The main scriptwriter for many years was Jonquil Antony, and her first collaborator (under a pseudonym) was Ted Willis, later to create Dixon of Dock Green.
The lead character, Mrs Dale, was played by Ellis Powell until she left the show in 1963 and was replaced by Jessie Matthews.
An innovative characteristic of the programme was that a brief introductory narrative in each episode was spoken by Mrs Dale as if she were writing her diary.
The serial centred on Mrs Mary Dale, a doctor's wife, and her husband Jim, and the comings and goings of a middle class society.
The Dales and their friends (along with Captain, Mrs Freeman's cat, apparently named after the rank of her late husband, who had been killed in the First World War) got along in almost perfect harmony.
The programme is thought to be the first British mainstream drama which depicted a character known to be homosexual sympathetically in a leading part – Richard Fulton (portrayed by David March), Sally's husband.
In 1975, Matthews's biographer, Michael Thornton, wrote: On 19 February, 1963, a plump and embittered fifty-six-year-old character actress called Ellis Powell walked out of Broadcasting House for the last time.
When it became The Dales, the show did try to copy The Archers, which was originally a medium to disseminate information to the agricultural community, and to give an insight into rural affairs to the public.
The serial ran for 5,531 episodes, culminating with the engagement of Mrs Dale's daughter Gwen to a famous TV professor on 25 April 1969.
In 1970, the year after the programme finished, she took back her former characters after a fashion, publishing Dear Dr. Dale, a novel set after the end of the serial.
In 1972 it received an amateur production at Rugby Theatre, with Bridget Watson as Mrs Dale and Harry Roberts as her husband the doctor.
The only professional revival seems to have been in 1997 at the Kenneth More Studio Theatre in Ilford, when Angela Ellis and Roger Braban played the senior Dales.