I hate you Gary Sparrow
In Back to the Future Part Two, the character Biff manages to take a sports almanac back in time, giving him the ultimate edge over the bookmakers. The Terminator visits the past to eliminate the mother of the leader of the resistance, before she has the chance to give birth to him. Ray Bradbury’s characters used time travel to hunt dinosaurs.
Gary Sparrow has rather less grand ideas, and uses a time portal at the end of his road to embark on an affair with a woman who, in his real timeline, is 40 years his senior. Goodnight Sweetheart is a preposterous sit-com currently being repeated on ITV3. A real mark of quality, a program too shit for ITV2.
Played by Nicholas Lyndhurst, the Peter-Crouch faced goon who you might recognise as Karl from the 1978 series “The Tomorrow People”, Gary Sparrow is supposed to be a bit of light relief. He’s actually a lying, manipulative cheat, selfishly and secretively using the time portal for a bit on the side and to profit through selling antiques.
Somehow, because his cheating takes place under air-raid sirens, his endless “sales conferences in Harrow” are funny rather than destroying the life of his innocent wife. Ha! The silly sod’s only gone and walked into the past with a pair of jeans on. How’s he going to explain that one? Oh: With more lies.
His deceit doesn’t end there, as he pre-plagiarises the songs of Lennon and McCartney, hiding his copyright infringement behind a good ol’ fashioned east end sing song. Forging ration books and currency are crimes against the entire country – a country at war! All so his missus can have some stockings. You’re a kinky one, Sparrow.
Are you outraged yet? You should be. Worst of all, the biggest crime of the lot: It’s not even a little bit funny. The bloody thing ran for six years. Six years! 58 episodes, or over 24 hours of this drivel and not even a titter.
Gary’s ambitions are amazingly limited (by the terrible writing), which sees him make a total of one attempt at helping the war effort, and even then it’s for the Americans. A half-hearted attempt at stopping Pearl Harbour – which is like a grand pearl necklace – sees him questioned as a spy. A heart-warming Christmas special where he’s detained and beaten by Dad’s Army would serve as a fair and reasonable comeuppance for his previous transgressions.
In one episode, he does try Biff Tanner style gambling, but in a hilariously bumbling sit-com way, the illegal bookmakers is rigged and he walks away with nothing. Instead of doing things in a real-life, normal way, refining the plan and doing it properly, he just gives up and never mentions it again. The “Tom Hanks in The Terminal” method of never achieving anything.
A lying, cheating, fraud with no regard for the butterfly effect or changing the course of history for the better, instead having illicit sex with Dervla Kirwan. Fair enough, actually. Until she got replaced by the moon-faced one after a few series and he didn’t notice. And for that, he’s an idiot.