Goodnight Sweetheart
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| Goodnight Sweetheart | |
.jpg) Series title card |
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| Genre | Sitcom |
|---|---|
| Created by | Laurence Marks Maurice Gran |
| Developed by | Alomo Productions |
| Starring | Nicholas Lyndhurst Victor McGuire Christopher Ettridge Michelle Holmes Dervla Kirwan Emma Amos Elizabeth Carling |
| Theme music composer | David Harsent Anthony Sadler Gaynor Sadler |
| Country of origin |  United Kingdom |
| No. of series | 6 |
| No. of episodes | 58 (List of episodes) |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) | Claire Hinson Allan McKeown |
| Producer(s) | John Bartlett Nic Phillips |
| Running time | 30 minutes |
| Broadcast | |
| Original channel | BBC1 |
| Picture format | 4:3 |
| Original run | 18 November 1993 – 28 June 1999 |
Goodnight Sweetheart is a popular BBC sitcom that ran for six series from 1993 to 1999. It stars Nicholas Lyndhurst as accidental time traveller, Gary Sparrow, who leads a double-life after discovering a time portal allowing him to travel between 1990s London and London of World War II. The show was created by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, also creators of Birds of a Feather and The New Statesman. The creators wrote the first series, while subsequent episodes were by a team of writers (including Marks and Gran).
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[edit] Plot summary
Main article: List of Goodnight Sweetheart characters
Gary Sparrow is a disillusioned, thirty-something TV repairman living an ordinary life in 1990's Cricklewood. Unlike his corporate-minded wife, Yvonne, Gary appears to be in no rush to move out of his humble starter home and onto greater things, and seems to live most of his life in a private dream-world.
Gary's life is changed forever though when one day, while having trouble finding the location of a repair job out in London's East End, he stumbles down "Ducketts Passage" and into the Royal Oak: an old-style Public House. Here, he meets Phoebe - a pretty brunette barmaid; Eric - Phoebe's staunchly patriotic father, and Reg - a naive but well-meaning policeman (or "bobby") (Episode One).
Upon taking in his surroundings, Gary initially assumes he is in a 1940's theme pub, and even congratulates Phoebe's father on his "amateur theatrics". However, after Phoebe assures him that his beer will only cost Tuppence-Farthing, Gary decides he must simply be asleep, and only dreaming he is back in the 1940's. It is not until experiencing an air raid and passing out in the pub's cellar from claustrophobia that Gary, upon awakening, realises the truth and that he has, in fact, travelled back in time.
From hereon in, Gary's life is one adventure after another as he uses the time portal on Ducketts Passage to flit between modern-day and war-time London. He starts a cross-time romantic affair with Phoebe, and immediately has to begin inventing "cover-stories" to tell both Phoebe and his wife in the 90's: excuses as to why he so often has to "dash off". In this, he is aided by his modern-day best friend and only time-traveling confidante, Ron Wheatcroft. Not only does Ron (albeit, reluctantly) help him invent these "cover-stories", but as he is a printer by trade, Ron is able to replicate items essential to Gary's survival in the past; things such as ID papers, period money and ration cards.
Gary exploits his obvious advantage as a man from the future by claiming to be a secret agent with "classified" information pertaining to the war. He also plays songs on the pub's piano that post-date his 1940's audience and then claims he wrote them; most notoriously, Beatles songs. Gary's courting of Phoebe is assisted by his ability to provide her with items considered luxuries by WWII ration standards; things like chocolate, stockings and bananas. Both Reg and Phoebe are deeply impressed by Gary's "glamorous" lifestyle, however, Phoebe's father has long considered Gary "suspicious" and as Phoebe is already married to a serving British soldier (Donald Bamford), Gary looks to him like a slacker by comparison.
As the series progresses, Phoebe's father (Eric) dies and Phoebe is left to run the Royal Oak on her own. Because of this unexpected responsibility, Phoebe consciously becomes more hard-headed, and consequently is less impressed by Gary's seemingly effortless gifts to her and his increasingly odd-sounding cover-stories. Back home in the 90's, Yvonne is also tiring of Gary's frequent absences and apparent lack of interest in starting a family with her. Through it all, Gary continues to confide in Ron, whose own marriage seems to be disintegrating in concurrence with him spending increasing time helping Gary.
