TV review by Steve Bennett

There’s a great line in the revived Goodnight Sweetheart, when Nicholas Lyndhurst’s time-travelling bigamist Gary Sparrow is described as ‘a two-timing bastard - literally’. 

It’s been 17 years since the show was last on the air, trapping Sparrow in 1945, when his portal to and from the modern world closed for good. Now it’s 1962, and the Cuban missile crisis has just been resolved, while Sparrow has become an old man in an old man’s pub, forever teased about his age by his teenage son. 

He’s restless with his lot, hardly feeling the heat of the impending Swinging Sixties and missing whatever advances the 21st Century holds. ‘We’ve probably landed on Mars, cured cancer and achieved European unity,’ he muses to the knowing laugh of the studio audience. But also the life he could have had with his 21st Century wife Yvonne

But by meeting himself as a newborn, he somehow manages to leap back to 2016. How? ’It doesn’t matter… it doesn’t make sense anyway,’ we’re told indirectly in another knowing line. 

For all the infinite scope a time-travelling premise throws up, the ambition of Sparrow is pretty limited (as comedian Richard Herring has often spoken about), travelling back to wartime Britain to hook up with the barmaid at the local.

Although the concept is high, original scriptwriters Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran use the fascinating premise to keep things domestic and mull over changing times, such as how attitudes to drink-driving or fathers being at the birth have shifted. 

It some ways it seems like a sitcom written by people who are a bit baffled by  modern life, for people who are a bit baffled by modern life. Selfies, hipsters – even ripped jeans or gay couples  – are portrayed as weird, not just as seen through Gary’s eyes, 50 years behind the curve, but in the whole tone of the sitcom. And having  Yvonne (Emma Amos) as a TV Dragon, seems to root the character to one cultural reference point a bit too securely.

Goodnight Sweetheart is often a better concept than its jokes, and is strong on its dramatic elements. This Landmark Sitcom one-off seems to set up some new storylines such a Gary finding out he’s the father of a 2016 teenager, while in the 1950s there’s the threat that his lies are about to be exposed. He’d previously passed future Beatles hits off as his own, and now they are making waves on the pirate radio station. So now he winds up ripping off Adele instead.

Are these plots opening up a gateway to more episodes, like Gary’s Ducketts Passage portal has reopened? Only time (pun intended) will tell…

Review date: 2 Sep 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett