It's funny how people never mention As Time Goes By (BBC1, Sunday) when they talk about Dame Judi Dench. Oscar-winner? Yes. Consummate theatre actress? Absolutely. National institution? Just behind the NHS (a joint ranking with Maggie Smith). That lovely Jean Hardcastle who, after years apart, finally married the curmudgeonly Lionel, her wartime sweetheart? Never heard of her. In fact, I bet that even now you recall her, you didn't even know that was her surname.

After nine series and 10 years, Jean and Lionel (Geoffrey Palmer) have cosied up in bed for the last time. Well, they didn't exactly "cosy", this being a sitcom. Rather, they both lay on their own side of the bed as close to their bedside lamp (matching, naturally, and on similarly similar bedside tables) as they were to each other. And, of course, they both had their pyjamas on.

That's the kind of show As Time Goes By is. Jean and Lionel live in a gentle, genteel world. It is a world where there are not only matching bedside tables but one in which tea is made in a china pot, padded coathangers hang in wardrobes and there is a wrought-iron cookbook stand in the kitchen. It is a world where the walls are covered with a plethora of English pastoral scenes, where a homeless girl can sit on the doorstep of a Georgian townhouse without the owners phoning the police or showering her with boiling water.

Unlike an awful lot of mainstream British sitcoms, As Time Goes By doesn't patronise its audience, though it undoubtedly panders to their attitudes and aspirations with its sheltered, upper-middle-class, middle-aged world view. It is the perfect sitcom for people who don't watch television, or at least say they don't. (Consider Lionel browsing the Radio Times. "Eight o'clock - people shouting at each other. Half-past eight - people ruining other people's houses. Nine o'clock - car crashes. Half-past nine - people falling over. Ten o'clock - more people shouting at each other, getting drunk and falling over.") For the rest of us, As Time Goes By is Ovaltine TV. Nice once in a while if your tastebuds need a rest. It will be missed.

Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending me this excerpt from an article which appeared in the August 5, 2002 edition of The Guardian (UK). It was part of a larger article which had nothing to do with the show. Also to Maree for sending the picture from Radio Times.

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