I’m not really sure how to articulate this thought, so I’m just going to type and see what happens. It’s about Keeping Up Appearances again, sorry.
I can’t get my head round when it’s set. I know full well that it’s set in the 1990s, but I think deep down it wants to be set in the 1950s.
At a time when the country was going all Girl Power and Madchester, and people were dropping Es and singing songs about it, Hyacinth lives in a world with none of that.
Hyacinth’s world is full of vicars coming for tea, being obsessed with the household, and men going to work wearing hats. It’s not peculiar to this Roy Clarke sitcom either. The world of Open All Hours and Last Of The Summer Wine also feel like the fifties.
This is of course, probably deliberate. These shows were so well watched because the older generation were being nostalgic, no doubt. But audiences that large must have been more demographically diverse than that.
It’s a world that never existed in the first place.
Like I say, not sure where I am going with this.
I think you could write a sitcom now, set in the fifties, with a studio audience, and it might still do rather well.
