Goodnight Sweetheart was a sitcom with an interesting concept of a time travelling adulterer. It was carried off by Nicholas Lyndhurst's appealing performance and rather derailed by the cast change of the two leading ladies leaving the series and being replaced.
When we last saw Gary Sparrow he was stuck in the past permanently. In this special one off, time has moved on from the 1940s to 1962. It looks like those 1960s Beatles songs he sang might come back to haunt him. Gary attends hospital to see his father waiting at the maternity ward for Gary to be born in 1962, when he ends up holding himself as a baby he manages to push himself forward to the present day.
Gary's last brush with the present day was 1999 and the world of 2016 is different. Smartphones, electric cars, openly gay couples in public, expensive coffee houses and his wife Yvonne is a business tycoon, television personality and Gary finds out he also has teenage daughter.
Gary now has to get to grips with the present as well as his life in the past. Writers Marks and Gran usually were always sure footed when it came to comedies and had a dab hand when it came to inserting cultural references. Just note the gag on European disharmony. They also kept this consistently funny and I managed to find myself laughing a few times and I needed it after watching the dire Young Hyacinth earlier in the evening.
Nerd Alert: As Gary Sparrow walks in the present day with the strains of The Beatles, Love Me Do, he encounters the security guard played by Ted Robbins. Robbins is the real life cousin of Paul McCartney.