Goodnight Sweetheart

[03laceys]

All information sourced from Wikipedia and thereafter. Direct link to wiki page.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodnight_Sweetheart

SONG:

song by Ray Noble, see Goodnight, Sweetheart (1931 song).

INTRO:

"Goodnight Sweetheart is a sitcom that ran for six series on BBC1 from 1993 to 1999. It stars Nicholas Lyndhurst as Gary Sparrow, an accidental time traveller who leads a double life after discovering a time portal allowing him to travel between the London of the 1990s and the same area during the Second World War."

PLOT SUMMARY:

Gary Sparrow is a thirty-something TV repairman living an ordinary life in 1990s Cricklewood. While his typically postmodern wife Yvonne hopes to start a family while simultaneously attempting to climb the "corporate ladder", Gary seems lost in a private dream-world and often waxes lyrical about the way people lived in bygone eras. One day, while out on a repair job in the East End, Gary stumbles down an alley called Duckett's Passage and accidentally discovers a time portal that leads to London in the Second World War.

While there, he comes across the Royal Oak pub, where he meets Phoebe Bamford, a pretty East-End barmaid; her staunchly patriotic father, Eric; and a jolly but rather daft policeman (or "bobby") named Reg Deadman. At first, Gary assumes he is simply dreaming; however, after waking up in the pub's cellar following an air raid, he realises that he has in fact travelled back in time.

Gary begins using the portal to flit between past and present with relative ease. He also discovers that the past and present exist concurrently, which means he can plan his actions down to the last minute. Soon, he starts a romantic, cross-time affair with Phoebe and is thus obliged to invent cover stories to explain his constant absences from both Phoebe in the 1940s and his wife Yvonne in the 1990s. Neither woman has any idea that Gary is a time-traveller or an adulterer. Phoebe's father, Eric, is suspicious of Gary's motives and, as Phoebe is already married to a serving British soldier by the name of Donald Bamford, Gary looks to him like a slacker by comparison.

Gary's courtship of Phoebe is aided by the fact that he is able to supply her with items considered luxuries by WWII ration standards, such as chocolates and nylon stockings. He is also aided by his modern-day best friend and only confidant regarding his time-travelling, Ron Wheatcroft. As Ron is a printer by trade, he is able to replicate items essential to Gary's survival in the past, such as ID papers and period money ("white fivers").

Gary exploits his obvious advantage as a man from the future by claiming to be a "secret agent" and making accurate "predictions" about the war. He also uses the pub's piano to play popular tunes that post-date his 1940s audience and then claims he wrote them; most notoriously, Beatles songs. At first, Phoebe is easily impressed by Gary's glamorous antics, but after a while, his constant absences and increasingly bizarre-sounding cover stories begin to frustrate her, as they do Yvonne in the present day. Ron too finds that his marriage to wife Stella has begun to disintegrate in concurrence with him aiding Gary's time-travelling exploits.

As the series progresses, the characters are further developed. Phoebe's father dies in a bombing and Phoebe becomes self-consciously tougher and more astute. Donald continues to serve his country but is killed in the North African Campaign. Soon after, Gary and Phoebe marry and have a son they name Michael. Technically, this makes Gary a bigamist, but Gary rationalises to Ron that he is not, even though he is married to two different women: since Yvonne had not yet been born during World War II (when Gary is married to Phoebe), and since Phoebe appears to have died at some point before the present (when Gary is married to Yvonne), Gary considers himself faithful to both wives. He argues that 'my wives exist in different temporal aspects of a four-dimensional space-time continuum' although Ron considers this to be a 'typical bigamist’s excuse'. Yvonne also becomes pregnant, but suffers a miscarriage. Gary opens a shop in the present day named "Blitz and Pieces", where he sells as "rare memorabilia" goods he has casually acquired in the 1940s. Ron and his wife Stella separate and divorce. Gary and Phoebe move to a luxury flat in Mayfair, where they befriend Noël Coward. Yvonne becomes a millionairess with a successful organic beauty products company, and a personal friend of Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie. The sci-fi premise is also expanded to include more than basic time-travel; in one notable episode, "Mine's a Double", Gary is struck by lightning while walking through the time-portal and is split into three "selves": an homage to the Star Trek episode, "The Enemy Within". Toward the later series, the comedic premise is imbued with increasingly dramatic subtext, and ultimately, Gary must face the question of which wife he loves the most. In the final episode, set on VE Day, Gary finds that the time portal has closed after he unexpectedly has to save Clement Attlee from assassination, trapping him in the past permanently, and leaving Ron to explain the truth to Yvonne. He tells him to do this by writing (in 1945) on the wall where he knows that Ron (in the present) is redecorating. Yvonne sees Gary materialise and then disappear as he walks in the shop yard, and at last is privy to the time-travelling secret, but as far as is known, Phoebe never learns of Gary's secret; although Gary did tell Phoebe whilst she was in hospital in 1942 that he came from 1996 where he had a wife, Phoebe was asleep and never heard the confession. The writers in an extra on the DVD say they thought it could have gone to another series, and were prepared to write, but accept that it ended sensibly when it did, committed as they were to an end coinciding with the end of the War. Re-runs are, as of 2010, seen on ITV3.

Episodes:

A total of 58 episodes were made including a Christmas special. Marks and Gran—the creators—wrote the first series; episodes thereafter 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 Al Bowlly on the series signature tune. Bowlly's death, during World War II, is referred to by Gary and Phoebe during an episode. 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.

 

[align=center]Your Input:

Did you ever watch an episode?

If you did, what was your opinion?

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[03laceys]

Nobody remember this programme?!?

[Paul Evans]

I'm sorry i wasn't on when you posted this, love this show... i have 'em all on DVD watch 'em like once every 6 months or so ... so easy to watch them over and over :D

[Uridium]

Gold showed the whole series a few months ago recorded the lot :)

[janiepeter]

I haven't listened it yet .

[03laceys]

Janiepeter you need to watch it! Seriously it is an excellent programme.

[Uridium]

Excellent programme Nick lyndhurst does this justice ;)

[gamble]

Never heard of it ill check it out