Keeping Up Appearances

This blog was going to be so cool and edgy.  I was going to uncover hidden gems on obscure platforms, curating them for readers’ viewing pleasure like some sort of Walter Presents, only with more hair and no glasses.  Highbrow people would come to me wondering what to watch.  This was clearly never going to happen for two reasons: firstly, I watch too much trash.  I’ve covered all the dross on here, from Geordie Shore to Ex On The Beach (broadly the same show) via Love Island and Bromans (which I still remember fondly yet it curiously doesn’t seem to be appearing for a second series).  Secondly, there aren’t enough hours in the day to get through all the TV.  I’m fairly vocal with anyone who’ll ask (nobody asks) that I have to be in bed by 10pm, which leaves a maximum of two telly-viewing hours of a weekday evening when I’ve dragged my heavily sweating body home from the office via a Tube, a bus and a quick walk.  With so many subsequent series of things like Peaky Blinders and Great British Bake Off taking up my schedule, my chances to uncover and share any gems, trashy or otherwise are limited.

So we’re back raiding the archives this week.  And what an old archive I’ve raided as I’ve gone all the way back to a sitcom that ran from 1990 to 1995.  I think I was searching for Cardinal Burns clips on YouTube for a previous unpopular post when I suddenly started getting served montages of this show, all in aid of promoting BritBox – seems to be some sort of platform for watching exactly the sort of old stuff I’m talking about this week.  Cunningly, though, another motivation to cover this is that aged British comedy that only just predates the internet gets the most reads.  Not straightaway, but I think eventually the searchbots crawl in and I end up being a leading authority on such classics as Bo’ Selecta! – now the most read post out of everything on Just One More Episode despite the clamouring apathy that greeted its initial publication.

And here we are, then, talking about Keeping Up Appearances.  Let’s begin with Patricia Routledge, a national treasure if ever there was one.  She had already proven she could hold her own, fully alone, in the outstanding Kitty monologues that featured in Victoria Wood’s As Seen On TV (something I immediately binged through when I spotted it on Netflix, but given my sycophantic piece on dinnerladies, I’ve saved posting about until another time).  As Hyacinth Bucket, she was given a wider world to expand into with her trademark impeccable character portrayal – not that any single line of Kitty’s lacked a complete visual rendering in the mind’s eye.

Hyacinth likes to keep up her appearances.  This is because her origins are distinctly lower class, so having scraped into the bottom rung of the middle class by acquiring a three-piece suite and (obsessively) cleaning her well-twitched net curtains, she exhibits the excruciatingly British trait of being agonisingly class-conscious.  Throughout the five series, she denies any association with her sisters: slovenly yet lovely Daisy and glorious maneater Rose, not to mention Daisy’s other half, Onslow, king of the slobs, played by the fondly remembered Geoffrey Hughes (also known as Twiggy in The Royle Family).  I’ll be honest though: as a Surrey schoolboy whose own parents’, shall we say, self-improvement naturally led to an element of snobbery, I was as appalled by Hyacinth’s family as she was.

In fact, as a child between the ages of five and ten when the show first broadcast, I couldn’t for a long time see what the joke was with our Hyacinth.  She had high standards, liked nice things and always wanted the best to happen – what wasn’t to like?  Her phone manner was clearly over the top, “The [bouquet] household; the lady of the house speaking,” but her candlelight suppers sounded like a hot invitation and she was always immaculately turned out (unless she had a tipple, in which case she became immediately dishevelled).  I could never understand why her neighbours, Elizabeth and Emmett, got so nervous about seeing her, though their anxiety rubbed off on me as I was always terrified of the impending moment one of them would be left with no choice but to smash their teacup on the floor in response to Hyacinth’s outbursts.  In conclusion, I really just thought this was a show about a nice lady, with lots of unexplained canned laughter.

Granted, despite the academic heights I later reached, some of the cleverer jokes were beyond me.  Whenever she quickly spelled her surname as B-U-C-K-E-T while insisting it be pronounced bouquet, I really had no idea what was going on, unable to match the spoken letters quickly enough to form the joke – all this despite the letters and spellings questions in University Challenge later being my top scorers.  Another regular recurring joke revolved around her phone number resembling that of a Chinese takeaway, which teed up many euphemisms about the availability of crispy prawn balls at the Bucket residence (low) due to misdials.  My own parents firmly believed that takeaways were for emergencies only and a clear sign of idleness on any other occasion.  To this day, I don’t use Deliveroo or Uber Eats, which does save me money and demonstrates a clear benefit to all the emotional scarring we’re unearthing here.  But this meant I had no idea that you used dish numbers when phoning a Chinese takeaway so I simply patiently waited for these scenes to end, safe in the knowledge something silly would happen eventually.  I remember we did once get a Domino’s as a family for some sort of treat, but this was of course served on our own crockery, with folded paper napkins, just in case anyone looked in through the window and thought we had a low household income.

Suffering through all of this we had Hyacinth’s husband Richard (a name she pronounced so wonderfully I can hear it ringing in my ears).  While driving, he would be told to mind the pedestrian, while gardening, he would be told to look like he was enjoying himself, lest people think a gardener beyond their budget, while rushing around at Hyacinth’s beck and call, she would hope he wouldn’t spoil things with lower middle-class humour.  Let’s face it, the man probably had clinical depression, which, added to her neighbours’ crippling anxiety, was just part of the show’s scathing social commentary around British snobbery.

