The 1992 role Judi Dench couldn’t believe became a sensation in America: “Very curious”
Americans have a strange relationship with British TV comedy, in that, for some reason, they don’t think we’ve made any for about 30 years.
Rather than The Thick of It or The Detectorists, or the original (and best) The Office, ask anyone in Trumpville to name a funny UK sitcom they like, and they’ll say ‘Oh, I love that one with Hyacinth Bucket’, or As Time Goes By with Judi Dench.
To be fair to our corndog-chomping chums over the pond, though, Britain did have an undoubted golden age of making sitcoms, with the mighty Fawlty Towers, Only Fools and Horses and the last series of Blackadder springing to mind. It’s just debatable whether the endless shows about quarrelling couples in suburbia in the 1990s, of which there were a lot, deserve to join those ranks.
According to Dench, however, the Americans go crazy for her show in which she starred opposite Geoffrey Palmer as two former lovers who lose touch only to be reunited after 40 years. It ran between 1992 and 2002, and although you don’t see repeats on British TV, it has played pretty much ever since on the perennially popular BBC America.
Dench played Jean in the romantic sitcom, a widowed single mother running an agency for secretaries, who is swept off her feet by Palmer’s Lionel, a former Kenyan coffee planter who moves to the UK in order to write his memoirs. Dench herself admits she’s a bit surprised at the fact that they still like it so much over there, saying: “It’s on a continuous loop. They can’t help it! It’s in front of them”.
Quite typically for Americans, they also don’t seem to be able to not go completely over the top about it either, with Dench adding, “I had a woman write in to tell us she was sending a quilt for the bed because that’s not the kind of quilt we’d have. Very curious”
Dench was already almost 60 when the series began on TV, but she was barely getting started in terms of what she would go on to achieve in the latter part of her career. In fact, of her eight Academy Award nominations, one of which she won for Shakespeare in Love, six of them came after 2000, including her most recent nod for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ in Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast in 2022 at the age of 87.
Things have quite understandably slowed down for her since then, although she did take part in a one-off at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2023, where she discussed her career and performed songs from some of the musical titles she acted in, like 2009’s Nine, which was an Anthony Minghella-penned drama with Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman.
She hasn’t completely packed things in however; aside from needlessly walking a tightrope of ruining her legendary 20-year Bond legacy of playing M by taking those Moneysupermarket ads, she also did the voice of the enchanted fridge in this year’s ultra-posh kids fantasy movie The Magic Faraway Tree starring Andrew Garfield, which got plenty of good reviews despite just basically imagining what would happen if someone went to Eton and spiked the Pimms with LSD.
