Brass

Brass is a British comedy-drama series made by Granada Television for ITV and eventually Channel 4. Set mostly in Utterley, a fictional Lancashire mining town in the 1930s, Brass was a comedy satirising the working-class period dramas of the 1970s and the American supersoaps such as Dallas and Dynasty. Unusually for ITV comedies of the time, there was no laughter track and the humour deliberately kept extremely dry, using convoluted wordplay and subtle commentary on popular culture. Brass is northern English slang for "money" as well as for "effrontery". The series also gleefully parodied the 1977 Granada TV dramatisation of Dickens' Hard Times, which also starred Timothy West. The series, created by John Stevenson and Julian Roach, was set around two feuding families—the wealthy Hardacres and the poor, working-class Fairchilds, who lived in a small terraced house rented from the Hardacre empire. The Hardacre family was headed by the ruthless self-made businessman Bradley, who espous