Simon Callow growls through Brighton as Henry Palmer, a 70-year-old widower who’d rather throttle a cop with a teddy bear than accept a bus pass. The scripts, lifted from Andrew Birch’s cartoon in The Oldie, treat old age as one long excuse for public nuisance: charity-shop turf wars, forged Duchamps, cannabis muffins sold on the pier, a funeral dash on a clapped-out Mod scooter. Director Vadim Jean keeps the tone brisk and the colours bright, letting the cast treat retirement like a second adolescence.
Around Callow, Bill Paterson’s ex-hippie Charles and Anita Dobson’s thrift-shop matriarch Margaret supply a lived-in comic rhythm, trading barbs over cups of tea that taste of something stronger. Anna Crilly as Henry’s weary daughter and Amit Shah as her absent husband provide the occasional reminder that actions have consequences, though the show always sides with the wrinkled renegades. Second-series newcomers Vivian Oparah and Frances Barber add millennial foil and ex-wife chaos, but the engine remains Callow’s theatrical bark colliding with polite seaside society.
Nine half-hours appeared across two summer runs on Gold between 2016 and 2017, then silence; no third renewal followed the December 2017 finale that saw Henry lose, retrieve and finally scatter his wife’s ashes. The channel has repeated the episodes sporadically, yet the series never migrated to a mainstream streamer, leaving it a minor, spirited footnote in Britain’s pensioner-com boom.
Production Details
U&Gold / 2 Seasons / 9 Episodes / 2016
Main Cast
Simon Callow as Henry Palmer
Bill Paterson as Charles
Anita Dobson as Margaret
Anna Crilly as Cath
Amit Shah as Jeremy
Vivian Oparah as Amaya
Frances Barber as Angela
Moyo Akandé as DS Freeman
Philip Cumbus as PC Burns
Jessie Cave as Steph
Ethan Lawrence as Sales Lee
Olivia Bernstone as Train Ticket Girl
