The Liver Birds sequence for series one also exists but in poor quality. The first series was stopped after four episodes because Polly James' hectic schedule—working every evening on "Anne of Green Gables" in the West End, then rehearsing all day for the TV show—was proving too much. By the time James was available again, Pauline Collins had moved to LWT's "Upstairs, Downstairs". The producer Sydney Lotterby remembered having worked with Nerys Hughes on "The Likely Lads" and, wrongly believing the Welsh actress was from Liverpool, asked her to read for a part in "The Liver Birds". (Neither actress really had a Liverpool
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