Seasons of the Year

1 9 7 1 (UK)
6 x 60 minute episodes

This Monday night drama series from Granada Television consisted of six plays, each about different families living in the same grand house (called ‘Seasons’) in the English countryside (filming took place at Rudding Park, a majestic Regency stately home a few miles from Harrogate in rural Yorkshire) at different times from 1815 to the present (1971).

The house was the link between the succeeding families which occupied it.

The debut episode – ‘The Three Graces’ (aired on 14 June 1971) – is set in Autumn 1815, just after the British victory at Waterloo. The house known as ‘Seasons’ is spanking new, and its first family – Mama (Dinah Sheridan) and her three teenage daughters, Faith (Jacqueline Stanbury), Hope (Maggie Wells) and Charity (Wendy Padbury) – are excitedly planning the housewarming ball.

Suddenly, a horseman rides up to tell the ladies that Mama’s husband is dead, killed in the Napoleonic war. The family is now fatherless and penniless, so how can the money for the splendid new house be found?

A portrait of the three sisters subsequently becomes the only piece of furniture which survives in the house through the changes in all the subsequent stories.

By ‘Trial and Error’, it is 1846, and the winter is the bitter crown of a cruel year. Jethro (William Lucas) – the last of the happy innocents who were there when the house was built – is now a proud, miserly magistrate who will not change until the day he meets his maker.

Or until he meets a strange and terrifying group of wandering Irish vagabonds led by the attractive Perdita (Nerys Hughes).

In ‘Court Circular’ (set in 1877), Victoria has been on the throne for almost 40 years, has become the Empress of India, and rules an empire upon which the sun never sets.

The very popular Lady Rudge (Googie Withers, pictured) – a marble pillar of high society – comes on a brief visit to Seasons from London and meets with another great lady from India (Gwen Watford) – as a result of them both being married to the same man – to decide how their peaceful and quite separate lives can be saved from scandal and disaster, threatened by the discovery of the situation by a third – less grand – woman (June Barry).

‘English Family Robinson’ is set in the high summer of 1910, and the Robinsons go to Seasons to escape from the smoke and tumult of the town. They are good and kind people – and so English.

But there is more to that great invention – the English weekend  – than laughter, croquet, and cucumber sandwiches, as their foreign visitor, Ottro Huber (Horst Janson), discovers.

‘It’s Cold Outside’ sees Madeleine (Jennie Linden) return to Seasons from the war as a tough ATS sergeant in the icy winter of 1946 (pictured below right).

But a large, deserted house in the middle of nowhere could scare anyone: The old house looks terrible, there are strange noises and Madeleine feels she is being watched. Is Seasons haunted?

The last story, ‘A Place to Go’, is set in 1971, and Seasons is still standing. Madeleine is still there (pictured below left), having turned the house into a successful hotel. This is her last day and new owners are arriving. Miss May (Catherine Lacey) – who was born in the house long ago – is still there too and plans to stay a little longer.

The house seems to know today is special, and something special is revealed.

Other actors in the six plays included Thora Hird, Ian Ogilvy, Hugh Walters, Angela Thorne, Frazer Hines, Penny Spencer, Jack Woolgar, Anthony May, and Gabrielle Daye.

Episodes

The Three Graces | Trial and Error | Court Circular | English Family Robinson | It’s Cold Outside | A Place to Go