Rooms was a twice weekly afternoon drama on ITV. It was more of an anthology series than a soap opera. Each double episode concentrated on a different tenant in 35 Mafeking Terrace. This was a rather dowdy and grim Victorian terraced house turned into bedsits.
The landlady was Dorothy (Sylvia Kay) who dealt with the tenants and her husband Clive (Bryan Marshall) who was always on the lookout for a deal of some kind.
This episode was written by Fay Weldon who would become one of the top television dramatists of the 1980s.
Clive seems to be a wastrel who fancies himself as a businessman. He complains about having no capital but he is the type who can never save a penny. In this episode he has a chance to buy a job lot of chairs which he plans to sell on for a quick profit. Dorothy has some money saved up, she plans to use it to decorate the house so she can attract better tenants. She upsets Clive by telling him that she is not going to give him the money to buy the chairs.
It is clear in this episode that it is Dorothy who has more of a business acumen despite her husband's putdowns. Clive could be heading for a fall as he has not examined the chairs properly.
There is also a side story of a new tenant who has moved on with a newborn baby. She wants to get a job and put the baby in a creche, in those days that was not easy to find. Her partner was physically abusive to her and when she was giving birth he was in bed with another woman. It is a sign of the times, one of female tenants tells her to get back with her husband and make the relationship work.
The house is certainly dinghy and that comes across very well on the screen. However this was a low budget and quickly made drama. It might had done well during the 3 channel era of the 1970s but for someone like me who watched Neighbours in its early days on BBC daytime, it really comes across as staid and undynamic. Marshall who had moved to Australia in the 1980s actually appeared in Neighbours.
When Rooms was repeated in 2019, these episodes were dedicated to Sylvia Kay and Bryan Marshall who both died in that year.