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Clamour For Goodnight Sweetheart To Get A New Series Begins

Goodnight Sweetheart was a nineties British sitcom about time travel and bigamy. Starring Nicolas Lyndhurst, it focused on Gary, a man who felt emasculated in his relationship to a high rising career woman without children, and he found himself able to walk into the past, London during World War II, a simpler, more sexist time when men were more likely to dominate, and where he struck up a new relationship with a barmaid. Over the course of seven years, the affair turned into bigamy, and he found himself a father. He lived this double life with the aid of a friend who covered for him, getting a name for himself inventing songs from the present in the past, taking objects from the past to sell in the present, and never able to choose between his two lives. Eventually that decision was made for him and he found himself stuck in the forties. His present day wife then had the situation explained by his friend.

Last night, as part of BBC2's 60 Years Of Sitcom season, the original writers revived Goodnight Sweetheart for a one-off episode, part of a number of sitcoms revived for one more episode in one way or another including Porridge, Are You Being Served, Till Death Us Do Part, Hancock's Half Hour and Keeping Up Appearances, as well as a bunch of brand new sitcoms.

Initial reaction to the news was generally one of disdain, but the actual broadcasts have gone done very well indeed. And Goodnight Sweetheart in particular has drawn near universal praise, to the extent that it seems regarded as a lot better than the original. The humour is still fairly broad and stereotypical, but rather than having two timezones to play with, we now have four. The memories of the forties and the nineties, everpresent, but now we have the sixties and the twenty-tens…

Gary now lives in the nineteen sixties, with his wife and son, unable to return to the present day. It takes a trip to a hospital to see himself being born and to prevent the midwife from dropping him on his head as a baby (and naturally ensuring that's exactly what happens) that sees him sent back to the future, or rather our present, 2016. And this, for Gary is as much a culture shock as anything. The profileration of smartphone and tablet technology, the hairstyles, the beard styles, the lack of phone boxes, gay men kissing in the street, his wife now a Dragon's Den/Shark Tank TV star, this clash is as big as any he has encountered before.  And he discovers that he has a daughter he never knew.

But normal service, as he put it, has now been resumed. He can time travel again – maybe he now has a reason to. The implication is that it was looking after his child in the forties that trapped him there, but with a child in 2016 he has new impetus to time-travel again.

It was poignant, especially with the song he imported from the present back to the past – a time when everyone seems to be stealing the songs he created forty years ago. Oh and it happened to be a lot funnier than I ever remember it being. Of course, I've also time travelled since then and maybe my perspective has changed.

But here's what a lot of folk far clever than I thought about it…

https://twitter.com/TomSpilsbury/status/771841085622673408

https://twitter.com/timmygarrett40k/status/771809689604685824

https://twitter.com/bellamackie/status/771808584564875264

https://twitter.com/BadWilf/status/771807473128861697

https://twitter.com/GRALambo/status/771807291330945028

There was one other conversation though…

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