Man About the House

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.

This programme started to be hard to see in this particular TV market once the American imitation "Three's Company" (1977) started up. "Three's Company" was everything "Man About the House" was not. The British original was funny, sexy, maybe a bit salacious. And it had two cute girls, nice English ones. The grossly inferior "Three's Company" was unfunny, prurient rather than sexy, and basically brain-dead. And no cute English birds, obviously.

"Man About the House" had a proper star, Richard O'Sullivan, who'd just finished his stint as Bingham in "Doctor in the House", a *completely* different role, mind you. Rather than someone like O'Sullivan, "Three's Company" had John Ritter. Years later, it turned out that Ritter could act but that wasn't really apparent in the '70's when he gave the leading one-note performance.

Hack US magazine writers still trot out that tired old cliché about the British being prudish about sex when compared to sophisticated Americans. I've seen a couple of references of that kind in the past month. Well, that might very well have been true in the 1940's, but that was certainly not the case by the '60's, and it's not true today either. If one compares these two series from the 1970's, it's the British one that's mature, while the American copycat seems childish and leering.

I suspect anyone who had ever seen "Man About the House" was left grinding his teeth by "Three's Company" and its long and entirely undeserved run. Surely there's an all-Britcom channel somewhere where this coy ménage à trois can find a happy home again.

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.

One of THE comedies of the 1970's. Also has the best signature tune of any comedy show. The story is about three people sharing a flat living above their landlords George and Mildred. The comedy rests on the mix of the people sharing. A man and two women. Richard O' Sullivan is besotted with Paula Wilcox. Its played in a gentle and not a leering way which is why this show was such a success.

The scripts and the stars were always giving the best performances and Richard's frustrated love life was shown with a relaxed charm. The end titles contained visual jokes which went unnoticed in the early 1970's but concerned the flat sharers living arrangements.

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.