The Liver Birds and Series 1 starred Pauline Collins as Dawn and Polly James as Beryl Hennessey. In Series 2, Nerys Hughes debuted as Sandra Hutchinson, replacing Dawn for the rest of the programme's run. The Beryl-and-Sandra pairing is generally regarded as the programme's best period. Beryl was the more 'common' one, while Sandra was soft-spoken and more refined, due to the influence of her snobbish, overbearing mother (Mollie Sugden). Carla Lane drew on her own mother for the character – "Mrs Hutchinson, I think she was my mother. I'm sure she was my mother". Beryl's 'common' mother (the Hennesseys live in Bootle,
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