Season 1

Anna Maxwell Martin and David Morrissey lead the cast in Andrew Davies' adaptation of South Riding by Winifred Holtby. This 20th-century classic is a rich and panoramic portrait of a Yorkshire community in the Thirties that carries surprising and refreshing echoes of our own time. In the long aftermath of the First World War, 30-year-old Sarah Burton comes home from London to Yorkshire to take up the headmistress-ship of a struggling Yorkshire high school for girls. But the homecoming is more complicated than she thinks and before long her ambitions are in conflict with her feelings for the man least likely to have won her heart - Robert Carne, the handsome, haunted gentleman farmer she clashes with.