To the Manor Born

- Season 3

(1981)

After her picnic with Marjory is disrupted by a bull, Audrey sponsors the local scouts in their raft race to raise funds for a new meeting hut and is annoyed to hear--erroneously--that Richard has refused sponsorship. In fact he has bought the boys a new hut and a grateful Audrey accompanies him on a riverside picnic, which is rudely interrupted by the raft race, which lands Richard in the water.

When British Rail announces that the local railway station will close, Audrey opposes the plan and is angry that Richard intends to turn the building into the site of his new Cash and Carry. However, the station gets a reprieve when it is chosen to serve the new school building. At least this gives Richard the opportunity to use the old school building for his business instead, and Audrey is not amused.

Having censured Richard for polluting the environment in his new helicopter, Audrey is unable to pay for her car to be repaired. After agreeing to run a friend's riding school, she sees the answer to her transport problem: getting about on horseback. But she has a run-in with an officious traffic warden for illegally parking the horse. Horsepower does, however, offer an opportunity to give the pensioners' outing a pleasant surprise.

Audrey takes up beekeeping and starts to do well selling her own honey until a rare bird turns up at Grantleigh. She's not happy because it's a bee-eater, but its rarity and its protected-species status ensure that people will flock to see it--providing Audrey with a steady flow of customers for her honey.

Richard is about to sign a lucrative deal with cosmetics-firm boss Mademoiselle Dutoit, but to fend off her advances he claims to have a wife. When Marjory volunteers to impersonate 'her' for Dutoit's weekend stay, a previously-reluctant Audrey quickly jumps in, using the masquerade to have a few alterations made to the estate as the rightful lady of the manor. Richard's mother almost ruins the deception, but Mademoiselle Dutoit owns that she has known all along and is impressed by Audrey's apparent assumption of an alien role.

When the stockholders of Richards company threaten to throw him off the board for being an upstart foreigner, Audrey calls upon her upper crust family connections to come to the rescue.

Richard's position at Cavendish Foods is saved but he still needs money to keep going after buying the Argentinian plant and feels that selling the manor is his only alternative. But Audrey has had a far-better reversal of fortune: Uncle Greville has died and left her a huge sum of money. This enables her to buy back the manor as its lady twice over, as she also proposes to Richard, who accepts.