More TV Memories – The Two Of Us.

The Two Of Us (ITV, 1986-1990)

This is another rather successful sitcom that was on ITV in the 80s, before the 90s came along, and they began to struggle to find a winning comedy formula. Even by this point, Nicholas Lyndhurst had been established as a big name in comedy after appearing in Only Fools And Horses for about five years, and he went on to star in this sitcom as well.

The Two Of Us (not to be confused with a short-lived American sitcom that was shown on ITV in the mid-80s) starred Lyndhurst as Ashley, who was a computer programmer (what an 80s occupation that is). If the late-80s was a time of excess, he was hoping to get some himself. He was rather fond of Elaine, and his aim was to get married and spend the rest of his life with her. But that wasn’t her aim, well not at this time in her life at least.

She wanted to do various other things and didn’t want to settle down and have children. Most of the episodes consisted of Ashley aiming to get a little closer to Elaine and hope she’ll see what things are like from his side, meaning that this was another one of those sitcoms where a constant “will they-won’t they” gently simmered away in everything that happened.

Other regular characters included Ashley’s granddad and friend, who he often turned to for advice, along with his parents, who weren’t really that keen on Elaine. This carried on until the fourth and final series when, well… they did it. Get married that is, in an extended episode, where it finally seemed that the time was right for them, and this must’ve pleased many a regular viewer.

And then it seemed that Elaine could be pregnant, and the happy family is finally beginning to happen, although this turned out to be the final episode. There were 32 episodes of The Two Of Us in four series, but not all of them have been released on DVD. This was popular enough for there to be an hour-long Christmas special, and there were some TV Times covers too.

Lyndhurst taking part definitely helped things go well, and shortly after this ended, he went into The Piglet Files, another sitcom produced by LWT. There were also some repeat runs on Granada Plus a while ago, but I can’t recall there ever being any on ITV3 in more recent years though. I wonder if they are still together all these years later…

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