Editing Howards' Way (section)

==Plot==
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The protagonists in the early episodes are the titular Howard family—Tom ([[Maurice Colbourne]]), wife Jan ([[Jan Harvey]]) and grown-up children Leo ([[Edward Highmore]]) and Lynne ([[Tracey Childs]]). Tom is made redundant from his job as an aircraft designer after twenty years and is unwilling to re-enter the rat race. A sailing enthusiast, he decides to pursue his dream of designing and building boats, putting his redundancy pay-out into the ailing Mermaid boatyard, run by Jack Rolfe ([[Glyn Owen]]), a gruff traditionalist, and his daughter Avril ([[Susan Gilmore]]). Tom immediately finds himself in conflict with Jack, whose reliance on alcohol and whose resentment of Tom's new design ideas threaten the business, but has an ally in Avril, who turns out to be the real driving force behind the yard with her cool, businesslike brain. Jan, who has spent the last twenty years raising the children and building the family home, is less than impressed by her husband's risky new venture, and finds herself pursuing her own life outside the family through establishing a new marina boutique whilst working for Ken Masters ([[Stephen Yardley]]).

Other major characters introduced during the first series are Kate Harvey ([[Dulcie Gray]]), Jan's sensible and supportive mother, the millionaire businessman Charles Frere ([[Tony Anholt]]) and the wealthy but unhappy Urquhart family. Gerald ([[Ivor Danvers]]) is the right-hand man of Charles Frere. Polly ([[Patricia Shakesby]]), a friend of Jan, is a bored corporate wife preoccupied with preserving her social status, and their daughter Abby ([[Cindy Shelley]]) is a socially awkward young woman who has returned to Tarrant after completing her education at a Swiss finishing school and who establishes a friendship with Leo Howard. Unlike the comparatively close and secure Howard family, the Urquharts have secrets to hide. Gerald and Polly's marriage is a sham—an arrangement to cover the fact that Gerald is bisexual, to give him respectability in the business world and give a name to Abby, Polly's illegitimate daughter after an affair at university. Abby herself is pregnant, after a brief relationship in Switzerland.

The series combined standard melodramatic storylines involving family drama, romance and extramarital affairs (Tom and Avril, Jan and Ken) with business-related plots of corporate intrigue and scheming for power, climaxing with an end-of-series cliffhanger.