To the Manor Born
BBC television sitcom
To the Manor Born is a BBC television sitcom that first aired on BBC1 from 1979 to 1981. A special one-off episode was produced in 2007. Starring Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles, the first 20 episodes and the 2007 special were written by Peter Spence, the creator, while the final episode in 1981 was written by script associate Christopher Bond. The title is a play on the phrase "to the manner born", from Shakespeare's Hamlet ("Though I am a native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance".).
In To the Manor Born, Penelope Keith (who was previously best known for her role as social-climber Margo Leadbetter in the suburban sitcom The Good Life), plays upper-class Audrey fforbes-Hamilton. Upon the death of her husband, Audrey is forced to sell her vast country estate, Grantleigh Manor. However, she then moves into the estate's small, modest lodge house (where she can keep an eye on the estate's new owner) and manages to keep her butler and her much loved Rolls-Royce 20/25 car. The manor is bought by Richard DeVere (played by Peter Bowles), a nouveau riche millionaire supermarket owner originally from Czechoslovakia. DeVere and fforbes-Hamilton have a love-hate relationship.
The programme proved popular and it received high audience figures for many of its episodes, especially the series 1 final episode, the most watched British television programme (excluding live events) of the 1970s.
“To the Manor Born” enters the record as bBC television sitcom. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Manor, Born and television can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1756461. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1981 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “To the Manor Born” 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.