by Stella Gibbons
Dramatised in three parts by David Turner
Starring Alastair Sim, Fay Compton, Sarah Badel

Flora Poste, fascinated by the little she knows of the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, considers visiting them.

(Repeated on Thursday at 9.5 p.m.)
See facing page
(Colour)

[Photo caption] Alastair Sim, seen here with Sarah Badel, makes one of his rare television appearances.

Stella Gibbons was awarded the 1933 Femina Vie Heureuse prize for her outrageously funny first novel "Cold Comfort Farm." She had been working as a critic and wrote it as a relief from reviewing half a dozen books every week. A satire on the melodramatic novels of the age, the book was described by Hugh Walpole as a 'minor classic.'

The story follows the fortunes of sane, cultured Flora Poste who, at the age of twenty, goes to live with her aunt Judith Starkadder at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex. There she finds a variety of earthy, passionate relations, dominated by Great Aunt Ada Doom who long ago saw 'something nasty in the woodshed' and now holds the rest of the household in thrall. Other members of the menage include Judith's husband, farmer-preacher Amos Starkadder, their three children - the ambitious Reuben, fey Elphine, and the incredibly sexy Seth-as well as Urk, Elphine's 'intended,' Adam Lambsbreath, the bawdy cowman, and Meriam, the Starkadders' young daily who has a baby a year - usually by Seth.

Flora decides to put to rights the lives of all of them, and this is exactly what she does.

Alastair Sim, making one of his all too infrequent television appearances, plays Amos, and Joan Bakewell, better known on Late Night Line-Up, provides the narration.