Barbara (TV series)
television series

Barbara is a British sitcom starring Gwen Taylor in the title role. A pilot was broadcast on 10 July 1995 by Central Television, and three series were then televised on ITV from 27 June 1999 to 4 April 2003 by Carlton Television. It was filmed at Carlton Studios in Nottingham in front of a live studio audience. The majority of location scenes for the series were filmed in various suburbs of Nottingham, including Mapperley and West Bridgford, with other scenes filmed around Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.
Plot
Barbara Liversidge is a no-nonsense, outspoken, nosey, middle-aged doctor's receptionist with a sharp tongue. She has been married to her husband Ted, a mild-mannered taxi driver, for 40 years. Barbara is by far the dominant figure in the relationship, but Ted does occasionally stand up to her. The pair live in Pudsey, Leeds, West Yorkshire with their twenty-something son Neil, who drifts between jobs and a succession of short-term relationships. Their daughter, the long-suffering Linda, is married to Martin Pond, a TV presenter who has his own slot on the local news, Pond Life, which generally involves him making a fool of himself. Jean is Barbara's appearance-obsessed sister (Barbara once claims she's had so much plastic surgery that "she literally doesn't know her arse from her elbow") who marries the simpering Phil.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4858688. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1995, 1999 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barbara (TV series)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.