George and Mildred
 Having just finished six series' of Man About The House
the ultra-prolific writers Johnnie Mortimer and Brian Cooke
created two concurrent spin-offs: Robin's Nest (six more
series') and George And Mildred (five).
This latter one was the more acclaimed of the two, featuring
the former landlord and landlady from Man About The House
now moved up-market into a new home at 46 Peacock Crescent,
Hampton Wick, suburbia.
For Mildred it is her long-awaited climb up the class structure
- she calls it a 'town house'. For George - lazy, mostly
unemployed (he does work for a short while as a traffic warden)
and aggressively determined to preserve his working-classness - it
is a terraced house.
The comedy centred on three main issues: the couple's hopeless
25-year marriage in general, Mildred's sexual frustrations in
particular (George has given up on sex completely and contrives
any excuse to avoid it) and the class struggle. This last problem
is exacerbated by the posh family next door, the Fourmiles - wife,
husband and their brat child - who are befriended by Mildred but
loathed by George.
Also appearing on occasion were Mildred's sister Ethel and her
husband, Humphrey, and George's partner-in-crime - and mastermind
of several "get-poor-quick schemes - Jerry (Roy Kinnear).
Without question George And Mildred was, for the most
part, a funny sitcom, but once again a spin-off feature film
(1980, same stars and director, written by Dick Sharples) was
largely an embarrassment.
Mortimer and Cooke also wrote a George And Mildred stage
production, which played at the Pier Theatre in Bournemouth in the
1977 summer season, with both Brian Murphy and Yootha Joyce
appearing.
An American TV version of the series was called The Ropers
(itself spun-off from Three's Company - the US adaptation
of Man About The House), in which Norman Fell and Audra
Lindley starred as Stanley and Helen, living at 46 Peacock Drive,
Chevia Hills. This was produced by ABC and ran for 26 episodes in
1979-80.
EPISODES
Moving On | The Bad Penny | And Women Must Weep | Baby Talk | Your
Money or Your Life | Where My Caravan Has Rested | The Little Dog
Laughed | Best Foot Forward | My Husband Next Door | Family
Planning | Jumble Pie | All Around the Clock | The Travelling Man
| The Unkindest Cut of All | The Right Way to Travel | The Dorothy
Letters | No Business Like Show Business | Opportunity Knocks |
And So to Bed | I Believe in Yesterday | The Four Letter Word |
The Delivery Man | Life with Father | Just the Job | Days of Beer
and Rosie | You Must Have Showers | All Work and No Pay | Nappy
Days | The Mating Game | On the Second Day of Christmas | Finders
Keepers? | In Sickness and in Health | The Last Straw | A Driving
Ambition | A Military Pickle | Fishy Business | I Gotta Horse |
The Twenty Six Year Itch
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