The real problem, though, is not so much with this series but with the considerably superior offerings that came later. It finishes with the characters reflecting on all they’ve been through in the war and how they look to the future in their new lives.

It was regarded as having much more in common with the high quality plays and dramas being produced by the BBC at the time, and seemed to be ITV’s response. It goes on in Series 4 past VE Day … but my dad always said, as far as he was concerned, the war ended in 1946, not 1945. Granada was noted for avoiding lavish costume drama, but liked the concept of a drama based around less expensive studio-based domestic interiors with a minimum of location shooting. A Family at War is a British drama television series that aired on ITV for 3 seasons and 52 episodes.Yes, much of the domestic intrigue probably passed me by, but other issues hit home strongly – the various brothers away at war while life continued at home, the character of Sefton Briggs (played by John McKelvey), who struck me as being particularly sinister, and the lovely Sheila Ashton (played by Coral Atkins) who struck a young boy in a rather different way. So much of the literature of Shetland focuses on crofting communities and the traditional way of life of rural communities. In that year we had to cast the main characters for something which would certainly run a year, possibly two.

Critics at the time sometimes complained of ‘women’s magazine atmospherics’ (Daily Mail, 21 January 1971), or that the show’s appeal replicated that of ‘the women’s magazines my mother used to read’ (Daily Express, 12 November 1970) or even that its narrative catalysts were nothing more than ‘the puny domestic bombshells that trigger off all soap opera, in fact. How do I sum up a TV drama series from the early 1970s about a family in Liverpool who went through the Second World War? As a totally engrossing television chronicle of the Second World War through the fortunes of a single divided family, Granada’s A Family at War deserves to take its rightful place as a seminal piece of British television drama: a series ‘capable of magnificence’ ( Sunday Telegraph, 21 March 1971). She is the author of David Lean (2014) and Female Stars of British Cinema (2017) and a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema’. The numerous photos are interesting to flick through, showing images of a bygone Lerwick, now forgotten to living memory.

This is so strange because after 1962, the Liverpool accent was writ large in the public consciousness. I found the first season of this series on a streaming service here in Canada and absolutely loved it. It is also interesting as a reminder of the very different social customs that existed at that time. According to one contemporaneous report, the programme’s ‘opening episode was seen in 6,850,000 homes, probably representing some 20 million viewers’, taking it ‘straight into the top ten with its first programme’, only just below the well-established Coronation Street in the ratings ( Sun, 28 April 1970).

the most tragic figure was the Mother, who could not live with the lose of her youngest son, and to watch her slowly deteriorate was heartwrenching.

Coral Atkins, who played Sheila (terrified of her kids being evacuated in the series) was an unhappy evacuee herself in the war. We try to add new providers constantly but we couldn't find an offer for "A Family at War - Season 3" online. The producer, the series planner and the designer needed all this knowledge in advance to organise their work.

If you cannot play them in the USA you will need to contact the company from whom you purchased for and exchange or refund.

Schoolteacher Margaret (Lesley Nunnerley) married John Porter (Ian Thompson), who went missing in action, while 21-year-old Oxford-graduate Phillip (Keith Drinkel) fought in the Spanish Civil War. Throughout the 1970s, Granada earned a reputation for doom-laden dramas like Samand The Stars Look Down, but it all began with John Finch’s A Family At War, a saga which suggested that happiness was something to be swept under the carpet – if you were lucky enough to have a carpet. All these events take place against the backdrop of the political conflict leading to the Second World War, which will have a major impact on their lives. There’s a really young Barbara Flynn as Freda Ashton who eventually married a really young John Nettles as Ian Mackenzie. Its aesthetic was frugal, quickly-produced studio-bound drama in the main with some location shooting when necessary, but again that seemed to work with the grain of the show rather than against it.