A desperately contrived attempt by the BBC to recapture the Sunday Evening family audience it once dominated with shows like 'All Creatures Great and Small' and 'Miss Marple'. Take a picturesque northern country village, populate it with a bunch of good character actors, build in a few rivalries and mild generational conflict based around a crusty doctor and his more progressive son and back-date the whole thing to a Never-Never-Land 1950's and hey presto! Ten million viewers are drafted almost wholesale from rival ITV's 'Heartbeat' (Set in a picturesque Northern Village in the 1960's but now rather tired and stale and lacking most of the original cast.)The thing is professionally made and generally well-acted but the first series suffered from some appalling scripts. The storylines and plot twists can usually be fully worked out from the first few minutes of each episode (if not the pre-credit sequence) and most shows centre round the illnesses of villagers whom we have mysteriously never seen before and will assuredly never see again, played by this week's special guest star. The plots are retreads of family shows of yore, such as 'All Creatures...' and 'Doctor Finlay's Casebook' and the whole show has the calming soporific qualities of a warm cup of cocoa.It was a bit unnerving to watch this closely followed by a weekly dose of '24'!The series is mainly shot on location in the beautiful village of Downham in East Lancashire but there is a real problem with this. The village is tiny-a church, a pub and a few houses and is clearly far too small to support a busy cottage hospital as it does in the show let alone the railway station, factory etc. which crop up in various episodes. Coming soon to a PBS or Hallmark network near you.
