Connie

There’s something wonderfully unapologetic about Connie, a gloriously sharp-edged 1985 ITV drama that mixes northern rag-trade politics with pure soap-opera excess. At the centre of it all is Stephanie Beacham, striding back into the East Midlands after eight years in Greece with little more than a suntan, a pashmina and sheer nerve. Within minutes of arriving she’s already hijacked a businessman’s car from the airport, talked him into buying her dinner and clothes, and inserted herself back into the family clothing empire she abandoned years earlier. It sets the tone perfectly: Connie never asks permission; she simply takes over.

The series thrives on schemes, betrayals and backroom manoeuvring. Connie returns expecting to reclaim her stake in the family factory, only to discover the business is bleeding money thanks largely to incompetence, vanity and family infighting. Her sister Nesta and the gloriously named “Hot Pants” Hector have been running things in her absence, though “running into the ground” might be more accurate. Every episode piles on another twist involving planning deals, affairs, corruption, pyramid selling scams and strategic seduction.

What makes it work so well is that Connie herself is both irresistible and faintly terrifying. Beacham plays her like a predator in designer heels, delivering Ron Hutchinson’s acidic Thatcher-era dialogue with absolute relish. Lines like “My spoon is going into the gravy, my snout is going into the trough” should sound ridiculous, yet she makes them land with feline confidence. The performance is pure camp but never cartoonish; Connie is calculating, charismatic and always three moves ahead of everyone else.

The supporting cast are equally strong. Pam Ferris is terrific as the bitter, scheming Nesta, while Brenda Bruce gets some of the best deadpan lines as the black-clad matriarch Bea. Richard Morant’s increasingly besotted businessman David Jamieson spends much of the series trying to keep up with Connie while his own life quietly collapses around him. Even the romances feel transactional, with Connie stealing lovers, manipulating rivals and weaponising charm whenever it suits her.

Underneath the melodrama there’s a surprisingly sharp satire on 1980s greed and ambition. The garment industry backdrop gives the series a gritty texture, but the writing never loses its wit. Nancy Banks-Smith described it as having a “nice citrus bite”, which feels exactly right. The dialogue snaps, the characters are shamelessly self-interested, and the whole thing moves at a pace that barely gives you time to process the latest act of betrayal before the next one arrives.

The series wraps up with Connie heading back to Greece to “rest and recuperate”, promising to return “relaxed and dangerous again”. Sadly, she never did. Instead of Greece, Stephanie Beacham crossed over to American and headed straight for prime-time television. You can absolutely see how Connie led to her casting as Sable Colby in The Colbys, though Connie herself feels far more dangerous and entertaining than anything she later did in the glossy US soap. She dominates every scene with a mix of glamour, intelligence and outright menace.

Connie feels like the kind of series that could have run for years, instead, it survives as a wonderfully vicious little time capsule of Thatcherite Britain: funny, sharp, sexy and completely unafraid to let its heroine behave badly.