Flambards (TV series)

Flambards is a television series of 13 episodes which was broadcast in the United Kingdom in 1979 on ITV and in the United States in 1980. The series was based on the three Flambards novels of English author K. M. Peyton.

The series is set from 1909 to 1918 (World War I is still being fought at the end) and tells how the teenage heroine, the orphaned heiress Christina Parsons (Christine McKenna), comes to live at Flambards, the impoverished Essex estate owned by her crippled and tyrannical uncle, William Russell (Edward Judd), and his two sons, Mark (Steven Grives) and Will Russell (Alan Parnaby). Other cast members included Sebastian Abineri as Dick Wright, Anton Diffring as Mr Dermott, Rosalie Williams as Mary and Frank Mills as Fowler.

Four episodes were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, and four others by Michael Ferguson.

On original British transmission on ITV in 1979 and on original American transmission on PBS in 1980, Flambards was cut from 13 episodes to 12 by combining the first two episodes into one. There was also added narration to the end and beginnings of the episode informing viewers of the events which had been affected by the cuts. In 1981, when Flambards was repeated on ITV in the UK, the first two episodes were broadcast in full. In the late 1980s Flambards was shown on the A&E cable network in the US in its full 13 episodes, but heavily commercial-edited.