On YouTube, ITV’s lavish TV adaptation of the Clayhanger novels by Arnold Bennett, set in Victorian Stoke-on-Trent. It formed a 23 hour costume drama broadcast in 1976, on the UK’s only commercial TV channel at that time. A small handful of Bennett’s classic Potteries novels were filmed, to make an epic family saga.

The quality is VHS, and it’s also available on torrents at Archive.org if you want to do tweaks or audio fixes. But note that the series is on DVD on eBay where — if you shop around — you can currently have the seven-disk set for about £15 including postage.

It was the coherent work of a single scriptwriter, unlike the ‘all must have prizes’ tag-teams of today. Despite some slow and thoughtful moments, it was a success and the series “dug deeply and sensitively into the grimly heroic world of Arnold Bennett’s novels” — Country Life magazine, 1977.

Some of it was filmed in the Potteries, and the rest in ‘the Potteries recreated’ on a large filming lot behind Elstree Studios. They did a good job, and the writer Douglas Livingstone recalled…

Michael Bailey, the designer, and his team did such a convincing job that visitors from the Potteries who’ve seen it have been known to become damp-eyed with nostalgia.

But despite the vast effort, and a cast of over 100, the series was effectively lost for decades. As Maire Messenger Davies, a University of Ulster film and TV historian, commented in an MIT paper…

“the question is raised as to why this prestigious costly production has so completely disappeared from view [and an] expensive, and star-studded adult serial has been lost to public access. [Its loss is especially felt because] It was the last of its kind – there were no more 26 episode series after this … It had an extremely starry cast … [playing to] a major literary work by a regional novelist [and was] filmed, and provided employment, within the Midlands region itself.”

Thus it was an important series on a number of levels, not least as a major expression of ITV’s cultural remit to serve its home region of the West Midlands. Yet it wasn’t just for a Midlands audience. Despite its regional flavour, in those days ITV (aka ATV) could easily have half the nation watching such a major series. And all the way through too, with none of the sort of ‘rapid tail-off’ that you see today, where audiences shrink drastically after episode four of a long series such as the current Doctor Who.

Whatever the reason for its burial it was gone for 35 years, and at a time when other old series were pouring into the shops on VHS and DVD. But it was eventually found and prised out of the archives of the rights holders. After much searching the entire series was found by the Arnold Bennett Society and TV producer Tim Brearley, languishing and dusty…

“in a warehouse in France”

It was only one warehouse fire away from being lost for good.