TV Cream

TV: D is for...

Dear Ladies

FLOUNDERING DRAGCOM starring PEBBLE MILL staples Dr. Evadne Hinge and Dame Hilda Brackett: two blokes in dresses who sang songs, played piano and did feeble gags. Except here they did them in a cottage in some “quintessentially English” rural backwater, and tossed in duff comedic asides on randy middle-aged upper-class women, repairmen, motorbike and sidecar journeys and sherry for good measure.

4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Nick

    September 4, 2012 at 9:55 am

    What’s the definition of an unnatural act? Hinge and Bracket

  2. George White

    February 18, 2019 at 9:52 am

    Watched it recently, and it’s very deeply strange. It’s almost like Grandad with Clive Dunn. It feels very kiddy. And quite low budgeted, yet there’s lots of very lovely film sequences.
    But it’s not particularly funny.

  3. Glenn Aylett

    April 27, 2019 at 9:31 am

    They were a big thing in the early eighties on the radio, but somehow didn’t transfer well to the television and were never big enough for BBC1. Never knew what to make of Hinge and Bracket as they were like an upper crust version of when Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough used to appear in drag, just nowhere near as funny.

  4. Tom Ronson

    March 25, 2022 at 4:17 pm

    It makes (slightly) more sense if you think of Hinge and Brackett as relatives of Barry and Yvonne Stewart-Hargreaves from Hi-De-Hi!, elderly eccentrics who fancy themselves as intellectuals, ‘treat’ their friends to musical recitals, and live in a stasis chamber of olde-worlde England where men with muttonchops and handlebar moustaches ride penny farthings, CS Lewis ravishes Enid Blyton on top of a huge pile of cucumber sandwiches, and the world only turns because Queen Victoria bloody well says it should. As noted above, Dear Ladies had a strange sense of heightened reality about it – equal parts Chucklevision and Last of the Summer Wine – which sat uneasily with the central premise.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To Top