Shark Bytes

F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre writes on December 21, 2007: "we have to learn at the end of the episode that the whole reason why the time-portal was maintained in the first place was so that Gary could save Clement Attlee from an assassination attempt in 1945. (So why didn't Gary materialise in 1945 the first time he went through the portal, rather than several years earlier?)" -

If you'll recall the very first time Gary went through the time portal, he was pretty much puzzled as to where he was or what he was doing there. In fact, for a brief moment, he didnt even yet know that it was 1940s London. If he had materialized in 1945 the first time, he probably would have been too bewildered and perplexed about where he was and how he got there in order to get his head together and save Attlee's life.

This way, having gone through the time portal several years earlier, by the time 1945 rolled around Gary had long since gotten acclimated to going through the time portal and being a time traveler.

I adore Goodnight Sweetheart & have watched all six series several times.
Without a doubt Dervla Kirwin steals every scene with her charming ways , This makes the transition from series 3 to 4 difficult...but would rather that than it have stopped for good.

never jumped VERY funny show last episode was a kinda sad one

An inventive sitcom that tried something new and for the most part succeeded, this stayed interesting for the length of its run and is worth downloading. The main character has two wives, one in the 40's and one in the 90's, although the show isn't sci-fi since no explanation is offered, he just one day finds he can move back and forth in time. The show has him constantly lying and using his future knowledge for his own gain, but the actor is likable enough to pull it off. Replacing the two female leads was a blow, but not insurmountable. The first Pheobe was the highlight of the show. The actress could do vulnerable with toughness at the same time. The second Pheobe was fine, but suffered by comparison. The second Yvonne was better than the first, but that's because she fit in better with the millionairess story arc, which leads to the JTS contender:
The whole storyline where they suddenly become rich was a betrayal of the feel of the first three seasons. I'm not going to complain about "realism" in a time-travel sitcom, but this had a surreal sense to it and didn't go with the idea that Gary leads a struggling lower-middle class life that drives him to excitement and adventure in the past. It seemed like the writers were trying to crowbar in some social satire with references to New Labour and "Tony and Cherie". It didn't work and took away time from the main attraction of the show. The show where Gary splits in two also didn't fit with the show ethos. Maybe the writers ran out of ideas and were grasping (classic JTS).
The ending in the last episode felt too sudden, but that's what happens when you have to wrap up six years of story lines in twenty-eight minutes.

'Goodnight, Sweetheart' jumped in the last episode, but NOT because Gary got stuck in 1945. That ending made absolute sense: let's recall that -- just a couple of episodes earlier, when Gary first thought that the time-portal was about to close, and he had to commit to one era and one wife -- he decided to stay with Phoebe in the 1940s rather than Yvonne in the 1990s. Still, I regret that this was the last episode. I should like to have seen Gary attempt to support his wife and son in 1945 (during post-war rationing) when he no longer has access to 1990s groceries and history books, and he has to explain to Phoebe why his 'War Office' job has suddenly scarpered.

What ruined this entire series for me were two other incidents in the last episode. The first was when Gary meets Clement Attlee and tells Attlee what a wonderful Prime Minister he's going to be, and how Attlee's socialism programmes are going to make Britain such an incredibly wonderful nation. That's bad enough, but then we have to learn at the end of the episode that the whole reason why the time-portal was maintained in the first place was so that Gary could save Clement Attlee from an assassination attempt in 1945. (So why didn't Gary materialise in 1945 the first time he went through the portal, rather than several years earlier?) I'm a Briton; I'm not quite old enough to have personal memories of Attlee's premiership, but I can tell you for certain that he was a ruddy-awful prime minister, and the notion of somebody rearranging the laws of space-time to prevent Clement Attlee from being assassinated is even more implausible than Fonzie jumping over a shark.

Also, if the sole purpose of the time-portal was so that Gary could save Attlee's life, then why did the time-portal's rules occasionally change ... bringing Ron into the 1940s, Phoebe into the 1990s, Gary back to the days of Jack the Ripper in 1888, and so forth?

Actually, the first time this sitcom jumped was when Yvonne became a billionaire. I had no difficulty believing that Gary was a time-traveller with a personal loophole in the laws of space-time causality, but I found it bang unbelievable that Yvonne could create a billion-quid business empire, especially under the guidance of that pony-tailed New Age wanker.

Dervla Kirwan should never have left. She played the role so well (and she is really really fit)

Definitely this show jumped when the two female leads were replaced with a pair of hags. If I was Nicholas Lyndhurst I would have stopped being with both of them at that point - the show just stopped being believable.

Pretty good this show. It went rubbish when they changed the two main actresses though and kept spending loads of time with Noel Coward. I think it was around the same time the Kochanski actress changed in Red Dwarf so I'm suspecting this was done for fashionable reasons that can't be fathomed now.

Loved the two seasons we probably got around the Denver area, but why can't we get a DVD in NTSC form? I'd love to purchase the whole series, but our Amazon stores do not carry it. Any plans to release this in the United States?

I'm an American, and lately I've been enjoying reruns of this on PBS. It's a clever concept for a sitcom; it's nothing like you'd see on TV over here. However, I think the show jumped the shark on the last episode. It was sad that Gary didn't make it back to 1999, and the ending kind of left me in the dark (like the last episode of "Quantum Leap"). Otherwise, it's a great show.

Brilliant British comedy (and why would it matter if Americans understood the George Formby jokes?) - it was made by the BBC for Brits, not Americans.

I think this was a dud from the start, but just about kept it together because of the lovely Dervla. Unfortunately for the show (but fortunately for her) Ballykissangel was a far superior show and far more successful, so she jacked in the two jobs and decided to concentrate on the better show. They replaced her with someone with far less talent and thus doomed the show to B-list status. Apart from that, I just couldn't bring myself to sympathise with a character who is basically a bigamist and lying to two women. The fact that they were in two different time periods was irrelevant. I wanted him to get caught, when the entire point of the show (for some reason) was for us to root for him NOT to get caught. Quite frankly I didn't have the patience.

Not a bad show, like other people said, they'd better not get Dylan and Jake involved too quickly, if at all. They're expanding the other characters a bit in the most recent episodes, and I'm loving Frank, played by Jere Burns - he's pretty funny, especially when he goes to the gay bar dressed as one of the Village People! Should be good as long as the exec's keep away from the usual love-story schtick.

they changed the two leading ladies to people who look nothing like the originals. they sounded different too!

'Good-Night, Sweetheart' is an excellent show. It was funny, and it also raised genuine questions about time-travel, alternate realities, predestiny, &c. Several different story arcs were juggled skilfully (Ron's marriage failing, Gary's two marriages, the two pregnancies, the conversion of the time-travel nexus from alley to building site to memorabilia shop, Ron's printing business going bankrupt so that he can no longer print Gary's wartime banknotes) were very well handled. There were some very clever plot twists in this series. Gary has agreed to spend the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve with his wife in the present AND his girlfriend in the past. He was able to pull it off, thanks to a (true) glitch in the time-line: during World War Two, Britain stayed on summer time all the year round. So, when it's midnight in 1943, it's only 11 PM in 1995. Very clever! I didn't like the fact that Gary was knowingly circulating counterfeit banknotes in wartime England, but the scriptwriters softened this by having him nick a counterfeiter who was working for the Nazis. I'm a George Formby fan, so I really love the running gags about Formby, and I especially love the episode 'Turned Out Nice Again', in which Gary meets Formby and his formidable wife Beryl. Unfortunately, Americans (and quite a few modern-day Brits) won't get half the jokes about George Formby.