Joby – Nostalgia Central

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1 9 7 5 (UK)
2 x 60 minute episodes

This two-part drama from Yorkshire Television, written by novelist Stan Barstow, revolved around 11-year-old Joby Weston.

It is August 1939, and Joby (played by 13-year-old Doncaster schoolboy Richard Tolan in his first television role) has been offered a place at Cressley Grammar School for the upcoming term.

Soon he will leave his less academic friends and the happy, carefree days of his junior school life behind – but first there are the summer holidays.

His mother (Diana Davies) is taken off to the hospital for a serious operation, and Joby is boarded out with his waspish Aunt Daisy (Lorraine Peters) while his father (future Star Trek: The Next Generation star Patrick Stewart) is “carrying on” with Joby’s young cousin, Mona (Sharon Gower).

Joby falls in with the local juvenile gang, briefly enjoying a life of petty crime (light-fingering an apple here and a stick of barley sugar there) with the devil-may-care Gus Wilson (Martin Whiteley) and Tommy Masterman (Paul Malkin) as his childhood innocence is gradually replaced by an awareness of the harsh world – an adult world of worry, injustice, illness, and gathering war clouds.

Although an air of sadness pervaded much of the plot, the story culminated in a moving ending with father and son at last “finding each other”.

The series was filmed almost entirely in Horbury (Wakefield), West Yorkshire.

Joby (Joseph Barry) Weston
Richard Tolan
Reg Weston
Patrick Stewart
Norah Weston
Diana Davies
Aunt Daisy
Lorraine Peters
Cousin Mona
Sharon Gower
Gus Wilson
Martin Whiteley
Snap (Sidney Norman Arthur Prendergast)
David Clayforth
Tommy Masterman
Paul Malkin
Molly MacLeod
Joanne Whalley