Gambling Man (1995)

I seem to have an increasingly-encroaching heap of unwatched DVDs which came uninvited as newspaper or other giveaways, and occasionally I choose one at random to provide a change of pace.  This British TV production -- I assume it must have been a mini-series by its two and a half hours length -- is based on a book by Catherine Cookson -- a romance novelist whom I have never read; add to these factors the l9th Century setting and the regional accents, and I had little in the way of expectations.   While it started slowly, it soon became increasingly involving, once I accepted the extraordinarily melodramatic plot.  Robson Green who was previously only a "name" to me plays a working-class rent collector with a passion for gambling which gets his best friend put in jail and his being nearly beaten to death by the henchmen of villainous Bernard Hill; and despite his marriage to his spitfire girlfriend, he catches the eye of a rich spinster who has befriended him and encouraged his personal progress without realising that he has a wife (since despite the class barrier between them, she quite fancies him.)  The wife is soon disposed of in a catastrophe at sea to clear the way for his new relationship -- until she comes back from the dead!  This description can only provide a taste of the ins and outs of the convoluted story, but it was all well-done with good period detail, and if the ending was in fact somewhat downbeat, at least it held my attention.