To the Manor Born

- Season 2

(1980)

Richard brings Spalding, his farm manager, down from London to run the estate more efficiently. Old Ned, one of the tenants, fears that he will be made homeless and, as her butler is gone, Audrey takes him on in his place. She hopes he will humiliate Richard at a dinner party she is giving, but the old chap knows how to rise to the occasion.

The lodge's roof is leaking, so when Audrey's old school friend Diana Hodge asks to visit, she gets Richard to put her up at the manor. At school Diana was a plain, tubby girl nicknamed Podge, but now she is a glamorous divorcee and Audrey is jealous of how well she gets on with Richard.

With Marjory away on a theatrical residential course, Audrey is pleased when Richard asks her to help him catalogue his collection of valuable china. A recently-acquired vase worth 40,000 pounds goes missing and Audrey is the prime suspect until Richard's mother eventually admits the vase's fate.

Educated tramp Arthur Smith makes his annual visit to the manor, where Audrey had always looked out for him before. Though more concerned with the poachers who are stealing his pheasants, Richard agrees to house Arthur, but it's soon clear that Arthur is playing the couple against each other in their efforts to be the more charitable to him.

Richard decides to clear some of the trees and hedgerows from the estate to create extra farming land; appalled, Audrey leads the local conservationists in protest. Then she learns that somebody in the vicinity is in line for a knighthood and, assuming it to be Richard ,rapidly changes her political stance, though of course she is proven wrong.

Audrey injures her back carrying firewood into the house, and after a visit to the doctor she exaggerates the severity of her condition so that Richard will visit her with flowers and chocolates. When she has recovered, he invites her to go skiing with him, but as a beginner he must take lessons on the estate, which go awry--leaving him the invalid.