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The Family was the first example of a fly-on-the-wall documentary on British Television. It became the model for the observational style of programme making. The idea for a camera crew following a family as they went about their everyday lives was taken from the US by producer Paul Watson, where An American Family had aired two years previously.

The Wilkins family of Reading were chosen as representative of a working class household. They agreed to be filmed for 18 hours a day over a three month period. Margaret and bus driver Terry, both 39, lived in a flat above a greengrocer's shop with their four children Marion, Gary, Heather and Christopher, along with Gary's wife Karen, baby Scott and Marion's fiancé Tom.

The Wilkinses were unhappy when they first saw themselves on screen and thought the programme had been unfairly edited. Audiences were divided and there were calls for it to be banned. However 8 million watched Marion and Tom get married in what was called "the television wedding of the year".

The series was repeated in 1983, with a new programme filling in the intervening years. When Margaret Wilkins died in 2008 Paul Watson remembered her as "a truly wise woman". The Family started a trend for observational documentaries that has evolved over the years, offering glimpses of real life as varied as the 1982 series Police, Driving School in 1997 and The Call Centre in 2013.