First watched : 1974
This soapy drama was one of my mum's favourite programmes and I think she'd followed it from its memorable start. The old patriarch of a family haulage firm had just died and his will split the shares four ways between his three sons hard-living Ted, boring accountant Brian and young playboy David and his secretary Miss Kingsley, now revealed to be his mistress and mother of his child. How they took things forward from this , with Mum played by the hatchet-faced Jean Anderson sticking her oar in unhelpfully, drove the drama for the rest of the series though there were plenty of diversions into the brothers' love lives..
It is a bit of a seventies relic with the coming decade represented from the fourth series on by ruthless financial whizz kid Paul Merroney played with icy charisma by Colin Baker. His supposed villainy dominated the later series. The Sun had a poll at the time which voted him "Most Hated Man in Britain" . It's interesting to speculate that if the show had been broadcast a few years later Merroney would have been perceived quite differently and might have become as popular as J.R. Ewing.
The Brothers ended rather abruptly in 1976 without much explanation ( even to the cast ! )
What I recall most about it is my mother's irritation that we were watching it at all. By 1974 I in particular was a bit too old to be put to bed before 7.30 on a Sunday. It was no fun being in the cold bedrooms of our non-centrally heated house in the autumn nor being in the kitchen/sitting room with our silence-loving dad so the lounge with Mum was the best option. That entailed Mum having to answer lots of questions about what was going on in this strange world of wealthy , argumentative adults which she wasn't happy about and let it show. When Brian had a nervous breakdown it was the excuse she needed to declare it unsuitable viewing for me and my sister and kick us out.
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