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.

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License and the GFDL; additional terms may apply. The book looks at the lives of various family members engaged in the war, both at home and abroad, and is lovingly told by descendant Margaret Stuart. These took place in a large room where the ground plan of the sets was marked out in adhesive tape, a different colour for each set. I believe the first 13 episodes were scheduled in consecutive weeks but, because each episode took at least two weeks to make, we had to have more than half of them in the can before transmission could begin. There is something special about this series, especially if you grew up in the UK in wartime or just post-war as I did.There’s a really young Barbara Flynn as Freda Ashton who eventually married a really young John Nettles as Ian Mackenzie.

Our studio would have been used for another programme on that Friday – those sets were struck on Friday night and our sets put in their place. People generally waited until their old set gave up the ghost before switching, and in those days sets could last a long time. The programme lined up a nostalgic parade of programmes from Granada’s programming history: the television milestone Coronation Street –obviously – as well as pioneering factual series running the gamut from World in Action to This Morning. Colin Douglas, as the lead and father of the Ashford family, was a captain in WW2 and fought in Sicily and at Arnhem. One of the small pleasures of watching the DVDs is spotting actors who later became well-known or who haven’t been seen for a while; for instance, John Ronane and Tenniel Evans (sadly, many of the cast is no longer with us).

The marriage of Harry (Patrick Troughton) and Celia (Margery Mason) Porter is like something in Strindberg, and you wonder what on earth brought them together in the first place. Viewers certainly thought so at the time of its original transmission, keeping at the top of the ratings throughout its long run. Margaret Stuart's compilation of her extraordinary family's experience of the First World War is based on copious contemporary articles, letters and photographs. Nostalgia Central covers the period 1950 to 1999 and contains some words and references which reflect the attitudes of those times and which may be considered culturally sensitive, offensive or inappropriate today.