MovieChat Forums > The Royle Family (1998) Discussion > 50 Years My A_rse!

50 Years My A_rse!

posted 15 years ago by Dlp07
13 replies | jump to latest

It may sound as if I'm just being incredibly picky but can Jim and Barbara really have been married since 1959? They must have left it extremely late to knock out a couple of kids!

I know it's only a comedy etc and a 50th anniversary's a bigger deal than, say, a 36th but surely a bit more thought should be put into continuity at the writing stage especially when people remember the "Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?" (in 1963) conversation from an earlier series (Barbara was at the pictures with a previous boyfriend) so, in a very small way, it did spoil The Golden Egg Cup a bit!

Still, much better than last year's effort (Dave's Dad didn't work at all!) and always good to see them on!

[–] floydthebarber 15 years ago

I thought David senior was the best part about last years special.

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[–] Finkle-is-Einhorn 15 years ago

exactactly plus in season 1 jim celebrates a 40 something birthday and has mentioned to dave that he and barbara have been together for i think 20 or 30 something years and theyve never had a cross word

[–] Dlp07 15 years ago

"50 Years My A_rse!"

-Love that, Benjamin.

I think the most glaring oddity would be getting married in '59 then not having any children until the 70's and 80's!

Dave's dad was funny- just not at all believable as Dave's father!

[–] knife_of_justice 15 years ago

Well Denise was obviously born not long after 1959, and Anthony was an 'afterthought', in the same way Claire Grant (daughter of the 'Jim' and 'Barbara' actors) in Brookside was. In real life Caroline Aherne (Denise) is 18 years older.

It could be that Jim and Barbara had a whirlwind romance and married in 1959, became estranged (which isn't uncommon), didn't bother to get a divorce, and then some years later, probably late 60s/early 70s, something happened to cement them back together (probably Denise), which is why Jim and Barbara referred to being together for 27 years back in 1998. The 'real' amount of years they have been married has probably been an irrelevance in the past, but they can milk the 50 for all it's worth if they are going to get more presents out of it.

Something similar happened to someone I used to work with. She had a baby with her partner, split up during the pregnancy and 16 years later were reconciled and are getting married... now the 16 year old son doesn't know if he should change to his father's name along with his mother, or keep her maiden name as his own....

[–] suiycfui 15 years ago

Don't you think that's stretching REEEEAAAALLLL hard to make someone else's script work? Maybe it happened to someone else once before, but I don't think the average viewer is going to buy that.

[–] Finkle-is-Einhorn 15 years ago

denise was26 in series 1 i.e 1998 so she was born in 72

[–] Mister-Monkey 15 years ago

Aren't we missing something here though? I may be wrong about this, but I immediately ruled out the notion that Jim and Barbara can have been married for so long. The characters seemed to look much older, in particular Barbara and Antony. Jim's beard seemed to have much more grey in it too. Could it have been set in the future? (The programme, not just Jim's beard.) It may seem strange, but it seems to me to be the only way that they could reasonably have been married for fifty years.

In this way, the question about what they were doing at the time of the Kennedy assassination would make sense. I noticed that Denise still referred to her son as "Baby David" when she talked about the tomato flavoured crisps, but maybe she was always going to refer to him that way, irrespective of his age?

[–] knife_of_justice 15 years ago

To make that fit with the show's arithmetic it would have to be about 2021!!

But maybe we should just accept it as a contrivance. Caroline Aherne has nothing more revolutionary to say, the show has passed the litmus test and present shows don't really need to prove the overall programme's social impact anymore. It wouldn't surprise me if she nor Craig have watched a single episode of the show since 2000.

Why are people so fussy about the date discrepancies, when Barbara has been made so imbecilic.. all she seems to do these days is repeat a stupid concept with a naive glee ("Oooh, a partially stocked shop!", "Flame retarded!", "All three meats!"). Is this really the product of 11 years character development? Has she been made giddy and weakened following Norma's death or do the writers feel like they have just gone everywhere they can with the character (including bloody Prestatyn!). Just seems lazy and formulaic to me.

[–] samanthaseaotter 15 years ago

In series 1, Denise is reported to be 26 (Jim explodes "it took us 26 years to get bloody rid of her!" when Barbara asks what night Denise and Dave will come around to have their tea and Denise names every day but two.)

Caroline Aherne was older than 26 in Series 1 but I think we conveniently forget it for the special, where the real age of Denise is more believable (if I'm not mistaken, she's about 46 now).

Continuity is always an issue - in series 1, Jim is constantly reminding us that Dave's dad Dave is on the disability for having one leg and then in the special, played by the brilliant Tom Courtenay (I love the way he drawls "Bar-barra" every other line), he's a former Army guy with two perfectly functioning legs. And when it comes to continuity, Red Dwarf is guilty of megamillions of "oopses" and Mssrs. Naylor and Grant just shrugged and said, "So what?"

Samantha
"We're here. We're dead. Get used to it."

[–] Mister-Monkey 15 years ago

"To make that fit with the show's arithmetic it would have to be about 2021!!"

Yes, what's wrong with that? It's only eleven years away, after all.

"Why are people so fussy about the date discrepancies, when Barbara has been made so imbecilic"

Personally I can handle Barbara being imbecilic because as you say, the writers may feel they can't take her character any further. This happens and it's not really anybody's fault. But discrepancies in continuity annoy me because they are caused by needless carelessness.

[–] knife_of_justice 15 years ago

OK well I for one will be highly surprised if the One Show with Adrian Chiles will still be running in 2021.

Maybe Aherne is the kind of writer who believes that in order to place herself in the reality of these characters, she doesn't watch any of the episodes, as that would give her a reviewing priviledge the Royles don't have. So it's likely she didn't realise how casual she had been over the years with birth/death dates.