The latter is a hard businessman who appoints his son Tony as the new manager of the workplace, rather than the experienced Edwin. By August that same year, one of Granada’s press releases was able to boast that A Family at War was now ‘top of the national TV ratings.

Its aesthetic was frugal, quickly-produced studio-bound drama in the main with some location shooting when necessary, but again that seemed to work with the grain of the show rather than against it. The series examined the lives of the lower middle-class Ashton family of the city of Liverpool and their experiences from 1938 and through the Second World War. This was a two-edged sword: the cost of resources could erode the money available for what was actually seen on the screen but the producer could sometimes juggle one area of cost against another. The men were within view of home when the ship sank at the harbour entrance – a tragic and cruel blow to the community who had endured four long years of war.This episode keeps cutting back to the intricate story of the shares in the printing works and who will control them, which I found distracting and dull compared to the romance. This is so strange because after 1962, the Liverpool accent was writ large in the public consciousness. Fifty two episodes, of which eight were black and white due to an ITV technicians’ strike when they refused to operate colour equipment. Colin Douglas was magnificent in this series as was the rest of the cast which starred in this story of the Ashton family as they made their way through those difficult times of World War Two.

John Finch states that he only wrote the original treatment as a ruse to be invited to the annual Granada conference where new drama ideas were discussed. The others tend to generic vaguely Northern, though Edwin retains Colin Douglas’s light North-East accent. Then Episode 4 Is Your Journey Really Necessary is based on the uncle, Sefton and his son, Tony, off on the Yorkshire coast where Tony’s corvette is docked. This was primary work for the medium, the first of the television novels and one on a Dickensian scale.I remember sitting down to watch AFaW with my mother, expecting somethjng along the lines of a war film or something similar to the Colditz series about prisoners of war from the same period.

The root of the problem of the marriage of Edwin Ashton (Colin Douglas) and Jean (Shelagh Fraser) is that Edwin has ‘married up,’ his wife being from the middle class, whereas he is from a mining family.Alexander Baron was the novelist who wrote From The City From The Plough (1948) and The Lowlife (1963). Most importantly, the audience at the time remembered the war, and even those born after it, like me, had heard SO much about it.