It’s time for a new podcast series. There have been many situation comedies over the years, but few are just plain damn weirder than Goodnight Sweetheart, the BBC sitcom that ran from 1993 to 1999, featuring “everybody’s favourite time-travelling bigamist”, Gary Sparrow.
Over the next 60 days, or weeks, or whatever, Sam Whyte and I are going to go deep with this story of a simple television repair man who discovers a time-portal back to 1940 and uses the opportunity to pretend to be a spy and try to get off with literally the first woman he speaks to.
It’s not the weirdest TV comedy ever made. That dubious “honour” belongs to the 1969 American sketch show Turn-on, which was on air for less than one episode before it was pulled from air. If you want to endure it, it’s right here for your delectation. And it isn’t the worst conceit for a sitcom ever designed, either. That honour probably belongs to Galaxy’s Heil Honey I’m Home.
But let’s get real for a moment, here. For a prime-time, 10 million-plus audience on BBC1, Goodnight Sweetheart is a thoroughly fucked-up show about a terrible man for whom everything goes right, despite him being simply a terrible human being. I have so many questions.
So, this episode is about the very episode of this show, in which Gary gets to experience time-travel without realising it, even though it’s completely obvious, and his very first air raid, because exposition and explaining itself is very important to this show, while we get to meet his upwardly-mobile wife and his best friend, who enables his worst behaviour through the next six years of his life.
But it’s also an opportunity for me to get the location of Cricklewood hopelessly wrong (I’m ascribing this to the fact that no-one ever visits north-west London), discuss the Open University as a tool for social mobility, and and the merits - or otherwise - of pre-decimal currency. Even adjusted for inflation, a pint of beer would have cost 97p, for the record.
So, settle in, bear with us while we fine tune it. This is going to be a hell of a ride.
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