80s Sitcoms

Cast of No Place Like Home

The 1980s are a bit of a lost decade for me – as far as television is concerned. I wasn’t in prison or embarking on a series of drug-fuelled hedonist episodes. I was, I guess, living the life of a young adult – out most nights at parties, pubs, concerts, or in my sad case, Labour party meetings. Not for me the slippers and fire, Radio Times draped over my knee while I watched an endless parade of sitcoms or variety shows.

All I recall from the small screen of the era are the set pieces – the Christmas specials of Morecambe and Wise, the Two Ronnies, Top of the Pops with DJs wearing Santa hats. I saw all these at my parents’ home, whence I returned dutifully every year, slipping comfortably back into family viewing with assembled siblings, crouched on a sofa eating KitKats or Bounty Bars, as if I had never been away.

So watching an episode of No Place Like Home on YouTube is a kind of retro revelation. Did this dreary domestic comedy really run for five whole series throughout the Eighties?  Is that really William Gaunt, whom I always rather rated in the Champions, a sexy 60s thriller series, sporting a dull Dad moustache – the kind that only Dads in the Beano and Dandy ever wore?.  Can that be a fresh-faced and mulletted Martin Clunes parrotting awful lines like

The premise of the comedy – we will have to use the official designation here, though there are precious few laughs to be had – is that Gaunt (Arthur Crabtree – crabby old git, geddit?) and wife Beryl (a put upon Patricia Garwood) having brought up four children, were looking forward to spending the next few years enjoying life together free of responsibilities. However, their two boys and two girls, now young adults, have no intention of leaving. In an early premonition of the boomerang phenomenon, they are still at home, sprawling over sofas, emptying the fridge and cramping their parents’ style, if that’s the word to describe Gaunt’s shapeless jumpers and Garwood’s frilly tops.

Quite apart from the jaw-dropping sexism – poor Beryl is reduced by the script to a simpering jelly, while her two boys are red blooded young stallions, snogging their way round a succession of dumb blondes (literally in some cases - Equity rates for speaking parts were clearly too much for the meagre budget of this particular programme).

Searingly middle class, middlebrow and middle of the road, the clunking stereotypes in No Place Like Home would be an embarrassment in a Carry On caper.  Women are bossy or buxom, the men henpecked or randy. In order to establish Arthur’s impeccable bourgeois credentials, we see him nipping round to his neighbour’s shed for a crafty sherry. Nobody from Surbiton or Solihull, Jesmond or Jersey, was drinking sherry in the 1980s. Only in a 

Most of the plotlines revolve around the frustrated Crabtrees’ attempts to have a bit of nookie, to use the 80s slang, whilst constantly being interrupted by their offspring.  It is no surprise to learn that the writer was also responsible for 70s sitcoms like Bless This House and Robin’s Nest, both of which majored on failed attempts on the part of the chief protagonist, always male – to get his end away. One could admire the premise of No Place Like Home as a kind of steadfast reluctance on the part of the producers to recognise that the world was changing and they were in fact, creating an elegiac celebration of a rightly forgotten era.

But the truth was that by end of the 80s, this relentless low level nudge-nudge wink, wink suburban smut was an exhausted coal seam of comedy, as anachronistic in that decade as a Ford Capri or a Fanny Craddock recipe, yet mainstream telly was not quite ready to take the leap into the world of alternative comedy,  pioneered by the likes of Alexei Sayle and Ben Elton. Instead, it had to rely on the signature genius of Morecambe and Wise, Les Dawson or the Two Ronnies, ably supported by cleverly crafted and unique ensembles like Dad’s Army, But those comic gems were a rarity -  the rest of the comedy menu on weekday nights had to be padded with school dinner stodge like No Place Like Home. I’m so glad I didn’t pass up on a night at the Hanwell working mens’ club for a general committee meeting in order to stay at home and watch this stuff.