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Keeping Up Appearances
Sundays at 8pm
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Thank heaven we can set the record straight in writing: It's Hyacinth Bucket. Bucket Bucket Bucket. Take that, you selfish, controlling, interfering, social-climbing, matronly floral sack of candlelight suppers.
But that's part of the charm of Keeping Up Appearances, which originally aired on BBC between 1990 and 1995 -- everyone has a Hyacinth Bucket in their lives, and everyone wishes they could say things like that to their face rather than cower and tremble, as her neighbor Elizabeth does, or cow and mutter things under his breath, as does Richard, her husband, who takes the term 'hen-pecked' to new levels. Watching Keeping Up Appearances, one finds oneself cheering on Hyacinth's oblivious sister Daisy and her slovenly husband Onslow: They just don't care. Repeated situational jokes give the show part of its texture: Senile Daddy (Hyacinth's father) will presumably jump into his own grave wearing his WWII uniform, her sister Rose will forever gush over the charms of various married men, and Hyacinth will just never get the subtext to every phone call from her beloved son Sheridan: He's lazy and gay.
What else have cast members done? Find out with the Internet Movie Database:
- Patricia Routledge (the insufferable Hyacinth) starred in Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, a detective series that aired just after Keeping Up Appearances. She also did a monologue in the highly acclaimed Talking Heads series, and she's well-known on the British stage. Even though her character in Keeping Up Appearances seems massive, Routledge is in fact a mere 5'5".
- Clive Swift (who puts both the long and the suffering in "long-suffering") has been on Doctor Who repeatedly and played Sir Hector in the 1981 film "Exalibur" and Major Calendar in the 1984 film "A Passage to India." In addition to countless television roles, he's played a host of characters from Shakespeare, like Friar Lawrence in "Romeo and Juliet" and Brabantio in "Othello."
- Delightfully jowly Judy Cornwall (eternally oblivious and eternally sexually hopeful Daisy) has played in television and big screen adaptations of many classics from British literature: Nellie in "Wuthering Heights" (1970), Rosie Gann in "Cakes and Ale (1974), Bessy Tulliver in "The Mill on the Floss" (1978), Mrs. Reed in "Jane Eyre" (1983), Mrs. Musgrove in "Persuasion" (1995), and Peggoty in "David Copperfield" (2000).
- Geoffrey Hughes (furry, paunchy, and presumably odiferous Onslow) has had an extensive stage career and played Eddie Yeats in the long-running drama Coronation Street.
- Mary Millar (Rose) was known primarily as a stage actress and was in the original cast of "The Phantom of the Opera" as ballet mistress Madame Giry. Millar died of ovarian cancer in 1998.
- Josephine Tewson and David Griffin (addled neighbor Elizabeth Warden and her brother, Emmett, respectively) have both had long careers in British television. Tewson has had a repeating role in Last of the Summer Wine as Miss Davenport.
