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Goodnight Sweetheart

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For the album and song by David Kersh, see Goodnight Sweetheart (album).

Goodnight Sweetheart
Series title card
Genre	Sitcom
Created by	Laurence Marks & Maurice Gran
Starring	Nicholas Lyndhurst Victor McGuire Christopher Ettridge Michelle Holmes Dervla Kirwan Emma Amos Elizabeth Carling
Country of origin	United Kingdom
No. of seasons	6
No. of episodes	58
Production
Running time	30 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	BBC1
Picture format	4:3
Original run	18 November 1993 – 28 June 1999
External links
IMDb profile

Goodnight Sweetheart was a popular BBC sitcom that ran for six series between 1993 and 1999. It starred Nicholas Lyndhurst as the accidental time traveller Gary Sparrow, who discovers he can travel between 1990s London and World War II London. The show was created by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran: also creators of Birds of a Feather and The New Statesman.

1 Cast
2 Plot
3 Episodes
4 Historical figures
5 DVD releases
6 External links

Cast

Dervla Kirwan - Phoebe Bamford (later Phoebe Sparrow) (series 1 to 3)

Elizabeth Carling - Phoebe Sparrow (from series 4)

Michelle Holmes - Yvonne Sparrow (series 1 to 3)

Emma Amos - Yvonne Sparrow (from series 4)

Victor McGuire - Ron Wheatcroft
Christopher Ettridge - PC Reg Deadman
Gary's son as an adult was played by Ian Lavender, most famous as Pike in another World War II-set sitcom, Dad's Army.

Plot

During the course of the series' six series, the plot changes quite a lot. Originally, Gary's life in the late 20th century is a relatively difficult one. He and wife Yvonne live in a 'starter home' in Cricklewood, North London, and are often struggling for money. Gary's job as a TV repairman is not particularly lucrative, and Yvonne wants him to take on a more prestigious office job like the one she has. Gary, however, is reviled by the corporate world and is in no hurry to become a millionaire. Gary considers Yvonne's Open University psychology course 'LA psycho babble', while Yvonne feels Gary isn't truly committed to her goals of becoming rich and starting a family.

Nicholas Lyndhurst as Gary Sparrow and Elizabeth Carling as Phoebe Sparrow.

