751 Bread

First  viewed : 1  May  1986

And  to  make  it  a  hat-trick  of  crap  sitcoms, along  came  the  latest  effort  from  Carla  Lane.

I  know  this  series  was  very  popular  and  my  wife  was  a  fan  but  I  watched  the  first  episode and  decided  it  wasn't  for  me,  despite  the  charms  of  Caroline Millmoe  as  a  supporting  character.

Bread  gave  Carmel  McSharry  a  starring  role  as  Nellie  Boswell  the   Liverpudlian  Catholic  matriarch  to  whom  her  five  rather  charmless  children , including  the  always-annoying  Jonathan  Morris,, ultimately  deferred. He  was the only  one  who  had  a  steady  job; the  others  managed  to  put  the  titular  bread  on  the  table  by  various  dodgy  means.

"Bread"  for  money is  actually  a  Cockney  rhyming  slang  expression  and  Liverpudlians  apparently  had  an  ambivalent  attitude  towards  the  series ,many  feeling  it  fuelled  the  growing  stereotype  of  the  perma-unemployed  scrounging  Scouser.

Nonetheless , the  series  ran  for  seven  seasons  up  to  1991  and  allowed  Lane  to  indulge  her  idiosyncratic  solutions  to  animal  welfare. However,  its  demise  also  proved  the  end  of  her  reign  as  the  queen  of  comic  writing. Three  subsequent  efforts  in  the  nineties  ( Screaming, Luv  and  Searching )  were  critically  mauled  and  shortlived. She  died  last  year  aged  87.