Among the longest-running of all ITV sitcoms, Shelley centred unmistakably on a single actor, Hywel Bennett, ever the idle philosopher, cynically rejecting or questioning the norm with witty one-liners delivered in a laconic, resigned London accent.
When the first series began, Shelley was a 28-year-old undergraduate malcontent whose determination not to pay income tax made him resolve to pursue a life of unemployment – or at least under-employment.
By the third series in 1981, the anarchic Shelley found himself lumbered with a high-powered job in the Foreign Office, a wife, a pregnancy, a home and a mortgage.
Peter Tilbury created Shelley after experiencing life on the dole and finding that education counted for little at the time.
Five years after ending on TV, Shelley was revived by BBC Radio 2 in a six-part series broadcast between 22 May and 26 June 1997.
Performing scripts especially adapted for the new medium, Stephen Tompkinson was cast as the philosophical idler and Belinda Sinclair as pregnant girlfriend Fran (who he eventually married).
Maggie Steed appeared as landlady Mrs Hawkins (“Mrs H”) and other parts were taken by the likes of Kate Robbins, Phil Nice, Phil Cornwell and Howard Lew Lewis.
The first series of Shelley was interrupted after four weeks by the strike that blanked out ITV in the late summer of 1979. The remaining three episodes were shown as a prelude to the second series, of six episodes, making for a nine-week run.
Shelley eventually left the UK to live in America, but returned five years later on, to Thatcher’s Britain, in The Return Of Shelley.
James Shelley
Hywel Bennett
Frances Smith
Belinda Sinclair
Mrs Edna Hawkins
Josephine Hewson
Gordon Smith
Frederick Jaeger
Forsyth
Kenneth Cope
Isobel Shelly
Sylvia Kay
Paul
Warren Clarke
Alice
Rowena Cooper
Desmond
Garfield Morgan
Carol
Caroline Langrishe
Graham
Andrew Castell
Phil
Stephen Hoye
Ted Bishop
David Ryall
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