Keeping Up Appearances - Living the Hyacinth Life

Director: Harold Snoad
Studio: BBC Warner
Product Type: DVD

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Living the Hyacinth Life contains the first half of the last series of British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, chronicling the shamelessly pretentious middle-class Hyacinth Bucket (comic powerhouse Patricia Routledge), who answers every phone call with her shrieking cry of "Bouquet residence, the lady of the house speaking." Her relentless efforts to be held in higher esteem include buying skis for her bewildered husband Richard (Clive Swift), not so he can actually go skiing, but so that he can have them strapped to the top of his car and look posh. She is perpetually embarrassed by her lower-class sisters Daisy (Judy Cornwell) and Rose (Mary Millar), to say nothing of Daisy's slobbish husband Onslow (Geoffrey Hughes). This fifth series also includes the long-awaited appearance of Hyacinth's more economically successful sister Violet (Anna Dawson), whose married life is an endless squabble. --Bret Fetzer

Description

Tireless social climber Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced "Bouquet," of course) returns in the fifth and final season of this hilariously classy comedy of manners. This disc includes the first half of season five, including two never-before-released episodes, as well as the classic Pebble Mill interview with Patricia Routledge and Clive Swift.

Customer Reviews:

Comedy or Tragedy?.......2005-10-29

I remember the first time I saw "Keeping Up Appearances" and incorrectly thought, with the bouncy title music, incessant laugh track, and the perpetually frustrated shenanigans of the main character Hyacinth Bucket, that I was watching a comedy. Boy, was I wrong.

This particular DVD contains the first six episodes of the fifth and final season, with a total runtime of 3 hours, as well as an interview with the stars Patricia Routledge and Clive Smith, outtakes, and biographies. All good stuff and highly entertaining, at first.

As an American of the U.S. variety, I have never experienced the strictures of the British class system, and did not realize that it was still in powerful effect to this day. Of course, social classes exist in the U.S. as well, but not to the historically rooted or culturally pervasive extent I imagine it to be in Britain. This class system provides both the context and subtext to the "Keeping Up Appearances" series. Each episode involves a new scheme by Hyacinth to improve her social standing, which is the context. The subtext, however, comes from her deep-seated feelings of inferiority and lack of identity resulting from the oppressiveness of the class system. After coming to this realization, I began to see Hyacinth's desperate and futile attempts to strive for an imagined ideal of social respectability as lamentable and deeply sad. So sad, in fact, that I can no longer watch an episode of "Keeping Up Appearances" without becoming horribly depressed and lachrymose. Still I watch, however, because although the spectacle is indeed pitiable and pathetic, it is also strangely moving. I am not sure why watching a middle-class British woman's laughably vain attempts at respectability should cause such profound stirrings in my psyche--perhaps I too am caught in a desperate and doomed struggle of my own design--but I somehow find the whole spectacle deeply edifying.

Perhaps I have not thought deeply enough about Hyacinth's answer to the existential prison of her own delusions. Maybe her social climbing and complete obliviousness to her own absurdity bespeak not foolish ignorance, but a noble futility, a la Don Quixote. If so, then her faithful helpmate and hapless husband Richard must serve in the Sancho Panza role as the steady and sensible comic foil. Seen in this light, Hyacinth and "Keeping Up Appearances" represent a true flowering (ha ha) of British television.

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Vernascht!