When it comes to classic television drama of the 1980s, there is perhaps none more gritty, more powerful and more realistic than Bertha, the classic 1985 saga of factory workers struggling to make a living under an oppressive Thatcher regime. Each week, our courageous heroes would face new challenges, and learn the harsh and bitter realities of life. It was, perhaps, the BBC's finest hour. Over the course of just 13 fifteen-minute episodes, an epic storyline unfolded which lesser series (your Edge of Darkness, your Boys from the Blackstuff) could never hope to match - not without adding evil robots to their cast, anyway.

Last year, the series celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Well, not really. I mean, I'm sure someone somewhere might have considered holding Berthacon 05, but then they probably came to their senses or something boring like that. Nevertheless, it was twenty years old last year. As was I. Thus, I am inextricably linked to this series, and perhaps that's why I can still watch the series today, and find endless new subtexts and narrative themes that make each viewing seem as fresh and exciting as if it were yesterday.

Or perhaps I'm just weird.

Anyway, a couple of years ago, four episodes of this animated classic were released on DVD, and before I actually talk about the series itself I'd just like to have a little moan about a few things.

1) Just four episodes? Come on, there were only thirteen made, how much more would it have cost to release them all? Hmm? Cheapskates...

2) The episodes now have their titles burned onto them, which they didn't have when they were first shown. Maybe this is a legal thing, I don't know, but they look terrible. They also manage to stick the wrong title on the wrong episode. Genius!

3) Before we can get to the main menu, there are trailers for the other series that this DVD company have to offer. God, children's TV is crap today, isn't it? Loads of bright shouty dancy hyper little programmes that just have no charm whatsoever. Case in point - Cubeez, something that I've never heard of outside of this disc. Creepy little CGI cubes with legs and scary faces march around informing me that they can "cubey-dooby do it all the day." Good for you, you minions of Satan.

Anyway - onto Bertha, and its basic premise - that of a massive green robot thing that makes things in a factory. Nothing specific, one week she could be working on garden gnomes, and the next week she'll be churning out uncontrollable robot kangaroos that are the size of full grown men. In one of the last episodes, we learn that she is in fact fifty years old. She's been sitting there tied to the floor for fifty years. Poor thing.

Every episode opens with a rather cracking little theme song, which explains the concept of the series but also highlights some of its basic problems.

Bertha, lovely Bertha. You are a lovely machine, and anyone who works with you will know what I mean. (- so far, so good, people think she's lovely. Bless her.)

Bertha, lovely Bertha, sometimes I think you're a dream! And when we work out what you have to do, you can always turn the goods out, always turn the goods out, we can depend upon you. (- uh huh. There's the main problem - 'when we work out what you have to do'. They've built this big monstrosity of a machine of the factory floor...and then have trouble finding work for it to do. That's not the way factories work, I don't think.)

Clicking in the day, flashing in the night, your computer is shining brightly. (She flashes in the night. Good grief...)

Some people say you've a mind of your own, and I think that's very likely... (Wait wait wait...this big machine...has a mind of her own? Good God, you people are insane. Utterly insane. I mean, that's obvious from any given episode, all the characters are utterly out of their skulls, but giving free will to a machine that could slaughter her operators any time she chose is just beyond the joke.)

Yes, well, I've already said what I think about that. Actually, these opening credits are quite nice, showing as the characters working around the factory and on Bertha, and various credits pop on boxes and things. Oh, and before we go any further, our narrator is Roy Kinnear. Hooray! The series wouldn't be anywhere near as fun as it is without him. He also does all the male character voices, with Sheila Walker doing the female characters (I assume). No idea what else she's done, but - yay for her too! She's very good as well.

Now, the process by which Bertha creates things is, well, rather unusual. And downright disturbing when you think about it. A claw shoots out of a hole at her rear end, and grabs the raw materials needed for whatever she's making this weeks. Then, Ted'll go into his control booth on the side of Bertha, and we learn that such a vast and infinitely complex machine can be programmed by two wall-mounted calculators and a few flashy lights. There's also a big emergency stop lever about a mile away, which is obviously convenient in an emergency.

Inside, these materials become what they're meant to become (well, that's the theory) and the finished product emerges from Bertha's mouth, on her conveyer belt tongue.

So, in summary - Bertha gets things shoved up her bottom (by men, most of the time) and then she vomits them up later. Fantastic. There's probably some deep symbolism attached to that, but that's a debate for another time. Perhaps even as far off as five minutes away if I run out of things to say.

The first of the human characters we meet is the head technician, Ted - a smiley, red-faced man with a Hitler moustache and very slurred speech. He puts things into Bertha's, um...bum...and we pan across to see them emerge from her mouth as whatever they're meant to be, where they are 'checked' by a young cross-eyed guy with a goofy hat. That's Roy, and he kind of looks like a French police officer...sort of...

He will then passes Bertha's amazing creation to Nell, a smiley woman dark-haired woman. She's the 'packer'. She packs things, although in this case all she does is put the puzzle lid on the box, before passing it over to blonde Flo, who is the 'stacker'. She stacks things. Obviously. She's the exceptionally stupid one, too, and obviously that's quite an achievement.

This is the way each episode would develop; things would be trundling smoothly along, the characters would be enjoying philosophical debates about sandwiches or something, and then - DISASTER! Not involving too many explosions, obviously, but still fairly dramatic. Be it a puzzle missing its pieces, or that a jack-in-the-box has escaped from its box and has gone on the rampage around the factory, there's always some major catastrophe that our heroes have to face. Or, as was often the case, run away and hide.

