Chambers: The Complete Series 1-3

Aug 18, 2025 4:15 PM

Author:Clive Coleman,Sarah Lancashire,Rebecca Front,James Fleet,Full Cast,Sanjeev Bhaskar,David Harewood,Alex Lowe,John Bird,Lesley Sharp,Sue Johnston

All fourteen episodes of the legal sitcom about a group of barristers who never let justice get in the way of making money

John Fuller-Carp, the Machiavellian head of chambers at Forecourt Buildings, is determined to become a QC and will perform almost any moral contortion to achieve his goal.

When left-wing Ruth Quirke, rumoured to be a High Court judge's daughter, applies to join his chambers, Fuller-Carp's imagination goes into overdrive and promotion seems inevitable. However, his attempts to project a 'New Labour' image cut no ice with Ruth, and the two are soon at each other's throats. Fortunately, his partner Hilary Tripping is much easier to manage (if somewhat ineffectual) and his clerk Vince, though deeply dodgy, is happy to put his criminal contacts and underworld cunning at Fuller-Carp's disposal.

In these three series, he ends up on the wrong side of the law, is embarrassed over animal rights, tries to join the Masons and gets embroiled in a bet with a rival barrister. Meanwhile, Ruth gets a job as a 'Legal Eagle' on breakfast telly, decides to adopt a baby and fakes a family for a client while Fuller-Carp fiddles the books. And when a legal firm invites John, Ruth and Hilary on a team-building outward-bound weekend, disaster ensues...

Clive Coleman's sitcom set in perhaps the country's least spectacular law chambers stars John Bird as John Fuller-Carp, with James Fleet as Hilary Tripping and Lesley Sharp and Sarah Lancashire as Ruth Quirke. Among the guest stars are Peter Serafinowcz, Sanjeev Bhaskar and Rebecca Front.

Production credits

Written by Clive Coleman

Produced by Paul Schlesinger

First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 17 April -15 May1996 (Series 1), 11 May-8 June 1998 (Series 2), 9-30 March 1999 (Series 3)

Starring John Bird and Sarah Lancashire

Reviews

A marvellous ghost story, shimmering with panic

—— Irish Times

A splendid chiller [and] extremely funny book... Indeed, the success of this novel depends very much on the balance that Amis maintains between laughter and fear

—— New York Times

Contains all the best and familiar Amis qualities - including superb sexual comedy.

—— Sunday Times

Richard Flanagan is one of the greatest writers at work in the world today - I admire him and his writing immensely. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a haunting, urgent and important book about our broken and confusing age

—— James Rebanks

Striking... brilliantly done... Flanagan is wise enough to place his wider concerns, and the accompanying magic realism within the sturdy framework of a conventional family narrative

—— The Times

Magnificent... Flanagan hasn't just written about the space between living and dying; in writing about the things that are disappearing from the world he's captured something fundamental about the moment we're living in

—— Guardian Australia

Pure and simple... A book in which workaday realism is increasingly marbled with magical effects... What impresses most, however, is that Flanagan's novel doesn't end in condemnation. It keeps searching for the proper form for love

—— Geordie Williamson , The Australian

Flanagan has delivered a book that both distills the literary qualities for which he has been celebrated for more than a quarter of a century and recasts our ideas about the kind of writer he is and what he can do. This novel is a revelation and triumph, from a writer demonstrating, yet again, the depths of his talent, while revelling in a new, unfamiliar register. It is at once timely and timeless, full of despair but leavened by hope, angry and funny and sad and a bit magical... What an astonishing book this is

—— Michael Williams , Sydney Morning Herald

An extraordinary tour de force, utterly compelling... It's a heartfelt, urgent plea to restore our connection to the world before it's too late

—— Morag MacInnes , Tablet, *Novel of the Week*

Utterly dazzling

—— Jonathan Wright , SFX

Fascinating

—— Scotland on Sunday, *Books to Look Out For 2020*

[Flanagan's] prose has a pyrotechnic brilliance

—— Max Davidson , Mail on Sunday

There's much beauty and hope to be found in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

—— Claire Webb , Radio Times

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