her doctor, that she thinks her husband is having an affair. In the sequel television film, A Very Polish Practice (1992), Daker and Grete live together in Poland, where he struggles with the former Communist country's antiquated health service. Grete encounters an ex-lover (Tadeusz Melnik, played by Alfred Molina), who helped her get out of Poland and to whom she had promised herself out of gratitude. She battles to decide whether to stay with Stephen and their child or to go with Melnik (with or without the child), confessing that she still loves him as well as Stephen. The idea for the second series was said to have come from the actress Joanna Kanska, who played Grete. Melnik eventually gives the couple his blessing. Production Lowlands University (the fictional institution at which the series was set) was based on the University of East Anglia campus near Norwich. The production wanted to film location sequences at UEA and also feature its campus skyline in the opening title sequence (which depicts an "apocalyptic vision of a university" which is then "illuminated by love") but the university was sensitive about its image and wary of television portrayals of universities in the wake of the 1981 TV adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, and so declined to be involved. The locations for the series' filmed sequences were the universities of Keele and Birmingham. Most episodes of series 1 begin with sequences shot from the roof of the Arts Building tower at Birmingham, revealing the distinctive Ashley and Strathcona Buildings as the refuse truck drives along Ring Road North past the School of Education building and sometimes past residential block D at Keele. The scenes involving the lake were shot in the vicinity of the Vale halls of residence at Birmingham; the buildings that can be seen around the lake were demolished and replaced with modern student residences in 2006. Also used for exterior filming was the BT engineer training school at Yarnfield Park in Staffordshire. Most of the interiors were shot at BBC Pebble Mill (first series) and London (second), in the common combined film/video format. The series had its genesis in writer Andrew Davies, then teaching at the University of Warwick, being commissioned and paid to write a series about three female mature students at university. By Davies' own admission, this idea "ran out of steam" after three scripts had been written