IT'S SITCOM HEAVEN time again. A sitcom is no longer a sitcom. A fundamental thing in my life, "As Time Goes By," is coming back. The eighth -and final -season is starting exclusively on WLIW/21, the English channel in our market, Friday night at 9.
What a delicious treat it will be to have Judi Dench -sigh -and Geoffrey Palmer back again for the last six times as Jean and Lionel, the two central characters in a romantic comedy that proves there is life after 50. "Charming, loving, funny, heart-touching, caring, delightful, sexy, addicting," as Louise Mochel of Corona, Calif., calls the Britcom.
Amazing, I call it, the sort of thing our network television should try in comedy but just doesn't have the guts.
The series about second chances and new starts began in 1992 with a happy ending. The Korean War had interrupted a romance between nurse Jean Pargetter (Dench) and Second Leftenant Lionel Hardcastle for 36 years. Now, Lionel and Jean have reunited and reignited the embers.
Both are in their 60s now. When was the last time you saw one of those love stories? Written in its entirety by Bob Larby, [sic] who also gave us "Good Neighbors" and "A Fine Romance," "ATGB" is not a wildly funny show like "Fawlty Towers" or raucous, like the double-entendre fish-and- chips humour of "Are You Being Served." It's more like the old Myrna Loy-William Powell or Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn black-and- white romantic comedies.
There aren't any gimmicks about the couple or their family and friends. No one is a cross-dresser or gay. They are just ordinary folks with those little irritating habits we all can identify with.
"I feel I am in bed with them," my wife explained, watching their little spats in the season VIII premiere Friday. They have their minor disagreements as Jean tries to be manipulative in a well-meaning way and Lionel tries to show her the error of her ways.
It's slower-paced. They didn't get married until the sixth season. I like lower energy, unlike our sitcoms, which are of such high energy, if harnessed they could light up the San Fernando Valley for a week.
The writing by Larby is classy and articulate. Jean and Lionel are prickly, and they make little funny remarks about the people they love, warts and all.
It's dry wit. I prefer dry wit, compared to the wet wit our laugh tracks slobber over.
There are times watching these episodes when I wish they'd cancel everything and just run Dench and Palmer. "As Time Goes By" passes by so effortlessly.
I'm what they call a Denchophile. There is nothing like a Dame Judi show. I even loved her in her first and only other TV series, "A Fine Romance," made with her husband, Michael Williams, from 1981-84. Nobody can get a laugh by raising an eyebrow or tidying up a pillow better than Dame Judi.
And you know what's really sad? "A mature woman like her would not even get a chance on American TV," as Thaddeus Nieves of Jamesport put it. "What does that say about us?" Not much, guv.
I also have been a great admirer of Palmer since the days of "Butterflies," "Reginald Perrin" and "Fairly Secret Army." He is an astounding actor physiognomically, the possesor of an unusually sad countenance, what in the ancestral home of the Kitmans (in Bensonhurst) used to be called "a sourpuss." But he can make me laugh by not saying anything.
I had the great experience of watching the two in action last February while attending a taping of the final episode (No. 60) at the BBC Shepherd's Bush studios in London.
Normally, I hate sitcom tapings; they can go on far into the night, as lines are flubbed endlessly. But Dench and Palmer are so professional. It was as if they were doing theater, breaking only to move from set to set.
It was so incredible to see Dench snap into character and then, after the cut signal, bursting into laughter. She had seen Palmer make a new face or ad lib.
As if that wasn't enough, I got to meet my two heroes at the wrap party in Studio 8. For a Denchophile like me, meeting Dame Judi is an event like meeting the Queen, except she doesn't carry the pocketbook that can swat you for not bowing properly.
Off camera , she is a waif of a woman, a real person, somebody you could have tea with any day.
Geoffrey Palmer was another person, too, smoking a Churchillian cigar as he waxed rhapsodic about how he could now go fly fishing in Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, Mont.
"Will this be the last show?" I asked Dame Judi.
"We'll see about that, won't we?" she said.
Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending me this article, which appeared on the Newsday site on September 6, 2000.
