'Our forefathers practically went their entire lives without any interest in the opposite sex'

The category-defying Mrs. Councillor Nugent of Keeping Up Appearances, "The Charity Shop"

Season 1 of Keeping Up Appearances is the one I know least well. I prefer the new-Rose (Mary Millar) ones, which means Season 2 and onwards. Season 2 also introduces neighbor Elizabeth’s brother Emmett, and is generally when the show becomes recognizable as itself.

What this means is that when it was 4:30am and for some kid-related reason I had been awake, and no longer needed or wanted to be awake, but my body thought it’s morning, I found myself popping in headphones and clicking on “The Charity Shop.”

I should say that I love a charity-shop episode of a Britcom. I always want to visit the store. In this case, the store itself isn’t in many scenes, but is crucial to the plot.

Hyacinth and Elizabeth have a 9:30am shift at the charity shop. Why? It isn’t explained. The point is that for Hyacinth, this is an opportunity to mingle with Mrs. Councillor Nugent, who’s also on 9:30am duty. As per usual, Hyacinth is social climbing at someone who registers as posh and important to her and probably not to anyone else. An upper-crust or near enough eccentric type, who elicits obsequiousness in Hyacinth alone.

Mrs. Councillor Nugent’s a no-nonsense, stiff-upper-lip, anti-fun, anti-“frills” staid activist of sorts. And she’s against excessive interest in, or dolling oneself up for, the opposite sex. This is her cause. She states with confidence, to a skeptical neighbor Elizabeth, that “our forefathers…practically went their entire lives without any interest in the opposite sex.” To which Elizabeth, a kind of Jim-from-The Office character representing the normal-person audience member, responds, “Well, they may not have broadcast it.”

Is Mrs. Nugent… well, what is she? Asexual, one might want to say, but she’s so adamant that it’s the opposite sex that’s at stake. So she’s gay? Hyacinth chipping in with a reference to how she’s warned her son Sheridan about sexually aggressive “females” is certainly a point in favor of that interpretation. But she’s more sex-negative than anything else, in a way that could as easily point to repressed interest in men. Who can say!

The LGBTQIA+ umbrella has no spot for her sort, because she is a type from another age. She is what would have been called, in those days, mannish, but not what might be called, in other times or circumstances, butch, masc, whatever. Similar in type to Mrs. Richards, “Mrs. Alice Richards,” from Fawlty Towers. Maybe Mrs. Councillor Nugent has a very good friend she lives with, maybe she lives alone. It hardly matters because the essential with someone like this—and I have encountered people like this irl, this is (or, was) a sort of person—is what they’re not up to, which is fussing about men. Who thinks the women who do engage in that sort of thing are dolts.

All of this works so well for the plot, because Hyacinth’s sister Rose is a nymphomaniac. A romantic nymphomaniac, who falls in love with a different man every five minutes. She cannot live without Mr. So and So. (Always “Mr.,” to indicate that they’re not yet on a first-name basis but are sleeping together.)

No female character has ever needed men as much as Rose does. Rose makes Samantha Jones look like Mrs. Councillor Nugent.

In this episode, Rose has decided, as she is wont, that she is “finished with men.”

Whenever Rose announces this—old-Rose or new-Rose, doesn’t matter which actress—it’s like when someone very-online says they’re logging off. In this case, Rose is back on men soon enough, in the form of a borderline incestuous flirtation with an unappealing man who’s the 45-year-old son of the elderly woman quasi-extorting “Daddy,” Hyacinth and Rose’s elderly father (who, of course, sleeps through all of this) into marriage. Rose comes on so strong that this is what finally gets the old lady to leave Daddy alone.

But the relevant part of the episode for our purposes is that back at the point in the episode where she’s renounced men, Rose decides to KonMari all her sexy lingerie. And where to? To the charity shop of course! What if Mrs. Councillor Nugent sees this? What if she realizes Rose is Hyacinth’s sister? What then?