Each episode of this Yorkshire Television comedy-drama takes place at a different social do, beginning with the wedding where David Jason’s brassy foundry-owner Ted Simcock slips upstairs with the bride’s mother, Liz Rodenhurst. From that moment the two families, the Simcocks and the middle-class Rodenhursts, are locked in a chain of adultery, bankruptcy, political coups and funerals that runs through thirteen episodes and two series inside a single year.
The scripts, adapted by David Nobbs from his own novels, treat every buffet supper and raffle ticket as potential ammunition. Gwen Taylor’s Rita begins the story a timid wife and ends it an independent councillor who has buried her father on the dancefloor and jilted a parliamentary candidate at the altar. Nicola Pagett’s Liz glides through marriages to both a dentist and a grieving solicitor, never once spilling her drink. When the final civil wedding rolls round, three different couples emerge from the same registry office, all quarrelling over the same round of hotel sandwiches.
Filmed largely in Knaresborough and using the real St John the Baptist Church for its animated titles, the series keeps the guest list rotating: a Miss Frozen Chicken pageant, an angling-club Christmas bash, the inauguration of an outer-inner relief ring road. Every function offers fresh chances for Ted to boast about his liquidised Jupiter Foundry, for Rodney and Betty Sillitoe to argue over who gets drunk first, and for someone to announce an engagement, a bankruptcy or an unplanned pregnancy. The show aired on ITV between January and December 1989 and never looked for a second series beyond the thirteen events it had already RSVP’d to.
Production Details
ITV1 / 2 Seasons / 13 Episodes / 1989
Producer(s): David Reynolds
Main Cast
David Jason as Ted Simcock
Gwen Taylor as
Tim Wylton as
Karen Drury as
Diana Weston as
