Bread

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.

I mildly remember this as a pre-teen in the early 90's; I guess I'd sit though it habitually (as you did !) and was too young to understand the socio-cultural setting and subsequent humour to reflect Scousers in Thatcher's Britain. I bought this from CEX a couple of days ago; the 1st time I've seen it in about 30 years ! Oh the nostalgia !

The humour is moderately funny - if a tad mediocre. Sure, the squalor and hardships of a struggling large working-class Catholic family all living in a small terraced house on a Liverpool hill street is all summarized through good old English comedy; sure, this show probably helped the '1 in 10' in Thatcher's Britain to laugh off everyday hardships and deprivation !

The most memorable thing about this show has to be that catchy, vibrant, totally kitsch and completely classic theme tune, supposedly sung by the main cast. (it's the 1 thing I do remember of this show back in the day !)

All in all, I'll give it a fair 7/10 for being (moderately) funny, a good satirical send-up of the decade and of course the brilliant theme tune !

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.

It's so easy to survive poverty and economic depression. All you need is the wit and the nerve to outsmart Government bureaucracy. Then you can have a decent home with plenty of food on the table, you can even run a classic Jaguar!

At a time when Margaret Thatcher and her thugs were destroying UK manufacturing industry and throwing whole communities on the scrap heap of unemployment, 'Bread' came along to show working class people were lovable scallywags who could rake in pots of money from the Department of Social Security by running rings around the rules.

I can only assume no-one associated with this condescending garbage has ever been faced with actually trying to prove they are "genuinely seeking work" (which required a file of rejection letters as thick as a telephone directory) or making their remaining £5 (or $8) last until they are allowed more social security.

The alternative was to get a job as a 'security guard' being paid £1.95 (or $3.40) an hour. Oh, and you had to provide your own dog.

If you want to know what working class life was like in Liverpool in the 80's, watch 'Boys from the Blackstuff', not this rubbish.

A sitcom from my childhood that my mother absolutely loved, as did most of my schoolfriends, but as a twelve-year-old fan of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, I couldn't for the life of me understand what all the fuss was about. The show revolved around a supposedly penniless Liverpudlian family, all of whom had their own annoying and oft-repeated catchphrases, and to this day I can't believe how much the audience used to roar with laughter at "She is a tart!" and "All the colours of the rainbow, son". Written by Carla Lane, famous for being paid large sums of money for making nobody laugh (see also BUTTERFLIES and THE LIVER BIRDS), and featuring audience-grabbing but embarrassing cameos from the likes of Paul and Linda McCartney whilst shamelessly playing on every chirpy Scouser stereotype in the book - hey, we're all natural comedians, poets and lovable rogues, don't you know! - this series was a nightmare from start to finish and dragged on far too long. Carla Lane somewhat unrealistically blamed the show's declining popularity on "disloyal ratbag fans" rather than her own tissue-thin scripts and the atrocious, stilted performances from all concerned.