Season 1

This bitingly funny comic drama, adapted by Steve Pemberton, celebrates and lampoons the snobberies and pretensions of small-town life and stars an acclaimed ensemble cast, led by Miranda Richardson and Anna Chancellor. Filmed on location in Rye, the inspiration for the charmingly idiosyncratic town of Tilling, the series fizzes with all the waspish wit and murderous gentility of EF Benson’s stories. Over the course of a 1930s summer, the sly, scheming Miss Elizabeth Mapp and the gloriously haughty Mrs Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas jockey for social supremacy in Tilling. This quaint English town may seem tranquil on the surface, but its eccentric inhabitants exist in a world seething with gossip and petty one upmanship. As Mapp and Lucia go into battle – albeit an impeccably polite one – who will triumph in this well-mannered fight to be Tilling's finest?