Gwen Flack takes a lot of getting used to. For some people it proves to be an impossible task. My attention span is not, perhaps, what it should be and I'm afraid that about 3-4 minutes is all I could spare the woman. She's irritating. She's boring. She never allows anyone to get in a word edgewise. She stands in the way of Lionel's ever completing his manuscript. She means well, but that's clearly not enough to keep her employed in an interactive situation. That's certainly not to say that she's unemployable, but if I were her boss I think I'd put her in situations which required a minimum of public contact. Maybe she could address envelopes. Or she could file.
Once, after spending just a few minutes with Gwen Flack, Lionel comes out of the living room and into the hall. He begins to bang his head against the wall. I know just how he felt. On the one hand, he's being pressured by a publisher who needs his work "yesterday" and, on the other, he is a captive audience for a woman who is unable to stop talking. Lionel is a man who is not comfortable around women, particularly when they begin to discuss subjects of a personal nature. And here he is, sitting with a woman he hardly knows and being forced to listen to her chatter on about how wonderful it is to have sex with short men without socks.
There's something about Mrs. Flack that makes her appear to be vulnerable. She doesn't have a dark side that we know of. She's a widow, who lives with and for her dog, Herriot. She's loyal and diligent and she means well. That's not enough to offset how terribly annoying she is, but it makes it difficult to justify her dismissal. If she were caught stealing from the underwear drawer, rather than reorganizing it, she would have been dumped immediately. If she had walked off with something more substantial than custard tarts, maybe that would have been grounds for dismissal, but she didn't. She simply had something to eat because Lionel went away and left her alone all day. She didn't even complain about being completely disregarded by Lionel. Anyone else would have left -- but not Gwen Flack. She stayed at her post. Just when they resolve to terminate her, that's the moment she limped to work on her crutches. They just couldn't bring themselves to hurt the nice lady under those circumstances -- instead Lionel and Jean are forced to resort to an elaborate scheme to make her think it was Mrs. Flack's own idea to quit.
Gwen Flack, the character, is wonderful. She's very down to earth, very down home. Larbey saved some of his best lines for her. Apparently there are many people who don't care for Mrs. Flack because her character is long-winded and boring. I find that strange because that's exactly why I find her to be so humorous. Remember the ridiculous newscaster Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore Show? NOBODY (except his wife) wanted to spend even two minutes alone with this pretentious and self-absorbed man. It is the reactions of the other characters to him which made him so funny. Nobody on As Time Goes By would want to spend any time alone with Gwen Flack either (except maybe her cousin). And this is the premise for a lot of humor which is built around the unattractiveness of that character.