that the cast played on him while he was having dinner with Patricia Routledge, he said: "Tony Britton - who, by his own admission, did not always arrive at rehearsals dead on time - stopped and knelt down in front of me and asked whether I would be kind enough to allow him another forty-eight hours to complete the five hundred lines I had given him for being late the previous morning! Tony moved on and was replaced by Nigel Havers and Dinah Sheridan who begged forgiveness for chatting during rehearsals. Simon Williams apologised for mucking up one of his lines that morning. One by one the whole cast generally ‘bowed and scraped’. As the last member moved on Patricia turned to me and said, ‘They obviously adore you!'"’ Snoad then went on to direct and produce the final two series of Ever Decreasing Circles after the show previous director, Sydney Lotterby was replaced due to not giving enough direction to the leading actors. The series starred Richard Briers, Penelope Wilton and Peter Egan. The series attracted 12 million views, It is series four of Ever Decreasing Circles which Snoad uses as a case study for his 1988 book Directing Situation Comedy. While working on the show, Peter Egan observed that Snoad had a very different technique to Lotterby saying that while Lotterby was an introvert, Snoad was an extrovert. In 1988, Snoad directed and produced the television film Wife begins at 40, for this Snoad again worked with Ray Cooney, who he had worked with in Not Now, Comrade. In 1990 he began work on the series that he is perhaps best known, Keeping Up Appearances. The programme ran for five series with 44 episodes, it was ranked 12th in the 2004 poll in Britain's Best Sitcom. By February 2016, the show had been sold almost 1,000 times to overseas broadcaster making it the BBC's most exported television program. After 38 years of working with the BBC, Snoad returned to the Theatre and in 2009 directed the stage play Say Who You Are. Later that year, he published his second book It's Bouquet - Not Bucket! In which he tells the behind the scenes story of the series. In the book he states that "My intention in writing this book is ... to provide the millions of fans of Keeping Up Appearance with a 'companion' to the series". On