All At No. 20

1 9 8 6 - 1 9 8 7 (UK)
12 x 30 minute episodes

Widow Sheila Haddon (Maureen Lipman in her first comedy series since Agony) discovers that she no longer has enough money to keep up repayments on her mortgage. Her deceased husband hadn't bothered to take out any life insurance and what little money he'd left her has now gone. 

Aged in her early forties, Sheila is fiercely independent, and her daughter Monica, a 20-year-old art college student, is charged with the job of finding likely lodgers, and she brings in all manner of people, like her art-student friend Carol, Hamish the Scotsman, Henry the doctor, vain Chris, who has just arrived in London, Candy, Frankie and others. 

Soon Sheila has a full house, but the odds, inevitably, are now stacked against her enjoying a quiet life. To ward off the bank manager Sheila also tries to get part-time jobs, with limited success, working as a PA and then typing book manuscripts. Plus, she is troubled by the increasing attentions of a blazer-and-cravat man, Richard Beamish, an old friend of her late husband's, who fancies his chances with the widow to the point where he proposes marriage. Sheila declines, exit Beamish.