This is an excellent series, by turns educational, exciting, emotional and engaging. It was surpassed by the sequel Dominic, but that was a more focused smuggling drama, while this is a delicate picture of an age, the year 1820.
The long series runs two stories in parallel. First, there is the story of how Capt. Bulman (stiff upper lipped cinematic stalwart Richard Todd) is shipwrecked in North Africa, loses his memory, regains it and unravels the mystery of why his ship went down. Second, is the story of how his wife Emma, together with loyal maid Bessie and son Dominic, set up a new life in Yorkshire with the help of shouty drunken gambler William Woodcock. Gradually, the two stories knit together to make a satisfying whole. The scripts are uniformly excellent, by a team including Penelope Lively.
Key to any drama featuring children is the ability of the child actors. The children in this are pretty variable, but Murray Dale as the eponymous Nick is absolutely superb, with a charming smile that he turns on particularly for his adored mother. What a loss to the profession he was - he played the same character in the sequel, but otherwise his CV is bare. He's hard to trace with Google, but one hopes he's had a nice life.
The early Richard Todd sequences don't add very much. He totters about in the sun, falling over and having terrible things happen to him. Shot on location in Tunisia, unfortunately the team had to get value for money in terms of the footage shown, so this is a bit overdone (and probably could have been shot at Bridlington on a nice day to save money). He has some bad luck and some good luck; at one stage he is kidnapped by Maxine Audley who has taken a shine to him, and bizarrely he wishes to escape (some of us would give our eye teeth for such a fate worse than death). But once he gets his memory back and is on his way to England, this sequence picks up pace and becomes dominant. Dominic himself fades away, and is barely present in the last couple of episodes.
The story of Emma, her bereavement and grief, and her pluck, together with the gradual growth of her friendship - could it be love? - for rough diamond William, is the main interest early on. There is a slight soap operaish feel to some of the episodes, but different aspects of the late Georgian era are highlighted, from early factories to injustice to the rigid society to early law enforcement and punishment. Nick appears to attract every difficult fellow in Yorkshire - if there is an escaped felon, a wounded highwayman, or any other morally ambiguous character in need of help, he will, as sure as anything, bump into Nick.
The cast is a uniformly excellent bunch of highly recognisable British character actors for trivia fans. Apart from those mentioned, we have Hildegard Neil and Brian Blessed as Emma and William, Ruth Kettlewell as Bessie, and Julian Glover as a hissable villain making up the principals. Mary Morris is the grandma from hell, Ivor Dean a crooked shipowner, and Ken Jones an eccentric Bow Street Runner (the forerunners of Scotland Yard). Others on the scene include Reginald Marsh, Morris Perry, Leslie Schofield, Peter Cellier, Basil Henson, Gary Raymond, Brian Wilde, Frances Cuka, and David Troughton.
The series really gives a strong sense of the times. Emma and Bessie are powerful characters, and we see them working in the context of the society of the time, with no social safety net, dependent on the help of others but never helpless. I'd be tempted to call it a highly educational series, if that didn't imply a sense of earnestness that would be misleading.
The long arm of coincidence does stretch at times, if we were being picky. But who cares after the final episode, when there won't be a dry eye in the house?
