Bread

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 love this show! I used to watch this when my family was stationed in England and it became a favorite for my whole family. The mother was one of the best; loud, dominant, and acid tongued. She keeps her five children at home with her, as her husband continues coming back and forth between his family and his Irish mistress. Some of the best scenes are between the mother (Nelly Boswell) and the mistress (Lillian, but known as Li Lo Lil or Tart). Joey was a hottie with his bleach blond hair and black leather clothing. Aveline was the cute, but bumbling model. Jack was the shy, overweight antiques dealer. Adrian was the sexually repressed poet. And Billy, the youngest, was a daddy at 16. This comedy was great when its original cast was present, but once the actors playing Joey and Aveline left, it lost its humor. I'll always remember Bread for Nelly standing on her doorstop screaming," SHE IS A TART!" and then crossing herself before she returns to her chaotic family. A British Married With Children, but funnier. If you see this show, watch it!

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.

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.

"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.