The foursome would usually then gather in front of Bertha and have a quick brainstorming session, which obviously achieves very little, if anything. These characters would always seem to pull fantastically goofy expressions whenever anything went wrong, which means that the animators had to come up with around 50 expressions of utter confusion for each character per week.

Having mentioned the animation, I have to say that it is very very good. Some of it is very human-looking. There's a scene in the first episode where, as Ted is busy pondering out the problem of the week, Flo leans on a box and wiggles her foot around, in a rather nice bit of animation. Very subtle. Very nice.

Perhaps at this point in the episode, Mr Duncan will stop by. He's Scottish, and he reminds me of my primary school headmaster. Just in looks, not in voice. He was Welsh, by the way.

Anyway, he's a bit of a git, all in all, and he has his eye on the manager's job. Indeed, when he was once left in charge of the factory, he pretty much declared martial law, in order to stop Ted and his chums being silly and having Bertha turn out hundreds of turban-wearing garden gnomes. Hmm. Yes.

Elsewhere on the factory floor, we have tea lady Mrs Tupp, who, um...well, pops up every so often to offer tea. As a typical episode is only 15 minutes long, it's quite surprising that on average we see the characters having around two tea breaks per episode. She also doubles up as the factory nurse, with her trusty first aid kit. Seems to me that an ordinary first aid kit would be fairly redundant in a factory with heavy and dangerous machinery around. Them severed limbs cannot be re-attached with bandages alone. I suspect she just likes the uniform, personally...

Oh, and before you say that surely, what with this being a kiddy show, there's no need for a nurse, let me just point out that these nutters don't even think twice before sticking their heads into factory machinery.

Yes. Quite.

Also, there's Panjit, who gets to drive the forklift truck around, and...yeah. That's it, really. But at least he has an IQ totalling at least double figures, which is more than most of the other characters have. Between them.

It's usually about this point in the episode that the action will move upstairs, to the first floor. See, this is like Upstairs, Downstairs, except with robots, which is an area I feel Upstairs, Downstairs really let the side down on. In the manager's office, we have the manager, surprisingly. Well, actually, they always *say* that it's the manager's office, but quite clearly it's the reception. Odd that. Very, yes. The name of the manager, I hear you ask? Mr Willmake, of course. You fools.

Mr Willmake has a fantastic voice. Every line he says is delivered as if it's the most important thing anyone has ever said to anyone. Lines like "We must find the telephone and answer it." look flat on paper, but they're a scream to hear him say. Anyway, this alarmingly short fellow is rather likable and no-one ever has a bad word to say about him, which I'm sure is nice.

His secretary is Miss McClackety, and she's a bit of a fussy worrier sort, but she means well. She's the sort of person who, whenever decisive action is needing to be taken, will usually stand in the background and say "Oh dear" a lot. Obviously, Willmake is grooming her to take over for him when he retires.

Next door to them are my two favourite characters, Mr Sprott and Tracey. Mr Sprott is the factory's resident mad scientist, and nothing he builds ever works. Which is most of the stuff Bertha ends up making, hence the reason that toy kangaroos come to life and attack people, and why organ-grinders turn themselves into missile launchers.

Tracey is the real genius in the factory (well...the least stupid person, at any rate) and she's also the most pro-active of the lot. She was the only one who seemed to have any guts to stand up to Mr Duncan in the martial law episode I mentioned earlier. She went to see Miss McClackety, said that she wasn't going to stand for any more of Mr Duncan's nonsense, and together they went downstairs to confront him about it.

Unfortunately, the end of that episode must have been written by someone else, because the next time we saw Miss McClackety, she was standing in a pile of boxes looking for all the world like she'd just bludgeoned Tracey and was trying to decide which box she could use to hide the body. Ah well.

Tracey is also the one who built the other main character of the series - TOM. Talk - Operated - Machine. He came about because the factory needed to be decorating, and rather than just hire some different decorators when the first lot cancelled on them, Tracey decided to bring new life into the world, just like that. A sentient robot. Because obviously, that's the sort of thing you do in a situation like that, just whip up a quick robot with a mind of its own and hope that the house is still standing by the time it's finished. Duh.

Anyway, Tracey makes her plan for TOM, gives it to Ted, who stuffs it into Bertha, who then chucks up this little devil, which all the characters then call her son...

I've learnt not to trust people whose eyes light up. The boy got light-up eyes...Tis not a good sign. In addition to that, and his permanent creepy grin, and his extendable arms, and his pincer hands, and the fact that his head could do a full-360, he made a funny chattery noise as he rolled around, which I now find vaguely menacing. Ahem. Yes.

Anyway, by the end of the episode, whatever the crisis was has long since been forgotten about, and the characters, with tea cups in hand, all crowd around Bertha to congratulate her for doing...well, bugger all, usually. But she's the title character, so we can forgive her.

Ah, Bertha. Twas a wonderful series, and is still great today. Good for a laugh, so it is, but alas the tape that was made for me in the mid 80s is missing two episodes; one being something about beach balls being made in winter or something, and the other where TOM reprogrammed the new coffee machine, and it attacked everyone. With cups of scalding hot coffee, no less.

Of course, they all thought he was trying to make friends with the coffee machine. But we know better, don't we?

"Oh dear."