murphy1169 Excellent comedy Hycinth is very funny. But I wouldn't have her living next door to me she's s bit too posh for my liking. They should make a movie about the life and times of Mrs Bucket from when she was a little girl till her mid fifties they should bring Sheridan into it. The Bouquet Woman would be a good name for the fim.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU It's a comedy. So you must laugh and you will laugh and with Mrs. Hyacinth Bucket, pronounced bouquet, you shall laugh. That's a request, a demand, an order in one word. So they took very clear characters both socially and mentally, and they knit them together into a real bouquet of flowers, Hyacinth, Violet, Daisy and Rose. The first one is married to Richard, a top local government official who is submissive and flexible and has transformed their home's bathroom into his reading room. She is the tyrant who does not give a suggestion that is not an order, who does not order you around but command the rising of the sun and the shining of the moon.Violet could have been the same, and she too married at the top of the middle class, with a Mercedes, a swimming pool and room for a pony or two, but her husband, Bruce, is no Richard. So it is a constant chase after divorce in the very sickening way of never getting it to be running after it all the time and forever. Daisy is a social marginal woman who married sentimentally a man, Onslow, who is a social marginal case living on society, not because he is handicapped or uneducated or even uneducatable, but because he is just one of these slobs who just want to live their life slouching in front of a TV only wasting some energy to go bet on horses, and nowadays they don't even need to go out because they can bet on-line since the Internet is a basic need for everyone, isn't it? The last one, Rose, is a pathetic woman who only lives in order to fall in love, that is to say to yield to her desires and appeals just in order to break every love affair, if possible with married men, to see it dying in order to chase after another prey, to hunt another game, to fall in love to her own desires and appeals one more time in order then to see it dying. There is no possible empathy for such a woman since her own desire is to constantly run around and around this cycle in the shape of a vicious circle with super short skirts and open neck shirts, or other light chest and breast embracing skimpy pieces of clothing.You have to add the son of these poor mismatched and yet perfect couple Richard and Hyacinth, a certain, oh by the way what is his name since we did not see him once, isn't it Sheridan, who is in college forever and has just dropped mathematics for a sewing needlepoint class and who does not run after girls because he is too young, so says his mother. And that mother does not seem to wonder why he only has boy friends, I mean friends who are boys or men, which is, according to his mother, good, you know why, because it keeps him safe away from girls for whom he is definitely too young, will be too young till he is too old for anything at all. But then it is a British, what's more BBC, comedy. So there must be two neighbors, a woman whose husband is living thousands of miles away and her brother who just got divorced. And of course there must be a vicar, Anglican if possible, and his wife and you have it all. We will have no plumber, but a postman and a milkman, a few cops and the father of this bouquet of flowers who is losing his head completely and believes he is still fighting against the Germans. Such comedies are so perfect that you cannot hesitate to laugh and laugh, again, encore and again still, episode after episode. But in the end you will wonder if there is any abstract value, any higher dimension. You may think your life partner is like one of these characters, or you might think you are like one of these characters, and then you might wonder if that is cathartic or not, if that may liberate you or not. Don't wonder. You will waste your time. It is nothing but a comedy.A cruel comedy though since episode after episode Mrs. Bucket, pronounced bouquet, is falling down into ever deeper failures, ever nastier tricks devised by life. You can be sure she could not cross the street but be run over by a bus, or go to the seaside but get drowned in a pool of dirty water on the embankment, the promenade des Anglais along the gravelly beach in Nice. She luckily does not go to foreign countries, at least practically never beyond Jersey and the Queen Elizabeth 2, otherwise she might really end up badly, like eaten up by the continental cannibals after slow cooking in a cast iron pot simmering on an open camp fire, soaking in a mixture of mayonnaise and mustard, and probably on Les Champs Elysées in Paris under the Arch of Triumph or on Unter den Linden in Berlin under the Brandenburg Gate.But well the series does not stop really, only symbolically since at the end of the last Christmas Special she will meet with her demise and Richard will get the order that if she dies he has to make sure Onslow puts a tie on for her funeral. Good bye lady and do not lie in the flower beds for too long. It is more comfortable under the flowers.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

frncsbrennan This series is perhaps the funniest I have ever seen. Patricia Routledge (Hyacinth Bucket) is brilliant (to use a British phrase.) She is not only that-but darn hilarious. The supporting cast matches her along way. Geoffry Hughes is great as Onslow, who plays Hyacinth's slob brother-in-law who can care less about every and anything. And then there is Daisy, his desperate wife and Hyacinth's sister, who is desperate to get Onslow to show some interest in her. And then there is the man crazy sister Rose (Mary Millar) who will do anything to get a man and to swear off them of them as well (including donating her undies to Charity.) And, of course, there's Hyacinth's poor suffering husband Richard and her neighbor, Elizabeth, who is so nervous in Hyacinth's presence that she continually breaks Hyacinth's Periwinkle China every time she is asked (forced to)come to tea. This is a hilarious series, every episode is enjoyable.

terryhall2 Given that the entire series is written by one man, as is often the case in British comedies, this is a good show that hearkens back to a Britain we are fast losing. Hyacinth is very funny when she lets her 'working class' roots show, though I find it difficult to believe in Richard being such a wimp. Daisy, Rose and Onslow are very funny as is Josephine Tewson, though a lot of the scenes do become tiresome and some characters are just plain irritating (the vicar scenes, Daddy going missing) It is a good job all the characters are played by quality actors as this prevents the show getting stale. If you want a glimpse of Britain and a harmless, good natured laugh, this is the show. I know many of my American friends like to hold candlelight parties because of it.