Queenie's Castle: Just Good Friends

 

How do I even start to write about this show? It has so much good stuff in it and so much that interests me.

For a start it stars Diana Dors, one of my great favourites. She is unusual among actresses in that you can find her in straight acting and (ahem) apparently she can also be found in sex comedies and risqué modelling. I always feel her role in this show may have been an inspiration for Lily Savage, who often referred to herself as a blonde bombsite. As with most of my favourites you either like her or really don't take to her - rumours abound of sexy parties and her secretly filming guests at her house having sex.

In this show she plays the matriarch of a family, but her husband is 'working away'. She shares a flat with her three grown up sons and her brother in law, and they're all dodgy in one way or another.

There is another star in this show, although it's never named, externals of the flats are filmed at Quarry Hill Flats in Leeds - despite my bizarre interests in failed public housing sadly they had been demolished long before I lived there briefly in the nineties. They were a significant development at the time they were built and continue to inspire fondness among former residents. They also had one of the Garchey waste disposal systems which then heated the building by burning the rubbish. The setting of this show places it firmly in the working class and firmly in the North.

This episode has Queenie being bothered by her family because they think she is seeing another man (hilariously played by Roy Barroclough - I hope you have all seen his Cissy and Adam sketches with Les Dawson). 

I'm trying to think of anything it would be reasonable to dislike about this show but there isn't anything, so there.