How's Your Father: Help

I have somehow neglected to write a blog post about any of the shows featuring the much-loved Harry Worth and so that omission must be remedied instanter. Worth started off his working life as a miner, but started performing while in the forces in World War 2. I'm slightly shocked writing this because this sounds so long ago, he was personally endorsed by Laurel and Hardy and yet was only two years older than my own father. His TV break came in the sixties and his confused and confusing character came to be well loved. There is literally nothing cruel in his humour at all, nothing unkind, and the joke is always on the situation.

How's Your Father is Worth's last series in which he plays a bereaved father (bearing a strong resemblance to himself) who lives with his two children, played by Giles Watling and Debby Cumming.

In this episode he takes on a 'daily', and the show is all about the difficulties of finding and hiring someone, complicated by the interference of the neighbours, particularly his neighbour Mrs Simkin. She prevails on him to reduce the salary offered so as not to force the neighbours to pay more. The ideas they plant about Coral the cleaning lady are the root of the ensuing chaos.

One of the things I like best about this show is that Harry does have more depth of character and motivation than may be apparent on a simple description of the show. For example when he tells the kids that they must give up their weeklies to afford the daily, they ask what he is giving up and he says smoking. When they object that he doesn't smoke, he tells them he gave it up originally to pay for their weeklies, which answer seems really quite cunning to me! He also cons the kids into cleaning the house well enough that a cleaning lady will even think about cleaning it.

Normally I don't like familiar faces, but it would be churlish to object to the cleaning lady being gloriously played by Gretchen Franklin, Effel in EastEnders, and her son by Nigel Planer.

The whole two series of this show are available in low quality on Dailymotion but it has never had a commercial release. There are other series of his available in commercial quality.