More TV Memories – Full House.

Full House (ABC, 1987-1995)

You might have realised that I am not really that interested in the sappier end of American sitcoms, especially the domestic ones. But this is one that I was briefly fond of rather a long time ago now. You have to understand that I was only nine years old at the time, what was I thinking. As I have said before, I never had satellite TV in the early/mid-90s, but I did know a few people who did, and occasionally I visited their houses.

This meant that I could see Sky One’s exciting weekday evening schedule of imports and stuff for myself. One of the shows that turned up a lot in the mid-90s was the American sitcom Full House (not to be confused with the 80s ITV sitcom with the same name, or indeed the short-lived weekly womens’ magazine). I don’t really remember much about why all of the characters lived together, but it was something like this.

Someone had a few children, and a couple of his relatives would help him out in raising them (I suppose we should be lucky that this wasn’t called My Three Dads). But one of them had a terrific mullet hairstyle, and he had previously appeared in the sitcom You Again? (the American version of Home To Roost) that I reviewed a while ago. This is also the show that famously launched the careers of the very successful Olsen twins.

Aren’t they adorable with their scene stealing performances? Well no, not really. This led to plenty of consequences that could almost be described as hilarious, almost. And if you thought all of that was exciting, Kirk Cameron once turned up in an episode, he was considered a “hunk” by the teenagers at the time (and he was the brother of one of the girls in the show for real you see), nobody could believe it.

And remember to watch to the end to discover what all of the characters had learned in that episode. Full House ran for almost 200 episodes in eight series. I don’t think that there was ever a DVD release in this country, maybe that’s no loss. I don’t recall this being shown on any other channel apart from Sky One either. Uncle Jesse never became the sitcom superstar here that he should’ve done really, how disappointing.

I know that the more outrageous sitcoms of the time including The Simpsons and Married… With Children were designed to blow way this sappy type of comedy away from TV for good, but about two decades on, there was a revival, which was probably renamed Even More Full House, where the children are now parents themselves, and things are as crazy as they ever were. It’s exactly what Netflix was invented for.