Passions: Was The Brothers the booziest show on TV, ever? Yesh, I think so (hic)

11 million used to watch the 70s haulage company drama

Cheers ... Richard Easton, Patrick O'Connell and Robin Chadwick were The Brothers

How was Dry January for you? Mine was going quite well until I happened across these three in the photograph - Edward, Brian and David, always with a drink in their hands, any time of the day.

They weren’t called The Booze Brothers but they might have been. Instead they were The Brothers and on Sunday nights in the 1970s 11 million of us were gripped by their Machiavellian machinations. Gripped, indeed, like Dunlop’s cross-ply tyres on what the BBC1 drama would often reference as “the Aberdeen run”. For this was a show, incredibly, about road haulage.

I loved it first time round and so, obviously, did the good people at Talking Pictures TV, the archive channel where oldies and obscurities live again, and who on New Year’s Day began re-running it from the beginning.

Which is fantastic, only some wag on social media has suggested a game: for every drink consumed on screen, pour one for yourself. Try to keep up with the Hammond boys. Oh, and their women who could knock it back, too. Well, don’t mind if I do …

The Brothers, which began in 1972, beat Dallas to family feuds and battling brothers by four years. After the death of the firm’s patriarch, Edward (eldest, thwarted by a will dispensing equal shares, no wonder he drank), Brian (dull accountant, no wonder he drank) and David (made to wear cravats, no wonder etc) had to get along, convene as a board, trust each other and keep the business chugging at a time when Britain was edging apprehensively into the Common Market and strikes were commonplace.

Sounds boring? Well, the women oiled the drama’s axles. Mary was the stern mother, forced to have vaguely civil relations with her dead husband’s mistress Jennifer Kingsley, a shock-horror appointee to the board. Then there was Jill Williams, played by Gabrielle Drake, sister of Nick, that most sensitive of Seventies singer-songwriters, the on-off girlfriend of David required to cook for him in bell-sleeved, belly-revealing chiffon who had all the schoolboys in that 11 million desperate to rescue her from the brute’s casual misogyny and strangle him with his cravats.

And then - then! - there was Ann Hammond, Brian’s frustrated wife, who wore her hair in a high raven swoosh like my mum but there the comparison ended. Ann (Hilary Tindall) was freight’s femme fatale. The truckers’ temptress. The juggernauts' Jezebel. Most of all, I raise my glass to her.

Aidan Smith is a journalist and columnist at The Scotsman​