During a service call out to a part of the East End Gary is not familiar with, he goes down an obscure street named Duckett's Passage and unknowingly walks through a time portal to 1940s London. He does not realise what has happened at first and simply thinks he is lost. He wanders into a local public house (The Royal Oak) which he decides must be a World War II theme pub; however, after an air raid, he realises the truth. Safely returning to the present, Gary discovers that the time portal will work for himself but not for anyone else. (In later episodes, the rules governing the time portal change at the whim of the scriptwriters.) In most stories involving time travel, a time-traveler can spend excessive periods in the visited era and then return to his own time-line at a point only a few seconds after he left, thus effectively being gone for only a few seconds. (An extreme example of this is in C.S. Lewis's novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when the Pevensie children from England remain in Narnia for so many years that they attain adulthood there, yet magically revert to their previous childhood ages when they finally return to England.) A distinctive feature of Goodnight, Sweetheart is that Gary Sparrow's two time-lines -- one in the present and one during World War Two -- are somehow moving forward simultaneously ... so that, if he stays in the past for (as an example) two days, he will return to the present two days after he left, and will have to give his wife Yvonne some explanation for his absence. In the later episodes, when Gary has wives in both time periods, his situation is not much different from any other philanderer's, since he cannot spend time with either wife without the other wife noting his absence and expecting an explanation. The rest of the first series largely involves Gary playing around in wartime London with the aid of his best friend and printer, Ron Wheatcroft (the only modern person he tells). He tries to start a cross-time affair with Cockney barmaid Phoebe Bamford while still contending with the domestic problems of his 1990s life. Ron's marriage, too, begins to dissolve in concurrence with spending increasing amounts of time helping Gary explore the early Forties. He provides Gary with reproductions of World War II items (e.g., ration cards, identity papers, money) and reluctantly assists him in presenting 'cover-stories' to Yvonne. Phoebe's father, Eric (owner of The Royal Oak) takes a quick disliking to Gary; not only is he suspicious of Gary's motives, but as Phoebe is married to a serving British soldier, Gary looks like a slacker by comparison. Gary plays well-known songs on the pub's piano that post-date his 1940s audience, thereby allowing him to claim he wrote them (for example, Beatles songs). His "talent" as a songwriter begins to impress everyone concerned, particularly Phoebe and the lovably vacuous policeman, Reg Deadman. In the episode "Turned Out Nice Again", George Formby wants to cover one of "Gary's" songs, When I'm Sixty-Four (although he wants to change 'bottle of wine' to 'bottle of stout'). Gary is also able to convince his 1940s friends that he is a 'secret agent', due to being able to provide foolproof information pertaining to the war. A subtle piece of humour throughout the entire series is derived from the fact that the forename "Gary" is an extremely commonplace working-class name in modern England, but totally unknown (except for Gary Cooper) during the 1940s; thus, Gary calls attention to himself simply by using his real name. At the end of the first series, Gary decides not to return to the 1940s. However, when the second series begins, Ron persuades him to go back in time to invest some money so that they will be rich in the 1990s. This scheme fails, but while there, he accidentally meets Phoebe and rekindles their relationship. Phoebe's father has died in an air raid, and her husband has been imprisoned in a POW camp; Gary's emotional and business support to her advances his prospects with her. Gary also discovers an easy way to use his time-traveling ability to make money: taking ordinary objects from the 1940s and then selling them as mint-condition antiques in the '90s for a huge profit. In the third series, he opens a shop (called Blitz and Pieces) to sell his World War II memorabilia in, though buying this shop was mainly a cover for the fact that the row of shops had been built on the time portal. By working in the shop, Gary has even easier access to the '40s than before. Meanwhile, his "travels" all over England, supposedly to buy new antiques, provide a cover-story to Yvonne for his numerous trips back in time to see Phoebe, while his 'secret war work' provides a cover-story to Phoebe for his numerous absences in the past. At the end of the third series, both the women in Gary's life reveal that they are pregnant. However, Yvonne later has a miscarriage, while Phoebe gives birth to a boy they name Michael. Ironically, Gary's son is actually older than Gary, since Michael Sparrow was born in the 1940s, more than a decade before Gary himself will be born. Phoebe's husband then dies and Gary and Phoebe get married. In his conversations with Ron, Gary rationalises that he is not a bigamist, even though he is married to two different women: since Yvonne was not born yet during World War II (when Gary is married to Phoebe), and since Phoebe appears to have died at some point before the present (when Gary is married to Yvonne), Gary considers himself faithful to both wives. He argues that 'my wives exist in different temporal aspects of a four-dimensional space-time continuum' although Ron considers this to be a 'typical bigamist’s excuse'. Eventually, Gary meets his own adult son in the present – a man considerably older than Gary – and is dismayed to learn that Michael Sparrow is a pauper. Gary proceeds to alter events in the past so that Michael will have an ongoing income - at the end of the episode via a massive coincidence, Gary once more meets 'present day' Michael who reveals he is a successful engineer in New Zealand. The adult Michael, unaware of their true relationship, notices that modern-day Gary reminds him of his own father from decades earlier. The fifth and sixth series expanded the science fiction premise beyond basic time-travel. In the episode "Mine's a Double", Gary is struck by lightning as he passes through the time portal and split into multiple selves (an homage to the Star Trek episode The Enemy Within). Initially, we only see two of the selves: the original Gary, and a second Gary, who, though physically identical, is nevertheless established as nefarious the moment he appears. It later develops that the lightning surge actually split Gary into three selves: an evil Gary, a good Gary (who is also "ever-so-slightly gay Gary") and the original Gary, who is neither particularly evil nor particularly virtuous, but rather a basically decent bloke with some selfish and venal traits. Indeed, when Ron temporarily becomes able to use the same time portal and to accompany Gary into the 1940s, Gary is clearly upset that he no longer has the privilege of time travel all to himself, and selfishly comes up with pretexts for why Ron should not use the portal. Later episodes in the series found both of Gary's wives gaining notable success. In the present, Yvonne became a millionaire through the beauty-aids business she founded. In the past, Gary and Phoebe moved to a "posh" part of town and Phoebe became a night-club singer, as she and Gary became acquainted with Noel Coward. However, despite the glamorous turn of events, the subject of marital disintegration was still a prominent theme of the show, culminating in Gary being made to face the question of which wife he ultimately loved the most. An episode in the final series establishes that Gary's time portal is one of many, leading to various time periods, and that there is some group of individuals (they look and sound like normal modern-day Englishmen, but might conceivably be people from the future, or even aliens) who maintain the time portals and can close down any portal if they choose. It is never established who these people are, nor whether they created the time portals or merely control them. During this episode, Gary believes that his own portal will be shut down soon, and therefore he must choose which era in which to stay permanently. He chooses the 1940s, on the grounds that Phoebe and young Michael need him more than the now-wealthy Yvonne. But at the end of this same episode the portal remains open, and Gary believes that this will be the case indefinitely. In the very last episode of the final series, Yvonne accidentally sees Gary in the act of vanishing into thin air as he steps through the time portal. In the past (now slightly after V-E Day), Gary prevents an assassination attempt on future Prime Minister Clement Attlee, which leads to the time portal closing permanently, giving him no choice but to remain in the 1940s. He paints a final message to Ron and Yvonne on the same Mayfair flat wall from which Ron will one day strip old wallpaper, to discover the words. In an eerie scene, the words appear on the wall (one letter at a time) in the present as Gary scribbles them there in 1945. As a time-traveler, Gary has always had access (in the present) to money, modern technology and items that were rationed during World War Two: he explained these (and his absences) to Phoebe by telling her that he did secret work for the War Office. Now, permanently marooned in the 1940s, Gary will have to find genuine employment in post-war Britain to support Phoebe and Michael. When Phoebe asks him to promise that his mysterious absences (allegedly due to war work) are now over and done with, he assures her in the very last words of the series: "Where is there to go?"

Episodes

As in Marks and Gran's sitcom Get Back, most episodes of Goodnight Sweetheart - and the programme itself - were named after popular song titles. The show is named for the song Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight. Due to a script-editing error, two different episodes (1.6 and 4.2) were both titled "In the Mood". There is no special connection between those two episodes.