This is a detective sitcom. It has all the charm of small criminal cases that deal with no murders or crimes of that type, but only with small crimes in local neighborhoods in Lancashire and from time to time a little bit in Yorkshire. The main interest is the family background of the characters. Hetty and Robert Wainthropp are two older citizens who have reached retirement age but would find it difficult to go on living in good conditions on their two pensions. So they look for extra-activities. They start a private detective business and lead us into some squalid, sordid or simply sorry situations of hatred and jealousy, envy and rivalry, small demeanors and traffic. Though they do not do drugs. Later on Robert Wainthropp will manage to get a regular column in the tabloid.But the producers wanted to change the situation from what it was in the previous fabulously popular series with the same main actress, "Keeping Up Appearances." In both cases, the son of the married couple (forty years of marriage) was away from the family home and a younger man and eventually a young couple were needed to open them up to the younger generations and their problems. So Hetty Wainthropp selects a hardly of age young man who is more or less unemployed and trying to get away from his possessive mother who seems to be an alcoholic or something of the sort. Hetty and her husband Robert will make him an associate, a partner in the business soon after. And then this young man who is as virginal as a lily will soon get in touch with a female mechanic who will sell him a second-hand car when he finally gets his license. And with some ups and downs, they will slowly move into a relationship, one apartment, and a future common life.The criminal cases are there to show how disrupted the English society is up north. We are twenty years ago and you will then understand why they voted for Brexit. Closed upon their communities that are very small, with a lot of underground black market economy that is half criminal and half illegal. It is well known they could not accept European regulations that became little by little so hefty that people more or less thought they could not take a shower without paying an extra-tax and having to use no more than a gallon of water. Not to speak of all sorts of marginals, gypsies or not, who are roaming around. And the police are just helpless most of the time, to the point of employing now and then Hetty Wainthropp to penetrate and infiltrate some dubious circles to get some information from the inside. And they stopped the series marvelously after four years when the agency is in full bloom, Jeffrey, the younger partner, and his girlfriend are moving slowly towards some kind of an official relationship and after Robert has reestablished normal relations with his own brother. The family circle is slightly larger, though it looks a lot like a recomposed family. Parents in their older age are led to choosing the younger people who will be their side-kick children, and these younger people find in an older couple some sidekick or substitute parents of a new sort: mental parents and not blood relatives.Frankly, who gives the slightest straw about blood!Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

Not being a fan of "Keeping Up Appearances", I purposely picked the video series out of the library because I thought the stars of that series might be better off in this one, which was produced after the other show. Unfortunately, while it wasn't silly like the other show, it wasn't very good either.The premise does evoke the stars' former show. They are an older married couple, with one problem: the wife is not legally eligible for a government pension because she had not been employed long enough, so she takes a job at a post office to fill in her missing working time. In doing so, she spots a teenage boy swiping a charity box and a suspicious couple cashing two welfare checks. She gets the box back and finds out how the couple were cashing a fraudulently-obtained check. She gets the idea into her head of being a private detective, over her husband's objections.The show doesn't try for comedy, but it is slow-moving and dull, and the wife bullies her husband as she did in their former show. I was hoping for better. I didn't get it here.

I first saw this program when it appeared on the PBS "Mystery" series. I keep asking for more. Patricia Routledge surely shows that she's quite adept at performing in a mystery program as well as in comedies. I wonder if she (Hetty Wainthropp) ever investigated amurder in any of these programs. I'm sure she'd do quite well. I know Patricia Routledge did an audio recording of some of these programs, but don't know where I can purchase them in the USA. If anyone can tell me, please contact [email protected]. Let's hope PBS gets on the stick and rebroadcasts some of these programs, especially in Kansas City Public Television!

this show is hilarious. It is a fun show to watch would bloody recommend it to everyone. Dominic plays geoffrie the cutest character ever. In this show you will get to see such things as dominics first kiss and well the over controversial show scene. Patricia is a great actress especially as hetty. they both have impeccable talent and sophistication.