For those who are new since my last one (welcome!), a bit about the Catherine Cookson Experience. Catherine Cookson, author of historical potboilers, enjoyed a magnificent heyday between about 1995 and 1997, in which the BBC went NUTS for her and filmed approximately eight hundred of her books in an attempt to employ every actor from Great Britain, Scotland, and Ireland it could get its hands on, and also to use up a lot of sawed-off basketballs they needed to use to simulate pregnancy. There are about eight metric tons of sugar consumed by all actors in this. They probably hated it. It looks good to me. British novelist Catherine Cookson dies at 91". The Washington Post. 12 June 1998 . Retrieved 5 April 2023.

Side note: Agnes is one of my favorite Cookson heroines, because she’s smart as a whip and, unlike many other Cookson heroines, keeps a level head in all situations, and does not take any shit about anything, ever, including her awful, awful dad. Cut to mumblemumble years later, when Reg makes a habitual visit to the great house, where Agnes is sitting around being awesome all by her lonesome. However Charles is not the only man who could shape Agnes's furture, as his brother Reginald makes no secret of his admiration for her. But she could not have foreseen how significant a part he is to play in her destiny... Cookson received the Freedom of the Borough of South Tyneside, and an honorary degree from the University of Newcastle. [22] The Variety Club of Great Britain named her Writer of the Year, and she was voted Personality of the North East. Her: If you strike me I’ll leave here forever and then who will run both your candy store and your tobacco store?Still, Agnes and Duncan try to keep the house cheerful, and there’s this nice scene with everyone gathered to celebrate the bairnsketball’s second birthday.

a b "Catherine Cookson". www.visitsouthtyneside.co.uk. Archived from the original on 16 January 2018 . Retrieved 15 January 2018. Note to all: these entries are inevitably huge and image-heavy. I didn’t use all fifty screencaps, but there are certainly 30something of them under this cut. Agnes, who has more sense than everyone else in this entire miniseries put together, is like, “Oh, for – I can’t toast to that, because the bird has grown wings, because I love you, okay? Do you read?”Agnes Conway (Claire Skinner) is an independent young lady who works in her father's sweet shop. She's shielding her sister Jessie (Michelle Charles), who is having a secret romance with someone of a lower class, while herself engaging in an intrigue with the impossibly handsome Charles Farrier (Edward Atterton), the second son of a moneyed military family. Agnes: You mean how his parents hate my guts for being middle-class and involved with the whole Shoot-’em-Up Lane thing? Duncan: Reg, you’re my beloved brother, and Agnes, you’re my beloved wife. And I want you to love each other when I’m gone. She does the best she can to be sympathetic and not put words in his mouth, and as he leaves, he lays the world’s longest cheek-kiss on her. They take a shine to each other, which they demonstrate by having a silent “Who Can Smile More Awkwardly” competition.