Open All Hours

1970s British tv sitcom

Small grocer’s shop on the corner of the street like many others in Yorkshire. The stingy owner, Arkwright, who sees costs everywhere, especially in his nephew Granville, who delivers the orders and demands to eat every day!

Arkwright runs a old-fashioned grocer’s shop on the corner of one of the streets of Doncaster suburbs. He sees the world through the money-coloured glasses - either he is obsessed with selling the customers things they did not came to buy or he is cutting down costs of his business, usually by forcing his nephew Granville, who is errand boy in the shop, to take part in ridiculous schemes. Granville is depressed by his life - he works all day for almost no wages, he has no time nor style to go on dates, he has to drive an obsolete shop bicycle while delivering the orders to their clients. The only bright element in their lives is the nurse Gladys Emmanuel living across the street - she is mother-figure for Granville and she awakes the inborn dirty old man in Arkwright.

One of the sitcoms that started as an episode of Ronnie Barker’s anthology Seven of One, Open All Hours had the longest run of all of them (4 seasons) and was successful at premiere. Based on personal experience of Roy Clarke it had at times a bit gloomy atmosphere of dull existence in the suburbs. There were some good episodes, there were some great moments in the series (Ronnie Barker as always gave great performance), but also with time the formula seemed to fade away - the first series was great, second was very good, but in the other two series Open All Hours sunk below the surface and most of the episodes were rather bland and concentrated on sale-drives or Arkwright’s selling techniques (or rather entrapments).

In 2014 sequel to the series, Still Open All Hours, was created by Roy Clarke, and also was featuring part of the original cast (David Jason, Lynda Baron, Stephanie Cole).

Rating	7.2
Funny	7 / 10
Entertaining	4 / 5
Characters	4 / 5
Nonrepetitive	3 / 5