Remembered this as a tolerable alternative to the Britcoms we really loved on PBS ("Fawlty Towers," "The Good Neighbors"); one of my wife's Facebook friends gave the original novel by David Nobbs a strong recommendation, so we thought we'd give the TV series another look. Seems pretty dated now, the repetitive shtick (flash a clip of waddling hippo with derisive bassoon motif every time RP's mother-in-law is mentioned), the whiny middle-aged angst and the catchphrases especially so—though, thirty-odd years later, "bit of a cockup on the logistics front" still seems like a handy way of conveying that I forgot something at the grocery store. Nice to see Geoffrey Palmer, of "As Time Goes By," in his younger days (he's the "bit of a cockup" guy). Nice too, I suppose, that we can be more selective nowadays than we could in the pre- DVD (even pre-VCR), pre-cable, pre-Internet era.
