Just around the corner from the Quigleys, a very different sort of family have bought one of the biggest and nicest of the houses in the neighbourhood.

Click “Read more” to meet the Blythe family.

Hortense is the matriarch of the Blythes. She holds impossibly high standards for the house, the family, and everyone she meets. Who knows if she can remember how to smile.

Her husband is Charles Blythe.

He’s been diagnosed with Multiple Multiple Personality Disorder. He is equally as snobbish as Hortense but perhaps a little less mean spirited. Nevertheless believes the Blythes to be a better sort of person.

Their unlucky daughter is Francesca Blythe-Green.

She tries so hard to please her mother. Francesca is naturally an untidy person but doesn’t dare show it around her parents. She is juggling a journalism career and trying to look after her son Bastian.

Bastian may look and act sweet sometimes don’t turn your back on him. He is extremely destructive if left alone. Bastian has zero sense of right and wrong.

Hortense usually does all the cooking. Not because she’s a natural cook, far from it, but Charles and Francesca would probably blow up the house if they tried to cook a meal.

Shame that on this particular evening Charles has found something better to do outside.

And Francesca is working late at the library because Bastian won’t let her use his computer (a gift from Hortense).

Bastian himself is outside the library making connections with some of the local kids.

Which leaves Hortense alone in the Blythe house.

In many ways she has always felt alone. And that’s unlikely to change any time soon.