The year is 1929 and in the opening episode Jeremiah Unsworth (Freddie Jones), the proprietor of the undertakers, dies. This leaves his widow Ivy (Thora Hird) and gormless nephew Billy (Christopher Beeny) to take over the business. As might be expected, the accident-prone Ivy and Billy have numerous mishaps, and hardly a funeral goes by without something untoward occurring. The setting for the show is the fictional Yorkshire town of Oldshaw during the 1930s. The writer Dick Sharples chose this period as this was the time when undertakers were switching from horse drawn hearses to mechanical ones.