was marigold a good mother......

Hmm, perhaps you need to watch it again. :)

I'm afraid I think you've rather missed the point of the story. Of course Marigold was a bad mother. Or rather, since I wouldn't like to dismiss anyone as an intrinsically bad person, she was doing very badly at the job of being a mother. We were left with no doubt about that. In fact, it was the premise upon which the whole story was based! It wouldn't have worked otherwise.

The tragedy of the story, as seen from Dolphin's perspective, was that she loved her mother very much, and really wanted the family to work, whereas given the way that Marigold was behaving, there was absolutely no way that could happen. As the drama progressed, we saw the family struggle on, and I expect many of us hoped that they would somehow sort it all out in the end, as people often do in stories. But clearly the makers of the programme (and, presumably, Ms. Wilson, in the book, although I haven't read it) wanted the viewers to know that real life doesn't generally work like that, and that the family did need someone else to step in.

That was the inevitable conclusion, and that was, in fact, how the the programme ended. Dolphin was, at the end, taken away by someone from Social Services.

So are you happy now?