Eventually, Phoebe and Yvonne are pregnant at the same time, however, while Yvonne's pregnancy ends in miscarriage, Phoebe goes on to have a son they name Michael. During this period, Gary and Phoebe marry; not simply to legitimise Michael's birth, but because Donald has recently been killed in the war and Phoebe has long-since confided to Gary that her and Donald's marriage was mutually loveless and made for convenience only. Upon marrying Phoebe, Gary graduates from adulterer to bigamist, although he justifies this to Ron by saying that his wives "exist in different temporal aspects of a 4 dimensional space-time continuum. Ron, though, considers this a "typical bigamist's excuse"!
In the later series, the sci-fi premise is expanded beyond basic time-travel and in one notable episode, "Mine's a Double", Gary is struck by lightening and spilt into three alter-ego's (an homage to the Star Trek episode, "The Enemy Within"). A "wicked Gary" wreaks havoc over Gary's life until eventually, Ron seizes him in a headlock and puts an end to his nefarious antics. At this point, a super-urbane, "Good Gary" makes an unexpected appearance, only to have the regular Gary muse egotistically that he'd always just assumed he was "the good Gary".
By Series Six, Yvonne has her own multi-million dollar beauty-aids business, and Gary and Phoebe have befriended Noël Coward, bought a nightclub, and moved into an upmarket apartment in Mayfair. Despite the glamorous turn of events however, marital disintegration continued to be a theme of the show, with Ron now divorced and Gary made to face the question of which wife he ultimately loved the most. The Final Episode, ("Accentuate the Positive"), is set on VE Day and Gary, after saving future Prime Minister, Clement Attlee from assassination, finds himself permanently trapped in 1945. He is shaken, but still has the presence of mind to strip back the wallpaper on his Mayfair flat and write an explanatory message to Ron and Yvonne. As Ron rents the very same flat in the 90's, Gary knows he will see the message. Eerily, Ron and Yvonne stand reading the message on the wall in the present day as Gary is hastily writing it on the same wall in the past, and thus, as far as we know, Yvonne is the only wife ever apprised of Gary's time-traveling secret.
[edit] Episodes
A total of 57 episodes were made including a Christmas special. Marks and Gran—the creators—wrote the first series; episodes after which were written by other writers as well as the creators themselves.
As in Marks and Gran's sitcom Get Back, most episodes of Goodnight Sweetheart - and the programme itself - were named after popular song titles. The show is named after the song Goodnight, Sweetheart, a popular song of the 1930s and 1940s, written by Guy Lombardo and performed by Rudy Vallée among others. Due to a script-editing error, two different episodes (series one, episode six and series four, episode two) were both titled "In the Mood". There is no special connection between these two episodes.
[edit] DVD releases
All six series and the 1995 Christmas Special have been released on DVD in the UK (Region 2), the Christmas special was released on the third series DVD. The first two series have been released in Australia (Region 4) in 2008.
| DVD | Release Date | |
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| Region 2 | Region 4 | |
| The Complete Series 1 |
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| The Complete Series 2 |
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| The Complete Series 3 |
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| The Complete Series 4 |
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| The Complete Series 5 |
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| The Complete Series 6 |
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| The Complete Series |
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[edit] Historical figures
Although the main characters are fictional, some real people have been portrayed in the wartime sequences. These include "Ludo" (possibly a young Robert Maxwell), King George VI, Wilfred Pickles, Winston Churchill, Ed Murrow, Guy Burgess, George Formby, Noël Coward (played by David Benson), Celia Johnson, the Kray twins, Trevor Howard, Alfred Lennon, David Lean, Clement Attlee and Cecil Beaton. Rolf Harris also appears as himself in a daytime dream sequence.
[edit] External links
- Goodnight Sweetheart at the British Film Institute
- Goodnight Sweetheart at the Internet Movie Database
- Goodnight Sweetheart at the British Sitcom Guide
- Goodnight Sweetheart at British TV Comedy Guide
- Goodnight Sweetheart British 1940s' swing dance event initially based on the program, by Goodnight Sweetheart enthusiasts
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