Second, the acting performances were in some cases astonishing in their excellence. The outstanding player was Eric Porter, then aged 38, a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and a very serious stage actor. Porter seems to have had some of the troubled aspects to his life that disfigured Soames, and which enabled him to play Galsworthy's creation with such force. He was the son of a bus driver from Shepherd's Bush, and his National Service in the RAF was cut short by a nervous breakdown. If you buy the boxed set of DVDs — and you should — you will find numerous good extras, some of which include Porter in rehearsal. They are illuminating for what they show of the proximity of Soames Forsyte's temperament to his own. The other main star of the series, Nyree Dawn Porter, who plays Soames's miserable wife Irene, seemed constrained by her part, especially in the later episodes where her main function was to be serene. She was comprehensively out-acted not just by Porter but also by Margaret Tyzack, another superb stage actress, who played Soames's younger sister Winifred. Honourable mentions should also go Joseph O'Conor, magnificent in his humanity as Old Jolyon, Martin Jarvis, who played the potentially ridiculous role of Jon with great sincerity and aplomb, and John Bennett, whose brief appearance as the doomed Philip Bosinney was marked by a unique mixture of high camp and aggression. Kenneth More, the biggest name in the cast, rather plays himself, which in a way is what Galsworthy would have wanted: and Susan Hampshire, as Soames's spoilt daughter Fleur, is almost permanently irritating, which is also not far from what the author intended. And the main theme — of the way in which property trumps human feeling — is consistently held until the end, when Soames dies after rescuing his precious art collection from a fire at his house that Fleur, through her usual thoughtlessness, has started.

Other extras on the DVD include interviews with Donald Wilson, the producer, who had nursed the idea of putting the Saga on television for as long as the medium had existed, and with various BBC executives who freely admit they couldn't see the point of televising it. Even in those days, the idea was reactionary; the Saga did not, to the eyes of progressives, have the outlook the BBC liked to foster and promulgate through its programmes. Yet the public absolutely loved it. Are there lessons to be learned by today's commissioning editors?