Bread

In it's heydey Bread was a decent comedy about the Boswell family-a Catholic family living in Liverpool. Nellie Boswell held the largely unemployed family together during the series as they got up to all sorts.

Living down the road from the Boswells was Granddad who was an irascible old man who kept bothering them every five minutes. He added to the humour.

The only problem was that Bread ran longer than it should have. A lot of comedy shows outstay their welcome and Bread was one of them. It ran until the early 1990's but by that time most people-including myself-were fed up with it. Comedy shows should only have a limited run and Bread chose to go on for longer than it should have.

But in all fairness, the early episodes were very funny and do deserve a look.

In its time, "Bread" was a bit of a cult show. Now it's being shown again on UK Gold (a UK 'classics' channel) I wonder what the source of its popularity was. The mother is domineering and has a nasty tongue in her head, her family are obsessed with 'the family' to the exclusion of normal social interaction with anyone else, the humour (such as it is) is laboured at best, and the dialogue is stilted and poorly-delivered.

This certainly hsn't stood the test of time.

I have fond memories of this show. It ran in Finland when I was 11-12 (in 1990-1992), and I fell in love with Joey Boswell. I would never miss an episode. I thought it was so much fun, especially every time the family drove to solve some problem: first Joey's Jaguar, then Jack's van, then Adrian's motorbike and Billy's old broken Beetle...There was always one empty chair at the end of the table, and I imagined myself sitting there as the youngest daughter of the family. I remember the catchphrases - "I'm not ready for all this!", "She's a tart!" (which my grandmother disapproved of), "Greetings!"... Adrian's poem "Granny's Bucket" and another one that went something like "If you were dead, I'd go to all the places we were together and cry.. But you're alive. And I hate you." I learned many English words from this show, including "greetings", "tart", and "retaliate".

I remember being heartbroken when Joey's actor was changed. My idol was the original Joey, Peter Howitt. I also hated the new Aveline and felt the show was never the same after the change of these actors. I don't know which season that was, but apparently I'm not the only one who thinks the show went on too long. I can't believe Carla Lane blames the fans for abandoning the show - I would assume that repetitive scripts and characters that never evolve wouldn't keep the fans' interest on for very long. I used to think the unchanging nature of the show and the stay-at-home grown up kids were safe and positive, but as a grown up viewer I might get tired of them.

I haven't watched Bread in 14 years, and I'm not sure if I'd like to see it again and spoil the memory. For one thing, at age 11, I missed out on all the irony and subtext. A lot of the things I admired, like Joey's dedication to his family, might seem negative now. My mother, a social worker, thought the characters were offensive for their blatant abuse of the social security system. She thought that their real life counterparts would be very unhappy and pitiful, not someone to laugh at. I was mad at her at the time, but I can see her point now - the show made fun of unemployed people and presented them as lazy abusers of the system. The humor that made an 11-year-old laugh might seem tedious and repetitive to an adult. I don't think "she is a tart" would amuse me now.

For me, this show is best left unspoiled. It was very important to me once, and I'll always have those memories. A part of me will always live on Kelsall Street.

"Bread" follows the lives of a close-knit family in 1980s Liverpool. We see their trials and tribulations, their daily battle with an outside world of crime, poverty, unemployment and immorality. Using their wits, the Boswells beat this world at its own game, exploiting every loophole in the welfare system to cheat the bureaucrats of the DHSS.

Nellie Boswell and her five grownup children (Joey, Jack, Adrian, Aveline and Billy) are fiercely loyal to one another. When one has a problem everyone else comes to the rescue, traveling in a convoy of cars, ranging from Joey's black Jaguar to Billy's clapped out old mini. You always see them walk closely together at the same pace, staring straight ahead. The charming, leather-clad Joey was always the first to speak, usually beginning with the word: "Greetings!" Not every episode had a happy ending, however.

When I first saw this programme I was still in primary school. It used to be shown on the ABC every Monday night at 8.00 PM. I liked it when it first started. 1986-1988 was the heyday of the show. But after a while it didn't seem so fresh. The show dragged on into the early nineties, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The mobile phones were still huge, though. They changed the actors who played Joey and Aveline, although I found the original Aveline's accent a bit annoying. The show seemed to have lost its sparkle.

When the last episode finished in 1991 we saw the camera draw away from the Boswell house in Kelsall Street (which looked identical to the surrounding streets), getting an aerial view of Liverpool at large, finishing with a shot of that old cathedral. And there it finally closed.

Comedy set in a Liverpool household, about a family that scrimp and scrape to earn a living. The moral of the story is they sit around the dinner table arguing. Ron Forfar who plays the Dad, Freddie Boswell is a down on his luck nagged man after his affair with 'the tart' as his wife calls her. Not a sitcom that lives long in the memory.