Flambards (TV series)

Flambards was a television series of 13 episodes which was broadcast in the United Kingdom in 1979 and in the United States in 1980. The series was based on the three Flambards novels of English author K. M. Peyton.

The series is set from 1909 to 1918 (World War I is still being fought at the end) and tells how the teenage heroine, the orphaned heiress Christina Parsons (Christine McKenna), comes to live at Flambards, the impoverished Essex estate owned by her crippled and tyrannical uncle, William Russell (Edward Judd), and his two sons, Mark (Steven Grives) and Will Russell (Alan Parnaby). Other cast members included Sebastian Abineri as Dick Wright, Anton Diffring as Mr Dermott, Rosalie Williams as Mary and Frank Mills as Fowler.

Four episodes were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, and four others by Michael Ferguson.

In 1980 Flambards was broadcast on American television by PBS who cut the series from 13 episodes to 12 by combining the first two episodes into one. PBS also added narration to the end and beginnings of episodes informing viewers of the events which had been affected by the cuts. In the late 1980s Flambards was shown on the A&E cable network in its full 13 episodes, but heavily commercial-edited.

Christina Parsons, who has been shunted around the family since she was orphaned at the age of five years in 1901, is sent to live at Flambards with her mother's half-brother, the crippled William Russell (almost never referred to by his first name, she calls him Uncle Russell, perhaps to avoid confusion with her cousin, also named William Russell). Her Aunt Grace speculates that Russell plans for Christina to marry his son Mark in order to restore Flambards to its former glory using the money that she will inherit on her twenty-first birthday. Mark is as brutish as his father, with a great love for hunting, whereas the younger son William is terrified of horses after a hunting accident and aspires to be an early-era aviator. Christina soon finds friendship with the injured William, who challenges her ideas on class boundaries, as well as a love for horses and hunting. William and Christina eventually fall in love and run away to London from the hunt ball.

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