Shine On Harvey Moon

Returning home to Hackney from wartime service in India as a corporal (stores clerk) in the RAF, former professional footballer Harvey Moon discovers his home destroyed and his family life in tatters. His flighty wife, Rita, has run off with other men, his 17 year old daughter, Maggie, is seeing his old pal, Lou Lewis, and his mother, Nan, remains as redoubtable as ever.

Add to this the problems of rationing, post-war shortages and the constraints of living in a prefab (later demolished by an unexploded bomb), and Harvey's lot is not a happy one.

However, he sets about making a new life for himself, becoming a Labour councillor, dating Harriet Wright, his worldly son Stanley's headmistress, and taking up residence with Erich Gottlieb and his sister, Frieda. Eventually he and Rita are, somewhat precariously, reunited.

For series 5, the story was taken up in 1953, Coronation year, and ran through the 1950s, with immigrants flooding into Britain looking for work and Maggie set to marry Lou (now 'One Lung Lou', having lost the other).