First watched : 1977
To say this ran for four series, you don't hear much about it these days do you ?
Rosie was another Yorkshire-set Roy Clarke creation. It concerned a young police constable Michael Penrose ( Paul Greenwood ) trying to pursue his career despite an over-protective family and bonkers , over-possessive girlfriend doing their best to get in the way. Rosie actually followed on from an earlier series The Growing Pains of P C Penrose which was broadcast in 1975 in a later time slot. That featured the same main character but was more station-based in a South Yorkshire mining town and didn't feature his family. It didn't quite work so Clarke revamped the series , having Penrose transferred to Scarborough on compassionate grounds to be closer to his bogusly invalid mother ( Avril Elgar ). This series gave much more time to his private life and he didn't usually get out on the beat with droll partner Wilmot ( Tony Haygarth ) until at least halfway through the episode.
Like Last of the Summer Wine , Rosie relied on eccentric characters coming out with amusing non-sequiturs rather than particularly witty scripts or farcical situations. I think it was meant to be gentle and wry but didn't really come across that way. Greenwood was not a comic actor and with his gaunt features and most of his lines consisting of sarcastic putdowns he wasn't very sympathetic and so the series had a rather sour, slightly misogynistic tone to it. That's perhaps why nobody seems to have a great affection for it.
Having said that Rosie was perhaps more influential than we realise. Little Britain of course picked up the idea of the relative who was putting it on a bit and Rosie's self-absorbed inner monologues lead straight to Peep Show ; by strange coincidence Frankie Jordan who played his girlfriend both looked, and particularly sounded, like Dobby.
The series ended in 1981. Greenwood still works as an actor although Haygarth has been the busier of the two.
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