Indeed, in real life, as a Daily Mail reader and probable Brexit voter, Hyacinth would be my natural enemy.  It’s hard to say how well the show has dated, but more valuable are my fond memories of crashing down the stairs to join my family in watching each episode in the early nineties.  This was all thanks to Routledge’s ability to create charm where there should be none.  Every line is a masterclass in delivery.  Every delivery is a masterclass in character.  Hyacinth Bucket remains as relevant as she ever was so we shall give her the last word, and the lifelong snob in me can’t help but agree with her sentiment: “If there's one thing I can't stand, it's snobbery and one-upmanship. People trying to pretend they're superior. Makes it so much harder for those of us who really are.”

dinnerladies

There are certain shows that, when they stumble back into your life, you are powerless to resist the urge commanding you to re-watch every episode immediately.  This is what happened to me and dinnerladies last week.  Scrolling through the EPG, innocently just checking if there was anything else that could be on in the background while I cooked, now I have reawakened an intolerance to Friends after so much repeated viewing, I suddenly spotted series one, episode one of Victoria Wood’s classic sitcom from the late nineties nestled in there as the listing for GOLD.  Within seconds of the familiar northern factory canteen set filling the screen, I had series-linked the whole lot.

Despite my strategic approach to which boxsets are lined up to watch once I have finished my current crop, despite all the recommendations people have given me around what I have to get into next (some of which I take on board, others I have no intention of listening to – have fun guessing where you fit in) and despite knowing there weren’t enough minutes before bedtime to get through enough episodes to satiate me, the comedic equivalent of a massive hug had drawn me in.  Sometimes you just have to get a show out of your system.  I was gone.

I have always loved Victoria Wood.  I think it was the fact that her comedy always made my mum laugh which first impressed me.  And not just laugh, but lose all control in fits of hysterics at her incredibly apt and perceptive observations of British life.  My sister and I subsequently whiled away many an hour watching her material on VHS: As Seen On TV, An Audience With (from 1988 where you literally cannot believe the haircuts sported by British showbiz royalty).  I even had the DVD of her stage musical Acorn Antiques sent to me by Lovefilm.  If Victoria Wood had anything to do with something, then I had to watch it.

Her comedy is gentle enough to be comforting, but strong enough to expose life at its most ridiculous.  She could always be relied upon to spot what was ridiculous, mostly because life is ridiculous.  This ridiculousness is then compounded by being British, as this has always been a particularly ridiculous thing to be.  And what’s more ridiculous than being British?  Being a middle-aged British woman.  Not because they themselves are ridiculous, but because what we as a society expect of them is.

Nowhere was this laid bare more deftly than in dinnerladies.  I’m not going to dwell on the lack of capital D.  I’ve made my peace with that.  Let’s instead dwell on how her shrewd observations and the incredible rhythm to her scripts turned the most humdrum of locations into a place where the highs and lows of life were played out with a plausibility that was second to none, all while guaranteeing a good handful of uncontrollable belly laughs.  More than anything, it was the inordinate accuracy of her characters that made the humour so identifiable.  Every walk-on part, from a pie delivery man to a woman asking about the availability of knives in the canteen (as there were no knives), came embellished with some unique quirk or declared behaviour that rooted them in the ridiculousness of reality.

When the show premiered on the BBC in 1998, we were still in an age where the whole family had to watch telly together, at a schedule dictated by the broadcasters and communicated to the masses in glossy tabloid supplements that were saved from the weekend to guide midweek viewing.  dinnerladies regularly pulled audiences around the ten million mark, which is unheard of now you can Netflix yourself silly as and when it suits you.  Even then, most of the names the characters referenced were famous way before more time.  On this third viewing, though, I certainly understood a lot more of the sexual references.  Cleverly wrapped up in layers of innuendo, it was never quite graphic enough for my teenage mind.

This blog is about shows that are special to me, and this is the main reason I have included dinnerladies.  I mentioned my year abroad last week, and while I currently have the benefit of rose-tinted spectacles to look back through on this time, those nine months or so thirteen years ago were difficult.  Living abroad hadn’t exactly been a choice and I missed Britain (and its ridiculousness).  A childhood friend had, by chance, been allocated a school in the same town where we were both language assistants – we sat in the back of classrooms acting as human dictionaries.  With German school starting unfeasibly early, our working days were done by about ten each morning.  Even with hanging around das Fitnessstudio and making pancakes, as it was the only thing I could cook, we were still left with whole afternoons to fill.  Cue a care package that contained dinnerladies on DVD.  Each scene-stealing line delivery from Julie Walters would give us the resolve to carry on.  It was a lifeline in a world where our senses of humour didn’t translate into a language which has sixteen words for the.  Even back in Blighty years later, we found a production of dinnerladies on stage in Guildford and laughed ourselves silly reliving again the show and everything it had come to mean to us.

Let’s conclude on some melancholy.  With Victoria Wood dying just under two years ago, re-watching dinnerladies has taken on a more haunting quality.  Woven throughout the two series are frequent though unspecific references to canteen manager Tony’s cancer and treatment.  Bren, Wood’s character, supports him throughout, yet in reality, it’s Andrew Dunn we see remembering Wood fondly in the accompanying series Dinnerladies Diaries.  It has been pointed out before that the lyrics to the theme tune, again, written by Victoria herself, lamented the tragic running out of time that prevents many of us from realising our dreams.  Indeed, the will they, won’t they Brenda-Tony love story that was at the heart of the show brutally illustrated that life is for the grabbing, otherwise opportunities are for the missing.  True love isn’t glamorous Hollywood kisses.  It’s people with bad haircuts finally having a snog in a factory canteen.  It’s, you know, ridiculous: hilarious and tragic all at once.  It’s tragic that Victoria can never again give us new comedy, but it’s hilarious we can carry on enjoying what she left us, and that what she did leave us can mean so much.