An early British sitcom – running from 1958 to 1964 – The Larkins is notable for pioneering a style that would become standard for the genre over the next couple of decades. Touching on class, the battle of the sexes and the ‘hilarious’ misunderstandings that fuelled the sitcom into the 1980s, it’s an interesting, mildly amusing slice of nostalgia.

This 1963 fifth series is what today would be called a reboot – coming three years after the fourth series, it’s lost several cast members – namely the younger members of the Larkin family – and replaced them with posh but penniless lodger Osbert Rigby Soames (Hugh Paddick) and, in the second episode, swotty (by modern standards nerdy) schoolboy relative Georgie (Hugh Walters), as well as a handful of supporting players. The action is based around the London café run by Ada and Alf Larkin (Peggy Mount and David Kossoff), a working class couple who oddly represent the blurring of class boundaries at the time – the kids are off being successful overseas and the couple are now running their own business. Throughout the eight episodes, the couple and their associates have assorted escapades – trying to turn the café into a Spanish restaurant, getting involved with a trading stamp con man, having a teenage girl from Liverpool visit and turn Georgie and his mates on to the Beatles and having a Christmas visit from hypochondriac American son-in-law Jeff (Ronan O’Casey).

But at the heart of it is the strained relationship between Alf and Ada, with Peggy Mount creating the first in a long line of TV battleaxes (a role she would later continue in late Seventies sitcom You’re Only Young Twice). Rarely speaking a line at less than full volume, Ada is suitably monstrous as she determines to thwart Alf’s plans for an easy life, which consists mostly of visiting the pub (the sheer amount of drunkenness in this show would never be tolerated today!). Interestingly, she’s often shown to be in the wrong – like when her offensive behaviour gets everyone barred from the local pub – but also shown to have a good and overly trusting heart under her bluster, while Alf is in fact the more cynical of the two.

The show also touches on the social aspirations that underpinned many great British sitcoms – Steptoe and Son, Fawlty Towers, Rising Damp – as Ada in particular is shown to have pretensions of grandeur (pronouncing café ‘Cayf’) that she will invariably fail to live up to. But it’s never emphasised much – there’s none of the underlying tragedy of people trapped in circumstances that they can never escape that you found in those later shows.

I can’t pretend that The Larkins is laugh-out-loud funny – but there is a lot of gentle, inoffensive humour here, and Mount’s domineering matriarch is the prototype for countless others to come. For that alone, it’s worth a look.

DAVID FLINT

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