Marriage counsellors declare that the best prescription for a happy union is for a couple to talk. Wed for seven years, and nominally content until husband discovers the extent of wife's pre-marital sexual liaisons, Donald and Patsy Redfern talk and talk until long after the cows have come home, a good deal of their conversations being in the form of disputes. Donald is a tax lawyer with a sharp legal brain, but slightly wet with it; Patsy is an interior designer with a sharp, lethal tongue and a liberated personality.

A sitcom about middle-class wedlock - a 1980s version of the 1960s' Marriage Lines if you like - That's Love charted the course of the Redferns' bumpy marital 'bliss', a union blessed with two children, their live-in nanny Olive, and a mother-in-law (Patsy's mother, Babs, who made frequent appearances, together with her husband Victor). Despite their problems, though, Donald and Patsy were viewed as marital role-models by their frequently seen friends the Owens, Amanda Owen being exasperated by her husband Gary's wayward, macho behaviour - he still liked to put it about a bit, even though he was fiercely protective of their four children. In series three, Donald Redfern did some straying of his own, albeit reluctantly, when he worked with a rich, glamorous and widowed client, Laurel Manasotti, and this led him and Patsy to seek marriage guidance in series four. Unexpectedly, the counsellor, Tristan Beasley, proceeded to fall head over heels in love with Patsy in the process.

Tristan was played by Tony Slattery - his first sitcom part - underlining the 'new-comedy' aspect of That's Love, with Jimmy Mulville in the lead role (a member of the Who Dares, Wins... and Chelmsford 123 teams and writer/producer of so many hit shows in recent years) and Neil Pearson (Chelmsford 123, Drop The Dead Donkey and DS Tony Clark in the BBC cop series Between The Lines) playing Gary Owen from the second series onwards. Diana Hardcastle appeared as Patsy, and her real-life one-year-old daughter, Alice May Wilkinson, was cast in the second series as Joe, youngest of the Owen children. Even the writer, Terence Frisby - he based the sitcom on his stage-play It's Alright If I Do It - got in on the act, appearing in one final-series episode.