Acorn Antiques

Victoria Wood was a fab stand-up comedian, a natural writer and actor. However no matter how good 'Eric and Ernie' or 'Housewife 49' were the thing that she was best remembered for was 'Acorn Antiques'.

It's taken on a life of its own really, and has captured the love of the British public, who remember when soaps such as Crossroads were full of such ludicrous plots and shoddy camera work.

I like it best in small doses. The DVD they released of only 'Acorn Antiques' seemed a bit too much of a good thing, and the novelty wore off, but packaged in with the rest of Victoria Wood's 'As seen on TV' programme like it was originally I found myself enjoying it more.

It's well worth a watch.

I always looked forward to an episode of "Acorn Antiques" in Victoria Wood's TV show. As a parody of the locally produced soap operas of the day it worked really well. Set in an antique store in the West Midlands, with "episodes" that were only a couple of minutes long, anything that could happen did happen: car crashes, sudden appearance of long-lost relatives, exposure of long-held secrets; and each episode ended with a cliff-hanger.

The plot lines were unique and not copycats of other established soap opera scripts of that era and the humour very wry. It's worth noting that Duncan Preston (Mr. Clifford) was a cast member of the original 'Crossroads' soap in the 60s. My favourite character was Mrs. Overall who made a pot of tea every 2 minutes and seemed to have a motto for every occasion - "That's God's way of telling you.....".

Apart from the wobbly sets the funniest parts were the "out-takes" when the characters thought the film was no longer rolling and reverted to normal speech ["Was that alright, darling?"]. The only minor flaw was that some of the characters spoke so fast or with such a thick accent that it took a few seconds to work out what they just said. I'm hoping this will be released on DVD (R1) with sub-titles and biographies of the main stars.

Victoria Wood seems to have remained a local UK celebrity but both Julie Walters and Celia Imrie have gone on to international fame thanks to productions that have been popular in North America - i.e. Julie in the Harry Potter movies (as Ron's mum) and Celia in "Nanny McPhee" and the 2nd Bridget Jones movie.

Acorn Antiques is without doubt the best soap opera ever produced. Okay, so the sets were wonky, the lines were terrible and the actors couldn't act their way out of a paper bag - but this was era defining television...

All jokes aside, Victoria Wood and her 'family' made this spoof perfect and each episode is a gem. You have to be extremely talented to do spoofs this well.