The Daily Mirror's Fosdyke Saga One

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If they marry, Fleur would elevate the status of her family from nouveau riche to the aristocratic upper class.

BBC Radio 4 Extra - The Fosdyke Saga - Available now BBC Radio 4 Extra - The Fosdyke Saga - Available now

Performed in London and the north in the early 1980s, it was an exuberant mixture of satire and coarse humour, including a scene where the actors threw tripe at the audience – and usually had it thrown back at them. The Fosdyke Saga ran in the Mirror from 1971 until 1985 and stopped only when Robert Maxwell bought the paper and declared he didn’t find the strip funny. Fosdyke was a wry reworking of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga novels, which followed the lives and peccadillos of aristocratic families in Dorset and London.Following The Forsyte Saga, Galsworthy wrote two more trilogies and several more interludes based around the titular family. When I became editor of What’s Brewing, I got to know Bill well and visited him at his home in Leicestershire. Another production of the dramatised cycle, which had Rachel Gurney as Irene, Noel Johnson as Young Jolyon and Alan Wheatley as Soames, came soon after the 1967 television series.

The Fosdyke Saga was a brilliant load of tripe

Photograph: Radio Times/Getty Images Bill Tidy appeared regularly on television in Countdown, Blankety Blank and Countryfile. A keen cricket-lover, he was closely involved for many years with the Lord’s Taverners, a team of entertainers who raise large sums for charity.

In 1975 he was confronted by Eamonn Andrews with his famous red book when Bill was the subject of This Is Your Life.

Fosdyke Saga by Bill Tidy - AbeBooks Fosdyke Saga by Bill Tidy - AbeBooks

The principal characters are Soames and Fleur, and the second saga ends with the death of Soames in 1926. Despite her feelings for Jon, Fleur has a very suitable suitor, Michael Mont, heir to a baronetcy, who has fallen in love with her. The radio adaptation starred (among others) Miriam Margolyes, Enn Reitel, Christian Rodska and David Threlfall. In 1994 Suleika Dawson published a sequel to The Forsytes titled The Forsytes: The Saga Continues in which Soames's daughter, Fleur, Lady Mont, is the main character.That confrontation sparks an eventual consummation between young Jolyon and Irene, leading to their marriage once the divorce is final and the birth of a son Jolyon "Jon" Forsyte.