From the makers of All Creatures Great and Small, meet The Hardacres as the new Yorkshire family drama launches on Channel 5 with Julie Graham and Claire Cooper

Julie Graham, who plays Ma, took to it inmmediately. “I think I’m a natural fish wife,” she says.

Claire Cooper, who plays her daughter, Mary Hardacre, was less enthusiastic about touching the real herring. “I gravitated towards the rubber ones,” she says.

Shannon Lavelle, who plays Mary’s daughter Liza, got stuck in right away. “It was actually a little bit therapeutic,” she says.

These three generations of strong - indeed, gutsy - Yorkshire women are at the heart of The Hardacres, which follows the fortunes of a family that escapes the brink of destitution and rises to a country life of riches and luxury.

Devoted parents Sam and Mary Hardacre live in a poor but happy hovel with their teenage children, Joe, Liza and Harry, and Mary’s mother, Ma. It is the 1890s, and we find most of the family working around the docks.

When Sam is injured, they all lose their jobs in the fallout and the poor house beckons, until resourceful Mary comes up with a money-spinning business idea. The pennies start rolling in and the couple seeks financial advice. A lucky investment pays off, and their troubles are over. Or are they just beginning?

The series is made by Playground. Executive producer Lesley McKimm says: “We were looking to continue our very successful collaboration with Channel 5 after All Creatures Great and Small, and Channel 5 had said they were interested in exploring a rags-to-riches themed series. We found the Hardacre books, and it felt like a perfect fit.”

The books were written by Clement Lister (CL) Skelton. Born in Northumberland in 1919, he was a contemporary of James Herriot (Alf Wight was born in 1916 in Sunderland), and was a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain. He returned to acting, in London and in Scarborough. He wrote the two Hardacre novels in the late 1970s but died in 1979. Hardacre has consistently ranked in the top two per cent of UK Amazon Kindle titles.

Despite its Yorkshire coastal setting (Grimsby, Bridlington and Whitby are all mentioned in the books), The Hardacres was filmed on location in Dublin and Wicklow. Cabinteely House, on the outskirts of Dublin, was used for Hardacre Hall, and its transformation into the opulent family home promises to be TV eye candy, as do the splendid costumes of the newly wealthy family. Costume designer Allison Byrne used the Whitby photographs of Frank Meadow Sutcliffe to help create the dock-side clothing looks.

The TV series has been inspired by Skelton novels, but modernised by writers Amy Roberts and Loren McLaughlan, bringing in more female characters in the form of Liza and Ma, while the marriage of Sam and Mary portrays an equal partnership.

Director Rachel Carey says: “I always go back to the realism that women in the working class world held up a lot of the family structure back then. They worked just as much as the men did. To see a Victorian working class family without strong female characters would feel a little bit inaccurate.”

So Mary Hardacre is the linchpin. “She’s a force to be reckoned with. She’s an optimist, she’s pragmatic, she’s multifaceted,” says Claire. “She’s a modern woman in a period setting.”

Sam Hardacre is played by Irish actor Liam McMahon, who says. “Sam’s very much a working class man and I think he’s very comfortable with his life.

“He’s a strong man in that he is able to step back and give Mary the freedom to fix, to be, to have her own opinions.

“We learn later that basically his dream was to have a really good family and to be able to provide for them, and I think he has that.”

Ma is a disruptor. “She’s a renegade rebel,” says Julie, the Scottish actor known for Shetland, Benidorm and William & Mary. “We have a back story that Ma, she’s never been married, and you don’t know who Mary’s father is.

“She doesn’t toe the line and very much marches to the beat of her own drum. And she’s enormous fun to play because she is unpredictable, and she can’t stand posh people.”

Joe is played by Adam Little, who has appeared in Coronation Street and Ackley Bridge. He says: “The problem with Joe is that he hasn’t got a purpose in life. He doesn’t know what he wants to do.”

This dilly-dallying also applies to his love life. “There’s one person he wants for the wrong reasons,” Adam says. “But then there’s a girl who is right for him, and he’s going through that journey.

“I think a lot of young lads today are probably going through this, with Tinder and everything like that. It’s so accessible to see somebody and think, oh, maybe I want that.”

Joe is from Wigan, as is Shannon, who plays Liza. “She’s very funny. She is bold and so courageous,” Liza says. “But she sticks out like a sore thumb in the different environment.”

The youngest, Harry, is played by Zak Ford-Williams, from Ramsbottom. “He’s a very clever lad,” says Zak. “He’s a bit of a people watcher, a friendly lad, but he is going through an awful lot of change to find out who he is, or who he thinks he should be, and he is also disabled. He has cerebral palsy, as I do, or, at the time, it would be known as Little’s Disease. But it’s a really incidental portrayal.”

Zak was in Bridgerton series three, as Lord Remington, a role praised for its incidental disability portrayal. “In every job that I do, be it theatre or on screen, you’d be amazed at how people message me,” he says. “I get heartfelt messages from people who have never seen someone like me on stage. And when I grew up, I didn’t see anyone like me, and it took me a lot of convincing to go, no, I can do this.”

All three young Lancashire actors admit they found difficulty with the Yorkshire accent. Shannon says: “It was actually way harder than I thought it would be, because they are so close, so similar to listen to. Like, even the way we say ‘no’.”

They had a voice coach, and Claire, who is from Wakefield, was on-hand to advise, but even she had issues. “We say ‘breckfast’ in Yorkshire, but we also say ‘brake-fast’. I actually did say ‘brake-fast’, but I had to change it to ‘breckfast’, because it just wasn’t going to translate for everybody.”

“It’s just great telling a working-class story,” Julie says. “You don’t see many of them, and if you do, sometimes they’re just grim. You know, it’s grim up north. But this has got so much hunour and heart, and great storytelling.”

• The Hardacres begins on Channel 5 on Monday, October 7, at 9pm on Channel 5 and My5 and will air weekly for six weeks.