If you’re up in the middle of the night because of what you know but don’t want to admit to yourself is a fever, but the Tylenol is downstairs, or it’s night three of the vice-grip headaches and it turns predictably to nausea and while this time the Tylenol is upstairs it’s soda you need, there’s only one place to go. And that place is the London of Lionel and Jean, of Judy and Sandy, not to mention Alistair, with guest appearances by Rocky and Madge (but not good Madge from “Benidorm”).
It’s a show that plays at a steady pace, with no surprises, where nothing happens, but not in a minimalist way where you’re expected to think. It’s like if “Frasier” were far less clever. It’s bland, unrealistic but realist, and there are something like 6,000 seasons of it so you can always pick an ep you haven’t seen a million times, which is weirdly helpful for the show’s only possible purpose, namely falling asleep.
“Keeping Up Appearances” is too silly for a fever. All that screeching. “Waiting For God,” too intelligent. “Are You Being Served?,” too lively. But if your head is throbbing to the point where you want to google whether it’s something weirder than the flu but it hurts too much to do that (negative covid test and whatever it is is subsiding, it’s flu, I want a refund on my free OHIP flu shot), your only option is “As Time Goes By.”
It got to the point where I had too much of a headache to god forbid select episodes and instead had to just throw my hands in the air (metaphorically) and start over at the beginning. Is this a recap? Of one episode? Of the first few seasons? Who knows?
The show begins with late-middle-aged Lionel, recently (?) returned to London from Kenya, where he ran (?) a coffee plantation. He turned this experience into a memoir, called My Life in Kenya, that is (per the universe of the show, not even bringing my 2022 lens to the topic) a dull, dull book. For complicated reasons explained in parts of the show I promise I have watched but slept through in the rewatch, 30ish Alistair feels indebted to Alistair’s father or something and decides to publish it. Alistair lives an exciting offscreen life but is like everyone almost exclusively seen in the set that is Jean’s house.
Anyway, Lionel is staying in a London hotel to write his novel, rather than in the London apartment he lives in by himself, because he requires secretarial assistance for the edits. He doesn’t think a secretarial firm would send a “girl” to a chap’s flat. I’m sure it makes sense in his head, or in the head of whoever wrote it. As will come up in later episodes, seasons, Lionel effectively needs these “secretaries” to write his books for him, although no one ever seems to question this.
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