Although As Time Goes By bows out on BBC1 this week, it will keep going strong on U.S. Cable. But which British comedies travel well -- and which don't?

After ten years and 64 episodes, As Time Goes By's Jean and Lionel will be turning out the light for the last time this week. And, remarkably for a gentle "chintz and sofas" sitcom starring late-in-life lovers (Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer), the show's departure will be mourned by a fanatical following from Australia to Africa and nowhere more so than in the U.S.A.

Boston Travel Consultant, Mary Lynn Travers, 38, who organised a trip to London in May and June this year for 75 fellow American fans to attend some of the last recordings, is a dedicated follower of both the show and Dame Judi.

"We have no-one like her in the U.S.," says Travers, "someone who'll go out and do a role in her sixties without makeup... We've been in Judi's dressing room and she's served us champagne. She's the classiest waitress I've ever had."

At the final recording there wasn't a dry eye in the studio as the set was dismantled and the production crew -- three quarters of them with the show since the beginning -- marked the occasion with pink and white cake. But if you're expecting an emotional climax on screen, forget it.

As Time Goes By's strength, says Palmer is "understatement at all times; far more touching than these slushy American shows where couples are announcing they love each other every five minutes. I expect that's why we've gone down so well in the states -- they like a bit of British restraint."

Dench agrees. "I think what the show captures is the real irascibility of marriage," she says. "You never doubt that Lionel and Jean love each other, but you aren't shown their relationship through pink-tinted spectacles."

The company behind all this British restraint is New York-based DLT Entertainament (who make May Family). Chariman Donald Taffner, Sr. is a veteran at selling Britcom to Americans, having remade Man About the House into the long-running Three's Company. Why does he think As Time Goes By works so well in the USA?

Are US fans two episodes short of a series?
Just how true some people believe the show to be was made very clear one night in New York.

"I was at the theatre with my husband [the late Michael Williams], reports Dench, "when a very agitated woman rushed up to me and asked where my husband was. I told her he was standing right next to me, and she said, 'No, not him -- your real husband, Lionel.' And she really did mean it, you know."

One US fan remodelled her Californian home to resemble Jean and Lionel's house; and American college students watching episodes on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) network of cable stations [sic] , or on video, play the Hardcastle Drinking Game. Someone first picks a selection of typical expressions -- "barmy", "soppy" or "custard tarts", say. "We don't have those words in the US," explains Travers. "If they're said [during the episode] and you're drinking a beer, you have to take a big gulp. If you're drinking a short, you have to down it."

So our comedy travels well?
As Time Goes By isn't the first British TV comedy to be a success in the States, although just how much of a success is difficult to pin down. BBCAmerica is not covered by the Nielsen ratings, which chart the weekly hits on the big networks. But a good measure of popularity is how many of the 200-odd public television licensees buy licenses to show British comedies on their 350 or so PBS stations. The big four, by these sales are As Time Goes By, Keeping Up Appearances, Waiting for God and Are You Being Served?

And shows with a bit more attitude are now finding a wider audience, too, especially in the big cities and on the coasts. This has been helped by the growth of Cable Channels HBO and Comedy Central, the local PBS stations -- which show edgier fare than the networks -- and the setting up of BBCAmerica. The latter has had sucess not only with BBC's shows but also with Channel 4's Father Ted and So Graham Norton.

Norton is a particular hit in San Francisco, with its big gay audience, says Tim Goodman, TV Critic for the San Francisco Chronicle: "it's irreverent and hysterically funny, with no boundaries. Outside David Letterman I don't think there's a better late-night host."

And New York fans turned out in droves when the stars of The League of Gentlemen appeared on stage after being voted by Time magazine the third best TV Show in America (after Survivor and Malcolm in the Middle).

Steve Pemberton as Tubbs, who is probably the only actor to appear on British TV breastfeeding a pig, says, "It was amazing how well people knew the characters. The audience went mad, shouting, 'We love you, Tubbs.' We really weren't expecting it." How Royston Vassy goes down in Bosie, Idaho, is another question entirely.

What gets lost in translation?
On a continent that's created both The Waltons and The Simpsons, it's tricky generalising about taste. Conventional wisdom says the sitcoms that Americans like most are network shows that are upbeat, middle-class and moneyed.

"I think there's a slightly brighter sensibility to American comedies," says Burton Cromer, who runs the BBCs US Video and DVD business. "Everyone is rich and healthy and middle-class. Comedies tend to be much lesss gritty and risk-taking."

Not that American popular taste is entirely saccharine. Remember the blue-collar sitcom Roseanne? And Fox had a big hit with Married...With Children, starring a crotch-scratching Ed O'Neill as low-rent shoe salesman Al Bundy.

Unwashed British characters have made it across the Atlantic, too: there were long-running remakes of Steptoe and Son and Til Death Us Do Part. But not all of them work: ;witness Only Fools and Horses and Gimme, Gimme, Gimme.

The bottom line is where we in Britain make six episodes of a sitcom in a season, in America they want 22, with repeats running the rest of the year. As USA Today's TV critic, Robert Bianco points out, "Because these characters are coming into your home week in, week out, all year, people have to like them. That's why American characters are smiley and solvent."

If Britcoms have a problem crossing the comedy divide, it is when cautious networks by them to remake with American actors and get cold feet over the gags or tone. Famously, Roseanne Barr got nowhere when trying to make a US network version of Absolutely Fabulous, which had been such a hit on cable. The drink, drugs and hinted-at sex were just too much for the play-it-safe networks.

A British writer who understands how Britcoms can get lost in translation is Simon Nye, creator of Men Behaving Badly. The US version fell by the wayside after rows between actors and writers: the network seemed to want to make Men Behaving Mildly.

When he tried to write a US network sitcom about a vet scared of animals, Nye says, "It became very clear that it would not work with that fundamentally negative kernel. They were happy to have a character who was cautious about something, but he could not be in the end bad at his job." (In Britain, he could, and his idea begat Beast.)

The trick, Nye has learnt, is not to try to tell Americans what to do: "They have their own rules and they are the country that knows how to make sitcoms." Smiley-solvent-people ones anyway. But when it comes to crabby old Lionel's custard tarts, we've got them licked.

This article appeared in Radio Times (UK) in the August 3-9, 2002 edition.

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