The Liver Birds "Man is the dog, and woman is the bone. He eats the best of you, and buries the rest of you, and when his dish is empty—he'll dig you up again." This would be the last series with Beryl; as Polly James explained: "The reason I left the programme in the end was that I felt I was in danger of caricaturing what was already a pretty outrageous character." Producer Sydney Lotterby had to find a new leading actress to keep the series going after Polly James' departure. In 1971 he'd replaced Pauline Collins with Nerys Hughes, and Hughes herself
The Liver Birds episodes commissioned for the third series, Michael Mills felt that the writing duties would be too much for Lane to handle alone, so he handed six episodes to the writing duo of Jack Seddon and David Pursall. "They wrote like fellas. They had no idea how a woman thought", Lane said later, and Nerys Hughes observed, "They weren't empathetic, they were...voyeuristic!" "They were, tonally, not the same", conceded the producer, Sydney Lotterby. This writing arrangement finished at the end of the third series. On 25 December 1972, a "Liver Birds" short was broadcast as part of "Christmas Night with the