Program Title
The Irish RM, I

Based On
Books by Somerville and Ross

Adapted By
Rosemary A Sisson

Number of Episodes:
6

Description
In late 1895, Major Sinclair Yeates, a retired army officer, arrives in the west of Ireland to take up his new appointment as Resident Magistrate. His first encounter with his neighbor Flurry Knox, the local Master of Fox Hounds and also the R.M.'s landlord, introduces a central theme, constantly and comically varied: that curious affection and mutual misunderstanding that has been the experience of the English and their Irish neighbors...


Original broadcast date
1984-01-29

Cast	Characters
Peter Bowles	Major Sinclair Yeates
Bryan Murray	Flurry Knox
Doran Godwin	Philippa Yeates
Faith Brook	Lady Knox
Lise-Ann McLaughlin	Sally Knox
Anna Manahan	Mrs. Cadogan
Brendan Conroy	Peter Cadogan
Beryl Reid	Mrs Knox
Niall Toibin	Slipper
Tim Woodward
Donald Pickering
Marie Kean
Joe Lynch	Sergeant Murray

Credits
Executive Producer: James Mitchell
Producer: Adrian Hughes
Director: Robert Chetwyn

Intro
THE IRISH RM/Episode 1/Intro by Alistair Cooke

Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke.

Tonight we begin a series in six parts that takes us back to a familiar time in what for us at Masterpiece Theatre is an unfamiliar setting. The time is the very end of the nineteenth century in the last days of Queen Victoria when she was Victoria, Regina, Defender of the Faith (the Non-Roman Church of England faith, that is) Empress of India, and Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland--all of Ireland.

I ought to say that by the 1890s the move to secede from Britain was underway, but was not yet a threat to the unity of the United. Kingdom--though the comedy you're going to see bristles with the hints of the chronic mistrust between the Irish and the Anglo-Irish, between both of them and the English--not to mention the happy turmoil that can be whipped up between the Irish and the Irish inside one family! In fact, this whole series is about one Englishman who went to live in Ireland and found he was in a foreign country.

Now these adventures derive from a book written in collaboration by two authors, and I'll talk about them later—they were published in 1899 with the title Some Experiences of an Irish RM. An American reviewer said it's a meaningless title, but he didn't know that an RM was a Resident Magistrate, and that this was the administration of justice throughout the empire. He was especially significant in country towns where feuds between castes, families, townspeople, and country people, and also between Catholic and Protestant–were confused and complicated. In these instances, a Resident Magistrate was sent in as a sort of legal umpire to bring something approximating justice to the local benches. And our story begins with Major Yeates, a British soldier who's not going to be Colonel of the regiment because the Colonel is the father of the girl he's in love with. So he's about to turn in his tabs and become a resident magistrate in Ireland.

The Irish RM episode one.





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