Holly

1 9 7 2 (UK)
6 x 60 minute episodes

Holly (Brigit Forsyth) Elliot is bright. She’s a university graduate who is taking an evening class in art appreciation. Her husband, David (Paul Moriarty) is not so bright. He works for a mail-order firm and is trying hard to keep up with his wife by taking an extramural degree in his spare time.

Gordon Godolphin (William Gaunt), like Holly, is bright. He is a practising psychologist and ex-university friend of Holly who spends a lot of time with her and David, analysing their unsatisfactory marriage. Although he has cast himself in the role of their best friend, Gordon secretly lusts after Holly and is jealous of her marriage to David.

David and Holly are celebrating their second wedding anniversary when she’s drugged and abducted by Tom Prentiss (David Burke), another college contemporary who has spent several of the intervening years in a mental institution and who is openly obsessed with Holly. He keeps her prisoner in a derelict windmill.

David has no idea what happened to Holly while she was Tom’s prisoner, and Holly is reluctant to explain her strange attitude to the man who abducted her.

Holly eventually leaves David, and in the end, of all the people whose lives have been changed by Tom’s act of madness, David Elliot has suffered most.

He has to accept that Holly will never come back to him, that all she wants is for Tom to be free. And she has psychiatrist Gordon to help her because she has moved into his flat. So David is the outsider now.

Produced by Granada, Holly aired on ITV on Friday nights.

Holly Elliot
Brigit Forsyth
David Elliot 
Paul Moriarty 
Tom Prentiss 
David Burke
Gordon Godolphin 
William Gaunt 
Det. Sgt. Wilmot 
Ray Lonnen 
Mr Mattingley 
Harry Beety
Mrs Mattingley 
Rosalie Williams
Mike Underwood 
Peter Birrel 
Mr Elliot 
Richard Butler
Jonty Myerson 
Michael Hawkins
Debs Myerson 
Aideen O’Kelly