259 Yus My Dear

First  watched : 1976

I  hardly  want  to  admit  to  ever  watching  this  dreck  but  I  do  recall  checking  it  out  to  see  a  Celebrity  Squares  regular, the  oafish  Arthur  Mullard, in  action.

Yus  My  Dear  was  a  spin-off   from  another  sitcom  Romany  Jones  of  which  I've  no  recollection  at  all. Both  series  were  written  by  the  On  The  Buses  team  of  Ronald  Chesney  and  Ronald  Wolfe. Both  of  those  guys  were  disguising  patrician  real  names  ( Rene  Cadier and  Harvey  Wolf-Lubroff  respectively )  and  to  judge  from  Yus  My  Dear  both  nursed  a  pathological  hatred  of  the  white  working  class.

All  the  supposed  humour  in  the  series  is  derived  from  mocking  the  perceived  values  and  behaviour  of  the  proles. Mullard's  character  Wally  Briggs  is  a  gross  caricature, a  fat, badly-dressed  ignoramus  whose  job  is  sitting  reading  The  Sun  on  a  building  site   and  whose  only  exercise  is  taking  his  whippets  ( please ! )  for  a  walk. His  wife  Lil  played  by  Queenie  Watts  is  a  vulgarian  with  dyed  hair,  rushing  out  to  buy  the  latest  consumer  crap  while  brother  Benny  ( Mike  Reid  in  a  bad  wig )  is  a  spiv  and  freeloader.

The  only  good  thing  to  say  about  this  unfunny  offensive  shite  is  that  it  only  lasted  a  year.  Mullard 's  career  was  by  then  almost  over. Nearing  70  at  the  time  he  largely  dropped  out  of  public  view  after  a  shortlived  series  Whizzkid's  Guide  in  the  early  eighties  and  died  in  1995  whereupon  his  daughter  thoroughly  trashed  his  reputation  with  allegations  of  domestic  and  sexual  abuse, possibly  influenced  by  the  fact  he  left  most  of  his  money  to  the  National  Children's  Home  rather  than  his  own  kids. Watts, a  well-known  pub  landlady  as  well  as  actress , had  died  much  earlier  in  1980.