Brass (TV series)

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Brass was a British television sitcom, made by Granada Television for ITV.

Set mostly in Utterley, a fictional Lancashire mining town in the 1930s, Brass was a comedy satirising not only all the "it's grim oop North" dramas of the 1970s (most significantly When the Boat Comes In), but also the American supersoaps such as Dallas and Dynasty. Its humour lay in convoluted wordplay and subtle commenting of popular culture. Brass is northern English slang for 'money'.

The series was set around two feuding families - the wealthy Hardacres headed by the grafting, villainous Bradley (Timothy West) and his alcoholic aristocratic wife Lady Patience (Caroline Blakiston) who lived in the big house at top o'hill and the poor, working-class Fairchilds, who lived in a small terraced house rented from the Hardacre empire. The head of the Fairchilds was the stern, staunchly political "Red" Agnes (Barbara Ewing), who dominated her passive, forelock-tugging husband George (Geoffrey Hinsliff - later Don Brennan in Coronation Street) and spread militant socialist rhetoric around the Hardacre mine, mill and munitions factory. In a twist, Agnes was also Bradley Hardacre's mistress.

Other characters in the series were the children of the families. The Fairchilds had two sons - Jack (Shaun Scott), a defiant miner and Matthew (Gary Cady), a "sensitive" clerk who wrote poetry on the side. The Hardacre children were Bentley (deceased; his memorial stone is featured in the first episode), nymphomaniac Isobel (Gail Harrison), innocent budding feminist Charlotte (Emily Morgan), ambitious heir to the Hardacre empire Austin (Robert Reynolds) and Morris (James Saxon), a gay Cambridge student with a fondness for teddy bears (cf. Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited). Bentley, Austin and Morris are all named for British car manufacturers.

Not only were Bradley and Agnes lovers with Bradley being most likely the father of Matthew, but Isobel and Jack were also lovers, and afterwards it was revealed that Charlotte was not Bradley's daughter but the result of an affair between Lady Patience and the elderly Lord Mountfast, whom Isobel married. Charlotte herself married Matthew, to whom Morris Hardacre had at one time been attracted. To complicate matters even further Lady Patience also had a brief fling with Matthew Fairchild.

Despite his wealth and social connections, Bradley had been brought up in the Utterley Cottage workhouse and had made his money himself, though probably not legally or fairly.

Apart from the Hardacres and the Fairchilds, the most significant character was the idealistic Scot Dr McDuff, satirising Dr Finlay of Dr Finlay's Casebook, played by David Ashton.

Brass ran for two series on ITV, shown between 1982 and 1984, but was brought back for a third series in 1990 on Channel 4. This was set in 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War.

The third series saw the Hardacres move to London and then to a country mansion called Yonderley but making frequent trips to Utterley or Swarfside where the Hardacre business empire was still based. The Fairchilds had also moved to London as Agnes was now MP for Utterley.

The entire series is currently available on DVD in the United Kingdom.

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