Goldsborough Hall was used to portray his Yorkshire country residence and was used as a backdrop for the opening photo sequences along with some exterior shots in the first series, including the scene where he tries to run over the gardener in his Bentley.

The town of Knaresborough, North Yorkshire was used to film the opening election sequence in the first episode and roads around Goldsborough were used to shoot the police car chase from the first series where the policeman's gun backfires.

Later, B'Stard would intentionally mismanage the Tory election campaign so Labour would be blamed for an economic crisis, stage his own assassination to bring back hanging (and make £1 million in the process).

When accused of engaging in sex acts with minors, Alan successfully sued The Times newspaper; when he plotted to get his hands on the stolen millions of Robert Maxwell who was hiding in Bosnia he was hailed as a humanitarian hero.

B'Stard's greatest triumph came when he managed to get himself released from incarceration in a Siberian gulag following his assassination attempt on Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and returned to the UK a hero.

In the stage show it was revealed that Alan had been the architect of New Labour when he realised the Tories were done for (effectively ignoring the last episode of the series), picking a young guitar-playing hippie named Tony Blair and grooming him to be PM.

It is explained that Alan died while making love to his two faithful Polynesian masseurs and states that B'Stard went on to marry Lady Gaga, his fifth wife and left behind five children and twelve grandchildren.

Despite coming from a wealthy background herself, she married Alan for his money and to further her social status, being far more invested in her hedonistic desires than his welfare, which she willingly compromises numerous times throughout the series.

Sir Stephen's morally uptight old-school attitude and respect for parliamentary protocol meant that he contrasted sharply with the self-centred Alan and the clueless Piers, serving as further comic foil to bounce the two of them off.

He is last seen in Series 2 when, having already been alienated by the introduction of TV cameras and film crews into the House of Commons, Sir Stephen witnesses Piers inflating a blow-up Alan B'Stard doll in a suggestive manner.

Over the course of the series, stage shows and newspaper columns, Alan opined on numerous topics, most of which demonstrated his contempt for the working class and indeed anyone not of the political and financial elite (the ordinaries).

Having stated that he is a libertarian and thus believes that pornography, prostitution and drugs should be commercially available to willing consumers (including himself), he once supported a parliamentary anti-pornography group and the efforts of Lady Virginia Imry to publish her pamphlet "Sex is Wrong".

In another instance, he endorsed environmentalism after a staged assassination attempt to campaign for the reintroduction of the death penalty by hanging (supposedly as an environmentally-friendly alternative to electrocution and a stronger deterrent to crime than lethal injection), with himself winning the contract to build new gallows.

(i.e., the Christian Approach to Society Handbooks, Conservative Action for South Humberside or Central Amazonian Spiritual Healers) in order to fraudulently cash cheques from unsuspecting donors.

Alan at one time proposed inverting the rallying cry of the American War of Independence by stating that "No representation without taxation" was a more fitting clarion call, believing people such as himself (the "enterprising, over-taxed minority") to be called on far too often to bail out other members of society (albeit as part of a long-term scheme to disenfranchise Labour voters in Hackney and ensure the election of a Conservative borough council that would support oil exploration in Hackney Marshes).

Alan used the same argument when proposing to cut off all social security payments to elderly people as he believes they should have considered how they would look after themselves instead of wasting their money on "ghastly holidays in Blackpool".

When being interviewed by Brian Walden, Alan readily conceded that should he rule, the rich would only pay tax on their cocaine, children would be forced to work in mills and the elderly and infirm would be left to die by the thousands.

The sitcom was one of the most critically successful ITV comedy series of its day, and developed a strong following: the audience laughter was so loud and persistent that it apparently caused the show to overrun and the writers had to shorten the scripts to compensate.

"[citation needed] Tying in with the original run of the stage show, British broadsheet newspaper The Sunday Telegraph ran a weekly opinion column penned by Alan B'Stard himself (in reality his creators, Marks and Gran).

In it, Mr B'Stard writes as the founder of New Labour and effective ruler of the country, commenting on the week's events in politics, often referring to his frustrations with Tony and the rest of the cabinet.

In these latest columns, B'Stard is now a Lord, (his final Sunday Telegraph piece seeing him leave the Commons and the country to become head of the World Bank) but still commentating on current events.