Program Title
The Barchester Chronicles

Based On
The novels by Anthony Trollope (The Warden and Barchester Towers)

Adapted By
Alan Plater

Number of Episodes:
7

Description
The Rev. Septimus Harding is a widower who is canon of the cathedral and warden of its hospital (inhabited by 12 ancient pensioners). His serene life, dedicated to his duties, is shattered when a young reform-minded surgeon, John Bold, publicly accuses him of cheating the pensioners. Complicating the situation is that the surgeon and Harding's younger daughter, Eleanor, have fallen in love and that Bold's campaign to force the warden to resign is sensationalized by a zealous investigative reporter...


Original broadcast date
1984-10-28

Cast	Characters
Susan Hampshire	Signora Madeline Neroni
Donald Pleasence	Mrs. Susan Grantly
Geraldine McEwan	Mrs. Proudie
Nigel Hawthorne	Archdeacon Grantly
Janet Maw	Eleanor Harding
Angela Pleasance	Mrs. Susan Grantly
Clive Swift	Bishop Proudie
Alan Rickman	Rev. Obadiah Slope
Susan Edmonstone	Charlotte
Barbara Flynn	Mary Bold
David Gwillim	John Bold
Cyril Luckham	Bishop Grantly
Michael Aldridge

Credits

Producer: Jonathan Powell
Director: David Giles

Intro
THE BARCHESTER CHRONICLES/Episode 1/Intro by Alistair Cooke

Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke.

Although public television several years ago put on a dramatization of Anthony Trollope's, The Pallisters, this is the first time that Masterpiece Theatre has taken the plunge into the works of a man who is now confidently acknowledged to be one of the three or four great English novelists of the nineteenth century. Wherever he is, he would be astonished to hear this because he was totally unknown until he was forty and for the forty years or so after he died in 1882 his reputation just about expired.

The story that rescued him from obscurity in the first place was the one we begin tonight. Throughout his working life Trollope was a civil servant in the post office--first a clerk, then an inspector, and then a surveyor. In his late thirties he was assigned to organizing the mail of the west of England. One summer evening he strolled through the cathedral city of Salisbury and got the idea for this tale, The Warden. What sparked the idea was the recent passage by parliament of something called the Charitable Trusts Act, which was the result of a crusade by young reformers who looked into corruption and abuses of charitable trusts for the poor. So Trollope imagined what might happen to an old clergyman who ran such a trust, an almshouse for twelve old, infirm men--a church trust set up by a will written four hundred years before. This is a theme for Ibsen if there ever there was one. But Trollope was not Ibsen; he was not a crusader. He just looked at life with an X-ray eye, and a willing acceptance of the way the world turned, even though he didn't like it.

So here is the first episode about a scandal that happened in a cathedral city in England in 1855, and that today could happen in any town. Now, episode one, The Barchester Chronicles.





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