First viewed : February 1987
Following the success of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, BBC Two quickly followed it up with an adaptation of a novel Fay Weldon hadn't finished writing and came a cropper with a series no one liked very much and which has never been repeated.
I think the idea was to puncture the ideal of country living and show rural Britain as a nasty , unfriendly place now run by ruthless agri-barons. The vehicle for this was the story of Nataie Harris, a pampered housewife living near Glastonbury who is deserted without warning by her husband and left with two kids and no money. If I remember rightly, she has to sell herself to slimy landowner Arthur Wandle ( Derek Waring ) to survive.
Heart of the Country is at least remembered for giving a first TV role to a 12 year old Christian Bale as one of Natalie's kids. Perhaps he's paying to keep it under lock and key although I think there might have been a radio broadcasting in the background for much of it which always causes problems for DVD releases and repeats.
However , it wasn't Bale that struck me amongst the cast, it was Jacqueline Tong as Natalie's benefit buddy Sonia. I hadn't seen - or at least hadn't recognised - her since she played Daisy the attractive housemaid in Upstairs Downstairs a dozen years earlier and boy, had she gone to seed. Though not yet forty, she was now an overweight frump and Sonia was less a character than a ranting mouthpiece for Weldon's views on the iniquities of the benefit system, threatening to turn the series into Girls from the Brown Stuff. IIRC, she organised the protest at the Glastonbury Carnival which ended in someone getting killed in the last episode.
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