In 1960s Liverpool, two families from different social classes confront the seismic shifts of a new era.
The lives of the working-class O’Rourke family and the middle-class Spencers become entangled at the dawn of a new decade. Ritchie O’Rourke (Danny McCall) and Christine Spencer (Lisa Faulkner), teenage children from the respective families, find themselves drawn together. Their relationship acts as a catalyst, exposing the social and moral fault lines within their own households and the wider community. The serial follows the two families as they grapple with issues of addiction, unplanned pregnancy, crime, and the rigid social codes of a pre-permissive society.
Produced by Phil Redmond’s Mersey TV, this serial was a deliberate corrective to the sentimental mythology of the Swinging Sixties. Setting its drama in 1960, the production presents a Liverpool on the cusp of cultural change, but still mired in the social hardships of the post-war years. The story uses the class divide between the aspirational Spencers and the struggling O’Rourkes to illustrate how the promise of a new consumer age was not evenly distributed. Its narrative is built from the tensions of the period: illicit romance, pre-judgements about homosexuality, and the limited freedoms afforded to its young characters, a world away from the celebrated liberation to come.
Broadcast: Channel 4, 8 Episodes, 19 March – 7 May 1996
Written by: Joe Ainsworth
Directors: Jeremy Summers, Steve Garwood, Chris Bernard, Ken Horn
Executive Producer: Phil Redmond
Producer: Mal Young
Main Cast: Danny McCall (Ritchie O’Rourke), Lisa Faulkner (Christine Spencer), Jenny Agutter (Connie Spencer), John McArdle (Charlie Woods), Stephen Moore (Nicholas Spencer), Eileen O’Brien (Mary-Ann O’Rourke), Roy Brandon (Mickey O’Rourke), Lynda Thornhill (Gloria O’Rourke)
