Howards' Way is a television drama series produced by BBC Birmingham and transmitted on BBC1 between 1 September 1985 and 25 November 1990. The series deals with the personal and professional lives of the wealthy yachting and business communities in the fictional town of Tarrant on the south coast of England, and was filmed on the River Hamble and the Solent. The series was notable for its pioneering camerawork onboard yachts, often filming multiple yachts racing in choppy waters and high winds, and its extensive location shooting mainly on the south coast of Britain. Most of the location filming for the series was carried out in Bursledon, Hamble, Swanwick, Warsash, Hill Head, Lee-on-the-Solent, Lymington, Hythe, Southampton and Fareham—all in Hampshire. The Jolly Sailor pub in Bursledon featured in several episodes. All interiors were filmed in Studio A at the now-demolished BBC Pebble Mill studios in Edgbaston, Birmingham. Extensive two-storey sets were constructed inside the studio (the Howards and the Urquart homes were both functioning two-floor sets). The smaller Studio B (used for regional news) was also occasionally used as an on-screen fashion photography studio. Other areas of the large 1970s TV and radio complex (opened in 1971) were used for the many board room scenes in the series, with long corridors and lifts sometimes doubling as a busy hospital and meeting rooms became lavish corporate hospitality suites. The whole series is being rerun on UKTV channel Drama since 2 January 2023. History Howards' Way was created and produced by Gerard Glaister and Allan Prior, with lead writer Raymond Thompson as story and script consultant—at a point in the BBC's history when the organisation was making a concerted populist strike against ITV in its approach to programming. The series debuted on BBC1 in 1985, the same year that the BBC launched its first ongoing soap opera EastEnders as a challenge to the ratings supremacy of ITV's Coronation Street. The first series, which aired in 1985, was a slow burner. It wasn't until the BBC repeated it in the summer of 1986 as the lead-in to the second series that Howards' Way became a huge hit. Its scheduling with new comedy series Bread, which launched in 1986, and followed it on a Sunday evening, saw both programmes achieve huge viewing figures for the BBC. Although Howards' Way is commonly cited as an attempt to provide a British alternative to glossy American sagas