After overhearing himself being called a bore at a party, mild-mannered civil servant Jasper Rye (Michael Maloney, HENRY V) decides that he wants to quit his job and make a living as a painter in Paris. His boss, however, steamrolls over his prepared speech and assigns him a just as tantalizing project: dismantling a statistical data outpost between the Norfolk and Suffolk border that has been "overlooked" for the last seventeen years since the war (the show is set in 1957). The assessment trip is a mere formality with his boss urging him to find that the outpost provided valuable data just after the war but to recommend that it be shut down. Arriving at the great house of Arcady, Jasper suspects that the outpost's team have not exactly been collecting the data that the ministry has so long overlooked, what with statistician Pollux (Graham Crowden, BRITANNIA HOSPITAL) so much more entrenched in the history of the country house and data collector Quirk (Stephen Moore, A BRIDGE TOO FAR) preoccupied with local cricket matches. Jasper's attempts to investigate are derailed constantly by the two, who oversell his importance with the ministry to the house's family Lord and Lady Flamborough (EMPIRE OF THE SUN's Leslie Phillips and A FISH CALLED WANDA's Maria Aitken) - living outside the house aboard a train that travels a now defunct line between the estate and the town - who are dependent upon the ministry's occupation of the great house to maintain it. The Flamborough's make him a guest of the house and a special guest of the upcoming fête that raises funds for fallen women. Jasper finds romantic distraction from Flamborough's daughters: wicked Belinda (Abigail Cruttenden, HIDEOUS KINKY), fanciful Matilda (Charlotte Williams), and eldest Chloe (Cathryn Harrison, BLACK MOON) - unhappily married to Arcady's heir Lionel Virley (David Haig, FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL) - and possibly even "mousey" ministry secretary Miss Mounsey (Amanda Root, THE IRON LADY). Pollux and Quirk are onto Jasper's true agenda, and are hoping that the idyllic village will seduce him as it had them, but Pollux is also willing to resort to blackmail and other underhanded methods as a Plan B. Based on the 1959 comic novel by John Hadfield (who also scripted).