The Grove Family

"The Grove Family" was a British television soap opera, generally regarded as the first of its kind broadcast in the UK, made and transmitted by BBC Television from 1954 to 1957. The series revolved around the life of the family of the title, who were named after the BBC's Lime Grove Studios, where the programme was made.

The programme was written by Roland and Michael Pertwee, the father and elder brother respectively of future "Doctor Who" and "Worzel Gummidge" star Jon Pertwee. As was commonplace in British television at the time, the series was broadcast live, and very few episodes survive in the archives, although one of the few surviving shows was transmitted on BBC Four in 2004. A film version produced in 1955 by the Butchers company, written by the Pertwees and starring the television cast, exists as an example of the series. The film was titled "It's a Great Day".

In 1991, during a special day of programming transmitted on the BBC Two network to commemorate the closing of Lime Grove, a new edition of the programme was shown, a modern production of one of the original scripts with popular television soap opera actors of the day such as Leslie Grantham filling the roles.

Peter Bryant, who starred as Jack Grove, went on to become a script editor and producer on the BBC science fiction series "Doctor Who".

In 1954, The Grove Family had drawn in almost a quarter of British people with a television. The huge success of the programme spread to the Queen Mother, who said

So English, So Real!

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*imdb title|id=0145611|title=The Grove Family