Where the Heart Is

I do like this feel good programme which is great for a Sunday night Prime time between 8pm and 9pm. Although it is a bit of a soap, every episode self contained. At 8.30pm everything is doom and gloom problems abound. However by 8.55pm. all problems have disappeared and everything is fine and dandy. The series is set in the small West Yorkshire fictional town of Skelthwaite. Almost all of the regular cast either work in the local health centre or a toilet roll factory. Almsot all of the regular adult male cast play for the towns rugby club. There has been a complete change of cast since the first series started. The theme song, heard over the opening titles is that this a a great little place to live in and that Home is where the heart is. Unfortunately as all of the original cast have left and regular cast leave all the while it would appear to be where the heart isn't !!

The first episode raises high hopes that we are going to get interesting stories based around the work of district nurses responding to medical situations and their moral and social consequences. At last, I thought, I can enjoy the delicious Sarah Lancashire in something that is not truly awful ( such as Last Tango in Halifax or the indescribably horrendous Happy Valley ) and with the lovely Pam Ferris involved it might actually be positively good.

But no: what we get is a soap and we pay for our modest pleasures with banal cliché-ridden scripts ( the highest count of "we are always here for you" in any drama I can recall ); dreary, moronic teenagers dominating the screen with their tedious sex-lives; endless homilies about how great it is up north; and rapidly decreasing plausibility with nurses going everywhere in pairs and only dealing with one patient per day.

And those were the good times.

Series 1 is just about watchable due to Lancashire, Ferris, and the rugby sub-plot.

Series 2 takes a dive with the arrival of the ghastly Jacqui but is kept afloat by, again, rugby, Lancashire and Ferris

By series 3 we are heading down the slope at pace with characters being ludicrously transformed into effectively different people unsupported by any dramatic logic; Jacqui, sadly, not being transformed; key plots turning on aspects of business life about whose rudiments the writers are plainly totally ignorant ( as they are about everything: "I was fly-half at Cambridge - I was in the Blues" !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ); and a complete absence of any humour to balance the awfulness.

I bailed out half-way through series 4 for reasons that will become obvious to anyone else who gets that far.

I could say more about why this programme was such a missed opportunity to make something decent out of a reasonable idea and some good resources but, unlike some other reviewers here who have no grasp of the basics of common courtesy, I refuse to engage in massive and ruining spoilers.

Where The Heart Is has always been well written and a comfortable Sunday night drama. It's a shame that the wonderful Peggy Snow played by Pam Ferris is no longer there though, I did feel the programme had lost something after she left. The show focuses on the lives of the people living in Skelthwaite so it does have a soapy aspect to it, you could say that there's too many soap like programmes on TV today but this is just mixing the drama with a soap aspect to make it seem more real. I recommend this to anyone who wants a cosy Sunday evening infront of their tele and doesn't want to watch something that is going to tax their brain to a great extent.

I was running out of good shows to watch during this quarintine of 2020 and stumbled on this on Amazon. I have watched and liked several British shows and to me this is probably my favorite. This is not a soap opera as we think of them in the US. It's a very good series about people who seem real and worth getting to know.

I really enjoy the stories and the characters. The only complaint I have is that the same actors don't play the characters for the whole series. It's disappointing not to see the same people that were the main characters in the first year after you've watched it for awhile. In the case of some, it's just like they ":disappear" and then maybe someone else plays the character, or not.

All in all though, I'd say it's a very good show and worth the time to watch.

I finished series 8 and there is a graphic for series 9 which indicates No Content?🤷 I looked on filmrise but no luck there 🤦 I found U tube had clip and episodes. Now there is a Series 10 I have partially watched. Ok Acorn Fans and mystery lovers, Can we please find Series 9?💁🆘