The 1950s :- GP Tom Gilder and his family leave Manchester to attend a wedding in Tom's native village Ormston, where his father Arthur is the doctor. Arthur's nurse Linda is marrying local copper Len, who wakes up nude in the centre of the village after a raucous stag night. The train carrying wedding guests breaks down and Linda has second thoughts but the wedding goes off well though one of the guests collapses. Father and son work well as a team to treat him and Arthur, who mistrusts the N.H.S. and is considering retirement, is pleased when Tom wins over his wife Deborah and agrees to take over his father's practice,with Arthur as consultant in charge of the cottage hospital.

Tom is appalled by the informal way Arthur runs his practice but both men combine to try and talk sense into their cleaner Edie McClure, sister of pub landlady Phyllis, whom Edie disdains for giving up on her marriage. Edie has a weak heart but is determined,against doctors' advice, to see through her seventh pregnancy as she has six daughters and is desperate for a son. Matters are taken out of her hands when she miscarries but reconciliation with Phyllis follows. Eddie,the hunky garage mechanic ,asks for advice from scrap-dealer Jean about dating Tom's teenaged daughter Helen but Jean misunderstands and assumes he wants to date her whilst Tom's son Michael gets revenge on a bullying schoolmaster.

With no cash available to pay builders the villagers rally to get the cottage hospital up to scratch before an N.H.S. inspector arrives to approve it.Despite being told the post is cursed Deborah becomes chair of the newly revived parish council and, whilst the villagers stall the inspector,who has arrived early, she tries to get cash from bombastic mill-owner Horace Trubshaw. He agrees providing Tom will pick three workers for him to sack,which Tom refuses. However he is 'persuaded' to provide funds when his put-upon chief clerk Jack Stubbs exposes him for embezzlement. Jack's son,who has diphtheria, goes missing and the inspector - who has been generally humiliated by the plan to stall him - is so impressed by the community's response to locate the little boy that he approves the hospital. Eddie finds he has somehow asked Jean AND Helen to the pictures and is dumped by both of them.

Tom is perplexed by carpenter Bert Cartwright's hostility to doctors until he learns that Bert blames Arthur for the death of his little boy years earlier. When Annie,Bert's wife, falls ill, Bert resists her hospitalisation but ,in her delirium, she mistakes Michael for her son who 'watches over her' and agrees to go, saving her life. Michael finds ancient coins in the woods but when the Reverend Brewer and station master Wilf start digging for treasure they unearth an unexploded bomb. Fortunately ex-munitions worker Phyllis knows how to defuse it - or thinks she does,but at least the remainder of the coins are unearthed.