The BBC screened 91 episodes of The Onedin Line between 1971 and 1980. It first appeared as `The Wind Blows Free', a one-off Drama Playhouse production, written by Cyril Abraham. However, it so impressed the suits that a 15-part series was commissioned and a Sunday night classic was launched.
Set in Liverpool in the 1860s, the action centres on James Onedin, the youngest son of a ship's chandler, who invests his £25 inheritance in a topsail schooner named the Charlotte Rhodes. However, Captain Webster's price includes a marriage proposal to his spinster daughter, Anne, and Onedin is so determined to establish his own shipping line that he consents.
As the series progresses, this cynical business relationship develops into a genuine love match. But this was anything but a novelettish costume drama. The voyages undertaken by Onedin and his trusty mate, Mr Baines, regularly took them across the Atlantic and pitched them into adventures with storms, mutinous crews and combattants from wars in Italy and America. Onedin also had frequent run-ins with the calculating Callon family, whose efforts to sabotage warehouse deals and expansion plans added some hissable villainy to the formula.
And then there were Onedin's troublesome siblings - his dour shopkeeping brother Robert and his aspirational wife Sarah, and their volatile sister, Elizabeth, whose passion for the seafaring Daniel Fogarty is tempered by her lust for the potential wealth of steam pioneer, Albert Frazer.
From the moment you hear the glorious theme from Aram Khachaturian's ballet, Spartacus, it's impossible not to be swept away by The Onedin Line. Filmed on location in Dartmouth, Falmouth, Exeter and Bristol, it not only captures the romance of the lost era of tall ships, but it also has the social insight, domestic intrigue and melodramatic sweep of a good Victorian novel.
The casting was also exemplary, with Peter Gilmore spiritedly conveying James's all-encompassing ambition and essential decency, Anne Stallybrass playing Anne with pride and pragmatism, Jessica Benton investing Elizabeth with coquetry and cunning, and Howard Lang bringing rugged dependability to Baines. Let's hope that the remaining series aren't long in following on to disc.
The complete first series of the beloved BBC miniseries set against the changing socio-economic climate of 19th-century England. James Onedin is a poor young skipper in Liverpool who dreams of starting his own shipping business and breaking free from his powerful boss. He buys a ship and marries the former owner's daughter, but it's not all smooth sailing as he contends with a mutinous crew, scheming competitors, an outbreak of disease, and his own wayward sister.
