'Sam’ moves on nine years

Press, 2 September 1977, Page 11

'Sam’ moves on nine years

“Sam,” Granada Television’s award-winning series about life in a Yorkshire mining community, leaps forward nine years in tonight’s first episode of a new series on South Pacific Television. “A New World” takes the story of Sam Wilson, his family and the people around him from 1947 to 1952. Sam grew up in a Yorkshire mining village during the depression, and at the end of the first series, set, in 1938, he was starting work as a miner. He was 14.

The schoolboy, Kevin Moreton, who played Sam in the first series, returned to school; the grown-up Sam is played by Mark McManus. Now Sam is 23, and still working in the pits. It is New Year’s Day, 1947 — the day the National Coal Board came into existence.

Sam lives with Alan and Eileen Dakin (played by John Price and Dorothy White), sharing a room

with his half-brother, Les (Peter Brown) — the child born to Sam’s mother after her affair with Alan. Since his mother died, Sam has heard nothing from his father, who left for Canada with another woman when Sam was 10. Next door live Sam’s aunt and uncle, Ethel and George (Alethea Charlton and Ray Smith), more prosperous now than they were and proud of their daughter, Pat (Michelle Dibnah).

at the end of the row of houses in Skellerton are his grand-parents, Jack and Polly (Michael Goodliffe, and Maggie Jones), who brought Sam up. Everyone has more to look forward to in the 19405. The war is over, there is money in the bank, and a feeling that the good times are coming.

Sam certainly means to enjoy what life has to offer. And on the first day of nationalisation, his uncle Goerge is less interested in work than in a date at a nearby pub.