Man About the House

I found the first four episodes of MAN ABOUT THE HOUSE, and I'm scouring eBay and Amazon for more! This show is pretty damn funny. I never liked the American version, and now I know why. The acting in this is far superior! Richard O'Sullivan is funny without resorting to inane slapstick -- ok, there's a bit of it, but the British do it so much better (as evidenced by Benny Hill). Sally Thomsett is cute without being dumb, and shows her wit time and time again. And Paula Wilcox combines sexy, smart, and sassy like no one I've ever seen. You won't find a more talented trio.

Yootha Joyce and Brian Murphy are the -- dare I say -- threesome's perfect foils. Not the lecherous landlords of the American version, but naughty and enjoyable.

Would love to see this on TV on this side of the pond. As it is, I'll have to buy PAL and have it converted to NTSC. A small price to pay for superior, saucy, sexy fun!

I absolutely LOVED this show when it aired here, even though I was a little kid by then. It had the kind of charm and mood that keeps you laughing until it hurts, the cast was excellent and so was the timing. If compared to what the sitcom genre has degenerated to (And I don't think it's necessary to name any specific title, most of the sitcoms are awful except Seinfeld) it's a crying shame that shows like Mad About The House are no longer made. Whatever happened to witty writing and great cast?

What you've got now in any sitcom is a cast full of supposedly cute girls who look like they just got out of a concentration camp, plus they can't act. And male cast is not much better, either. It seems any sitcom actor/actress must come out of a models' agency, as if the 'beauty' actually mattered more than the acting skills.

Somebody may accuse me of nostalgia, and I'm willing to be called that if it means yearning for good and funny shows like Mad About The House. The current sitcoms really stink. And I am looking forward to be able to get this fantastic show on DVD someday. By the way, The Roper was awesome as well.

10/10.

I absolutely love old British TV series, and especially in the sit-com department they beat all other countries. I remember this particular series quite well even though I haven't seen it in a long time, luckily it's now available on VHS/DVD so I'll be buying it soon. Nothing beats that atmospheric shot-on-videotape look most British TV shows had in the '70s, when filmed indoors. Richard Sullivan is great as the guy the two girls find in their bathroom, and the two actresses are also both excellent. Terrific stuff. The series had two spin-offs; "George & Mildred" (about the landlord and his wife) and "Robin's Nest" (Sullivan's character minus the girls). Those who think the American version "Three's Company" is better only need to look at the amount of episodes it had, and suddenly it's not so funny anymore. I think the fact that "Three's Company" was filled with more characters and ran for a whopping 172 episodes compared to the original's small cast and 39 episodes says it all. Overdoing it kills any show, and the Brits always knew quantity is not the same as quality.

While the British produced some hilarious and slick sitcoms in the 1990s - Ab Fab, Men Behaving Badly, One Foot in the Grave, etc. - the 70s were the real golden age.

In the 1970s there were whole new territories to explore, including the sexual revolution, feminism, and the slowly evolving awareness of a need for "sensitivity" that would, twenty years later, become Political Correctness. Attempts to grapple with the confusion of this thoroughly modern world were the subtle and not-so-subtle themes in everything from the skits of Monty Python's Flying Circus to sitcoms like Man About the House. (By the late 70s this "grappling" resulted in more meditative and bitter-sweet sitcoms such as the masterpiece Butterflies.)

Man About the House is a perfect example of the good Britcoms of the time - slightly genteel, cheeky, fresh, ingenuous, sometimes outrageous, with some well made observations on contemporary life. Compare it to a cynical 90s show such as Ab Fab, and it is hard to believe the two were created in the same country.

Man About the House is one of the great Britcoms of the 70s, right up there with Good Neighbors (The Good Life), and About the House's spin off George and Mildred. Its quality is attested to by the fact that - as with Good Neighbors - its creators, writers, and many of its cast have had continued success in British television.

Now the series is 30 years old but it is still funny. I saw it when I was a child and I can still recall the laughters at home. It was the first British tv series thet topped the tv rankings in Spain. And even now, people remember it. Two different situations: upstairs the 3 flat mates, and downstairs the landlord and his wife. The scripts were terrific: both situations fixed perfectly. And what about the actors? all of them were absolutely brilliant, specially my dear Mrs Roper. Oh, yes. Americans made a "remake" that was OK when they copied word by word the original episodes. When they had to create new scripts it became awful and boring. By the way, I always recommend to see any show in its original version, but I must confess that Spanish dubbed version is as good as the original one.