In 2000 Malcolm Bradbury defined British society of the late 1960’s as still bourgeois – predominantly 'concerned with home, family, property and place'. The conservative nature of the national spirit at the time still appeared rather unshaken by the swinging sixties. Bradbury believed that this was the reason why the BBC’s adaptation of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga of 1967 was such a success. The paper focuses on the transnational replication of the phenomenon and looks at how the series was received in communist Czechoslovakia two years later. It compares the reception of the series in both countries as captured in national and local media. It claims that the roots of the excitement and elation with which Czechs across generations and classes reacted to the adaptation resembled those in Britain. Both spatiality and temporality suddenly lose their common outlines. In spatially distant national communities people engaged in the same way with temporarily distant fictional world that on the surface did not resemble their reality. What brought them close to the fictional characters were the domestic values that they all shared – the British of the 1860’s, their descendants a whole century later and, among other nations caught in the Forsyte mania, Czechs who had been physically locked behind the Iron Curtain for two decades at the time.