Catharina_Sweden
I loved this series! Although every episode was built on the same formula - Hyacinth wanted to snob in some way, but was instead humiliated - it never became boring. I think the reasons are several: 1) very witty dialogue, I laughed all the time! 2) characters that you can relate to, because we have all met them: the snobbish and dominant Hyacinth, her husband the long-suffering Richard, the lazy and unkempt White Trash-man Onslow, the over-sexed and mutton-dressed-as-lamb Rose, the nervous and submissive Elizabeth etc.. 3) very good actors that play their parts perfectly (the only one who was not right was the actress playing the Vicar's wife, she was somewhat wooden and unlikeable) and 4) the recognition factor. There are so many situations you can recognize from real life, for instance the women running after the handsome young vicar although they know he is married (this is happening in churches all over the world). Or the way Hyacinth is always boasting about her son, although everybody else understands that he is far from perfect...But the most important thing is that this series has this strange, alluring quality of sucking the viewer into the world on the screen. I feel that I want to be there with them - yes despite of Hyacinth! The troubles they have are very small really, nothing very bad happens, it is an idyllic and almost old-English world, like an oasis in all the terrible things that happen in the world today. I want to have this world to flee to, when reality overcomes me! When I have forgotten the episodes a little, I am going to watch it all from the beginning again!
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
It's a comedy. So you must laugh and you will laugh and with Mrs. Hyacinth Bucket, pronounced bouquet, you shall laugh. That's a request, a demand, an order in one word. So they took very clear characters both socially and mentally, and they knit them together into a real bouquet of flowers, Hyacinth, Violet, Daisy and Rose. The first one is married to Richard, a top local government official who is submissive and flexible and has transformed their home's bathroom into his reading room. She is the tyrant who does not give a suggestion that is not an order, who does not order you around but command the rising of the sun and the shining of the moon.Violet could have been the same, and she too married at the top of the middle class, with a Mercedes, a swimming pool and room for a pony or two, but her husband, Bruce, is no Richard. So it is a constant chase after divorce in the very sickening way of never getting it to be running after it all the time and forever. Daisy is a social marginal woman who married sentimentally a man, Onslow, who is a social marginal case living on society, not because he is handicapped or uneducated or even uneducatable, but because he is just one of these slobs who just want to live their life slouching in front of a TV only wasting some energy to go bet on horses, and nowadays they don't even need to go out because they can bet on-line since the Internet is a basic need for everyone, isn't it? The last one, Rose, is a pathetic woman who only lives in order to fall in love, that is to say to yield to her desires and appeals just in order to break every love affair, if possible with married men, to see it dying in order to chase after another prey, to hunt another game, to fall in love to her own desires and appeals one more time in order then to see it dying. There is no possible empathy for such a woman since her own desire is to constantly run around and around this cycle in the shape of a vicious circle with super short skirts and open neck shirts, or other light chest and breast embracing skimpy pieces of clothing.You have to add the son of these poor mismatched and yet perfect couple Richard and Hyacinth, a certain, oh by the way what is his name since we did not see him once, isn't it Sheridan, who is in college forever and has just dropped mathematics for a sewing needlepoint class and who does not run after girls because he is too young, so says his mother. And that mother does not seem to wonder why he only has boy friends, I mean friends who are boys or men, which is, according to his mother, good, you know why, because it keeps him safe away from girls for whom he is definitely too young, will be too young till he is too old for anything at all. But then it is a British, what's more BBC, comedy. So there must be two neighbors, a woman whose husband is living thousands of miles away and her brother who just got divorced. And of course there must be a vicar, Anglican if possible, and his wife and you have it all. We will have no plumber, but a postman and a milkman, a few cops and the father of this bouquet of flowers who is losing his head completely and believes he is still fighting against the Germans. Such comedies are so perfect that you cannot hesitate to laugh and laugh, again, encore and again still, episode after episode. But in the end you will wonder if there is any abstract value, any higher dimension. You may think your life partner is like one of these characters, or you might think you are like one of these characters, and then you might wonder if that is cathartic or not, if that may liberate you or not. Don't wonder. You will waste your time. It is nothing but a comedy.A cruel comedy though since episode after episode Mrs. Bucket, pronounced bouquet, is falling down into ever deeper failures, ever nastier tricks devised by life. You can be sure she could not cross the street but be run over by a bus, or go to the seaside but get drowned in a pool of dirty water on the embankment, the promenade des Anglais along the gravelly beach in Nice. She luckily does not go to foreign countries, at least practically never beyond Jersey and the Queen Elizabeth 2, otherwise she might really end up badly, like eaten up by the continental cannibals after slow cooking in a cast iron pot simmering on an open camp fire, soaking in a mixture of mayonnaise and mustard, and probably on Les Champs Elysées in Paris under the Arch of Triumph or on Unter den Linden in Berlin under the Brandenburg Gate.But well the series does not stop really, only symbolically since at the end of the last Christmas Special she will meet with her demise and Richard will get the order that if she dies he has to make sure Onslow puts a tie on for her funeral. Good bye lady and do not lie in the flower beds for too long. It is more comfortable under the flowers.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
bigverybadtom
This is a series about a social-climbing woman named Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced "bouquet") and her long-suffering husband and neighbors. The show's humor is based on how Hyacinth goes into temper tantrums, or is oblivious to other people's feelings, or puffs herself up about important she is, or soon will be.Patricia Loughridge is a talented actress, but her role is awful. She is artificial and extremely annoying, and I could imagine anyone around her wanting to avoid her like the plague. One could compare her with Lucille Ball of the "I Love Lucy" show, but Ball wasn't quite so irritating, and her family and neighbors had quirks of their own. Here everyone's character is simply a reaction to how Hyacinth is and what she does.Some people may find "annoying protagonist" sitcoms funny; this wasn't the case for me.
Ibuk
I used to love this 90's sitcom as a child and I still enjoy watching the reruns. In my opinion the 90's were the best decade for classic British comedies. The plots were repetitive, each episode would see Hyancinth planning to improve her social standing only to be let down by her family. The jokes were pretty repetitive, in each episode someone would call her Mrs Bucket and she would correct them,Elizabeth would drop her coffee etc. It was the actors and the energy they put into the characters that made it so endearing. I cannot imagine anyone else playing the role of Hyacinth more better than Patricia Routledge,the same can be said for the rest of the cast. My favourite characters have to be Hyacinth(of course!),her long suffering husband Richard and her layabout brother in law Onslow. The show ran from 1990 til 1996, if it gone on for longer then it would ruined the show completely. The producers did a wise thing to pull the plug on it before it went stale. Keeping up appearances reminds of a happy childhood and makes me feel nostalgic.
