Born and Bred

“Heartbeat meets All Creatures Great and Small, with a brief stop at Last of the Summer Wine” was how Radio Times neatly summed up Born and Bred, and it’s a description that proves both apt and faintly damning. This is Sunday-night comfort television in its purest form: soft, genial and steeped in a rose-tinted vision of post-war Britain that rarely risks troubling the viewer.

Set in the 1950s in the fictional Lancashire town of Ormston, the series revolves around the Gilder family, with widowed GP Arthur (James Bolam – New Tricks) attempting to coax his son Tom (Michael French – Crime Traveller) back from Manchester to help run the village practice. Tom’s reluctant return, accompanied by his wife Deborah (Jenna Russell – On the Up) and their four children, provides the central dramatic tension, particularly as his modern medical ideas clash with Arthur’s more traditional approach. Early episodes lean heavily on Tom’s attempts to drag the surgery into the modern age and establish a cottage hospital (Ormston Memorial), a storyline that gives the show what little narrative drive it possesses.

Yet Born and Bred is less interested in plot than in community. Ormston is populated with a gallery of gently comic characters who feel as though they’ve wandered in from more established series. There’s Linda (Tracey Childs – Howards' Way), Tom’s former flame, now wed to the well-meaning but dim local bobby Len Cosgrove (Peter Gunn – Heartburn Hotel); Eddie (Samuel James Hudson - Brookside), the garage owner with a knack for mild mischief; and Revd Brewer (Clive Swift – Keeping Up Appearances), an amiable but unorthodox vicar who enjoys life’s vices (smoking, drinking and gambling) perhaps a touch too much. The stationmaster Wilf (John Henshaw – The Grand) and his daughter Jean (Naomi Radcliffe – Coronation Street), the gossip-loving landlady Phyllis (Maggie Steed – Silent Witness) at The Signalman’s Arms, and various other eccentrics all contribute to a steady stream of subplots that rarely rise above the mildly diverting.

The show’s cosy rhythms were disrupted behind the scenes as much as on screen. When James Bolam departed midway through the third series, his character was written out with a move to New Zealand, paving the way for Richard Wilson (One Foot in the Grave) to step in as Dr Donald Newman. Further upheaval followed in the fourth series, introducing new characters and complications, including the dashing Dr Nick Logan (Oliver Milburn – The Royals), replacing Tom who drowned trying to save a boy who had fallen overboard from a cruise ship, and there were tensions between Logan and hospital surgeon Henry Williamson (Nigel Havers – The Charmer). These changes gave the series a slightly more dramatic edge, though it never quite shook off its fundamentally gentle tone.

If there is a consistent pleasure to be found, it lies in the calibre of the supporting cast. Familiar faces such as Una Stubbs, Roger Lloyd-Pack, Denise Welch, Julian Glover, Frances de la Tour, Russell Hunter, Ruth Jones, David Troughton, Gwen Taylor and Stephanie Cole make guest appearances, lending a touch of class to proceedings. Even the filming location — the picturesque village of Downham — plays its part, providing an idyllic backdrop that reinforces the show’s nostalgic charm.

For all its warmth, however, Born and Bred never quite escapes the feeling of being a patchwork of better-loved programmes. It is amiable rather than compelling, pleasant rather than memorable. Its greatest misfortune, perhaps, is its abrupt cancellation that denied it a proper conclusion, leaving storylines unresolved and denying viewers the tidy, comforting ending the series seemed destined to deliver. For those who enjoy an undemanding slice of period escapism, it remains an easy watch — but it seldom amounts to much more than that.