Bad.
Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh NO.......!
shareIt was abysmal.
It's that man again!!
Exploring the early years of well-established characters can work - I remember enjoying "First of the Summer Wine", for example - and I was certainly more interested to see this than I was to watch the revivals of "Are You Being Served?", "Goodnight Sweetheart", etc... I liked the 1950s soundtrack and the period detail was generally good. (I'll forgive the very un1950s radiator cover seen in the background of one scene...) Sadly, there was no discernible story and Kerry Howard's impersonation of Patricia Routledge felt very forced and only succeeded in making her sound oddly foreign... Given some semblance of a plot and a few tweaks to Ms Howard's interpretation of the character, this could have been jolly enough... As it was, I felt it was a bit of a waste of half an hour of television and it was definitely a waste of the talents of Mark Addy and Tamla Kari, who both deserve considerably better material.
shareRoy Clarke struggles when he doesn't have an existing old script to lazily retweak. KUA relied on one script and he just shuffled the lines around for every new episode, relying on the excellent performers to give it life. With this he had to start from scratch with established characters in a whole new setting, and he couldn't do it.
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