To the Manor Born, anybody seen this show?

[raincitygirl]

I have been watching To the Manor Born, a Britcom from about 1980 with Penelope Keith as Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, the exultant widow of the owner of a fabulous manor house (and when I say exultant, I mean she jumps up and down for joy at a private moment in between her husband's funeral and the reception). However, her joy is short-lived, as it turns out Mr. fforbes-Hamilton has left her very short of money and she is forced to sell her beloved estate to Richard de Vere (played by a deadpan Peter Bowles), a nouveau riche widowed supermarket tycoon with an elderly mother in residence who has an unpronounceable last name (needless to say, Richard de Vere is not his birth name). Audrey stays in the village, and she and the new owner of what she still thinks of as HER home embark on a prickly love-hate relationship. It's VERY funny.

However, I've reached the church episode, which is an odd one, because it assumes that Richard is an Anglican and indeed a Christian. I had assumed the character was Jewish, partly because of a young him and his parents having fled Czechoslovakia in 1939. Also because he's just generally coded as a total outsider to this very traditional upper class English countryside life. Did anybody else get the impression that Richard was supposed to be Jewish, or was that just me jumping to conclusions?

I hope everybody is well on this fine Sunday evening (well, it's Sunday evening in my time zone, may not be in everybody's), and the people on the East Coast of the USA are staying warm after their blizzard. I am pleasantly full of salmon teriyaki and contemplating watching another episode of To the Manor Born. But if the stupid cat doesn't stop jumping on the desk and treading on the laptop while i'm trying to type, I may lose my marbles. I give up on fighting with her and will hit "post".

Comments

[madripoor_rose]

Oh, I loved that show! Haven't seen it in years.

I...have to say I think you're jumping to conclusions. (I might be wrong. My family got out of Lithuania in the 1930s and we're Catholic. I always assumed the Outsider stuff was simply from him being Eastern European in general, and not British, and being working class made good and not a blue blood.)

[raincitygirl]

I think they still show it on PBS on occasion. And they may have a DVD set at your public library, if you want to rekindle your relationship with it.

I have been known to jump to conclusions in the past, so it wouldn't especially surprise me if I'd jumped to conclusions here. There were, I suppose, other reasons than the religious one for people to leave Czechoslovakia in a hurry in 1939. Probably reasons also related to Hitler, mind you.

I laughed myself into a coughing fit in the second episode as Richard's mother sobbed, "it's just like leaving Czechoslovakia in '39. Only able to take a few personal possessions." as they drove from Mayfair to the manor, followed by about 8 moving vans.

[madripoor_rose]

I've added it to the Great Rewatch List, heh.

It is a reasonable assumption, but I don't know if they'd have left that subtext or outright stated that he was Jewish....the only canon Jewish character from an 80s sitcom I can remember is Rhoda Morgenstern from Mary Tyler Moore/her spinoff.