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.”