I got really hooked, strongly against all my better intellectual instincts, and loved every second of it!

The 1st series was great but it has become increasingly unbelievable ever since. Posh hotels of the sort depicted just would not exist in a small market town without a railway. I'm sure town hall clocks were not knocked together by itinerant Irish clockmakers on the village forge and if huge swathes of prairie like corn fields existed in the 1890's I'm sure it took more than 10 blokes with scythes to harvest it !! I watch it now with the same mixture of morbid fascination and embarrasment that I used to watch Crossroads in the 1970's !!