Brass (TV series)
| Brass | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Comedy-Drama |
| Directed by | Les Chatfield |
| Starring |
Timothy West Caroline Blakiston Barbara Ewing David Ashton James Saxon |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language(s) | English |
| No. of series | 3 |
| No. of episodes | 32 |
| Production | |
| Running time | 30 minutes |
| Production company(s) | Granada Television |
| Release | |
| Original network |
ITV (1983–1984) Channel 4 (1990) |
| Original release |
ITV series: 21 February 1983 – 20 August 1984 Channel 4 series: 23 April – 28 May 1990 |
Brass was a British television comedy-drama, made by Granada Television for ITV and eventually Channel 4.
Set mostly in Utterley, a fictional Lancashire mining town in the 1930s, Brass was a comedy satirising the working-class period dramas of the 1970s (most significantly When the Boat Comes In) and the American productions such as Dallas and Dynasty. Unusually for ITV comedies of the time, there was no laughter track and the humour deliberately kept extremely dry, using convoluted wordplay and subtle commentary on popular culture. Brass is northern English slang for "money" as well as for "effrontery". The series also gleefully parodied the 1977 Granada TV dramatisation of Dickens' Hard Times, which also starred Timothy West.
The series, created by John Stevenson and Julian Roach, was set around two feuding families—the wealthy Hardacres and the poor, working-class Fairchilds—who lived in a small terraced house rented from the Hardacre empire. The Hardacre family was headed by the ruthless self-made businessman Bradley (Timothy West), who espoused Thatcherite rhetoric, while coming up with various harebrained schemes to make his businesses more efficient so he could sack workers and his alcoholic aristocratic wife Lady Patience (Caroline Blakiston). The head of the Fairchilds was the stern "Red" Agnes (Barbara Ewing), who spread militant socialist rhetoric around the Hardacre mine, mill and munitions factory and her doltish, forelock-tugging husband George (Geoffrey Hinsliff; Geoffrey Hutchings in the 1990 series), who is dominated by his wife and his boss. In a twist, Agnes was also Bradley Hardacre's mistress.
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