After Henry (TV series)

Did You Know?

• The opening and closing music is "Three-Quarter Blues" by George Gershwin.
• A stage play version was planned by Simon Brett in 1991 but dropped after Joan Sanderson's death in 1992.
• In the radio series, the mother lived upstairs and the daughter downstairs, the opposite of the television arrangement.

Plot

Sarah France, a 42-year-old widow of a GP named Henry, shares a house with her elderly mother Eleanor Prescott and her eighteen-year-old daughter Clare France. After Henry's death, the three women must learn to cope with each other. Sarah often finds herself caught between her mother, who lives in the basement flat, and her daughter, who lives upstairs. Eleanor is cunning and spreads information through a network of elderly locals, which Sarah calls the "geriatric mafia" or "geriatric KGB." Clare seeks independence but returns home during crises. The alliances among the three shift constantly, with grandmother and granddaughter often ganging up on Sarah. Sarah's refuge is Bygone Books, a struggling second-hand bookshop where she works for Russell, who offers sympathy and wisdom. Russell lives with a gay partner in a small 1980s Home Counties town, and Sarah views his relationship as the perfect marriage she knows.

Production

The television adaptation expanded the roles of minor characters from the radio series, including Eleanor's friend and rival Vera Poling and Valerie Brown's sister Mary. Sarah also gained an on-off partner named Sam Greenland. Exterior locations were shot in Thames Ditton and Twickenham. The house used for the France family exterior is on St George's Road in Twickenham, owned at the time by the family of television presenter Sophie Raworth; its gardens have occasionally opened to the public through the National Garden Scheme.

DVD releases

All four series, including a complete series set, have been released on DVD in the UK (Region 2). The complete series was first released by Network as a 6-disc set; after Network went bankrupt, Old Gold Media bought the rights and re-released the set in 2024 with Network branding removed. The Network cover stated it contained 30 episodes, but the series actually consists of 38 episodes; both sets have the same running time, so the error appears only on the cover.