Birds of a Feather

- Season 6

(1994)

Affluent newcomers are moving into the house that backs onto the Stubbs' and Greens' back gardens. The sisters and Dorien follow their minders to a wine bar, where they overhear that their new neighbours are called Charles and Di and when they see Di at a theme park she looks just like the Princess of Wales - so how come Darryl is able to give Tracey her phone number to ask her round to tea? Probably because she's a lookalike for the real princess.

Tracey is shocked when Garth, feeling that girls his own age are immature, starts dating the considerably older Linda Robinson. However Dorien advises her that if she puts her foot down it will drive Garth closer to Linda so the two women become friends - so much so that Garth feels awkward and ends the relationship. Meanwhile Chris's efforts, encouraged by Dorien, to become an author, land him in trouble.

With Sharon and Dorien doing something for the community - though Dorien's reasons for becoming a first-aider are questionable - Tracey feels left out and rings a local radio phone-in to talk about absent husbands. She becomes known as the Wise Woman of Chigwell but unfortunately fails to realise that the programme is about coping with widowhood and has to admit that Darryl is alive and well just as his probation officer comes to assess his home circumstances.

Tracey invests in a knitting machine and, whilst initially she has a problem getting the hang of it, she makes Chris a unique birthday present. Dorien becomes a shopaholic - buying things she doesn't want and giving them to Sharon. This turns out to be a reaction against her mother re-marrying a much younger man, so Sharon and Tracey help reunite mother and daughter.

Chris's cousin Georgiou is supposedly re-wiring the café but is actually using it as a night club and splitting the profits with Chris. When Dorien's latest toy boy takes her there she recognizes the place, spills the beans to the sisters and helps them to get their revenge.

When Sharon tells Tracey she has it easy staying at home all day this leads to a challenge whereby the sisters swap roles. Tracey is exhausted but Sharon manages to flood the kitchen so they call it quits. Dorien, standing for the chair of the local tennis club, is receiving blackmail notes in an effort to get her to stand down - but then so is her rival, Melanie Fishman. Could the vicar's wife be to blame?

Sharon lets the flat over the café to Garth and his girl-friend Kate, which annoys Dorien, who wanted it as a love nest. However, when Darryl shows an interest in selling his house Sharon has to evict them and move in herself. Fortunately for Sharon, Tracey's prospective buyer is one of Dorien's many conquests and his wife does not find the house suitable, so Tracey takes it off the market and welcomes Sharon back.

Chris gets home leave whilst Darryl, caught fighting, does not. Sharon is pleasantly surprised that Chris seems to have changed for the better but, to test him, asks Dorien to try and seduce him. He resists her advances but unfortunately throws himself at Judith, his probation officer, instead.

When Tracey finds a letter from a man requesting Darryl to build him a swimming pool, her first response is to refuse but, thanks to Sharon and the workmen from the café, she finds herself in the money and starting a new career. Dorien sponsors a child in Africa as well as encouraging Garth to talk to his dad more.

With the swimming pool business beginning to take off, Sharon decides to sell the café to consolidate her interests. Marcus is offering thirty grand but cousin Tony wants to keep the sale within the Greek community. And before she can entertain either of them Sharon has to get Chris to agree to sign over his half of the business.

Following a girls' night in, discussing their first boy-friends, Sharon, Tracey and Dorien decide to track them down. Tracey meets up with Robert Radford, whose name might sound romantic but who is short and prematurely bald. Dorien's first love, Derek Henty, is now a Tory cabinet minister who is afraid she wants to blackmail him. Sharon's squeeze, Warren, once the spottiest boy in the class, has filled out into a regular hunk and Sharon announces their engagement. In fact he is in a relationship with another man and went along with the story so that Sharon could make...

Sharon and Tracey wonder if they have got in too deep when they agree to build a pool for Monty Kray, the Godfather of Chigwell, for his trophy wife Chanel, with a tight deadline and a geriatric work-force. Dorien is consumed with guilt when she learns that Marcus had a heart attack when she was out with another man. However, when she gets to the hospital and gets chatting to another waiting woman, it provides the answer to all of the sisters' problems.

With Sharon ignoring Tracey's advice to curb her spending and ending up skint, Marcus stopping Dorien's allowance and the swimming pool business being less than brisk in winter, the girls turn to selling double-glazing. Dorien reels in Concorde pilot Duncan as their first customer but when he and his sister appear to be fraudsters she takes drastic action to get the money.

After drinking a little too much of the Christmas spirit, Sharon falls asleep and dreams that she is the glamorous, diva wife of rock super-star Chris who employs a prim, church-going cleaning lady who looks just like Dorien. Tracey, on the other hand, is a put-upon drudge living in a tower block with a layabout husband called Darryl and a tearaway son called Garth.

As Tracey prepares to write her autobiography the girls look back on their previous lives, the events that led them to be living together and the various misadventures that they have had over the past six years, using clips from previous shows throughout the series.