"I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive" by Hank Williams
Married is a BBC radio comedy with science fiction themes, first aired on BBC Radio 4 from March 1999 to October 2001[1].The main character is Robin Lightfoot, a confirmed bachelor with a successful architectural practice, who wakes up one day in a parallel universe in which he is married with two children. Unfortunately his counterpart in the parallel universe, who has evidently been swapped into our universe, is a cad, a womanizer, a swindler and possibly a murderer. Only the younger of the two children, Ned, believes Robin's story, largely because he reads about parallel universes in comic books.
Apart from his previously unknown wife Leslie, and the children Maxine and Ned, Robin finds the new universe populated by people he already knows, but who are different. His former business partner Dirk is still his partner in this universe, but the business is writing greeting card messages, and Dirk, who is married in our universe, is an unmarried sexual addict in the alternate one.
The ruling monarch is a King John, son of King Richard who dies during the first series. Richard was apparently the son of Edward VIII who got cold feet at the last minute when about to abdicate. King John, however, is openly gay so the prospects for an immediate heir are not good. While as Prince John he was known as an adventurer, setting records for ballooning, soon after his coronation he abandons the Royal spouse in favour of his gay lover, who was also his partner in his adventures.
The place where Robin lives, an alternate Surrey, is economically depressed while North East England is prosperous. Some forms of alcohol are illegal, while marijuana is legal.
Famous people in our universe are re-imagined for satirical effect. Tony Blair is the leader of the Conservative Party which is currently out of power, the government being in the hands of the Liberal Democrats. Stephen Fry is a Royal Biographer, and Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark is a homeless waif who sets fire to telephone boxes. Art critic Brian Sewell is the celebrated designer and manufacturer of ultra-modern "S-plan" furniture. TV presenter John Humphrys is an outrageous performance artist who likes to perform naked.
Dealing with the fallout from the activities of the other Robin, and wondering if he'd like to keep this new life, form much of the plot of the first series of six episodes, first broadcast in 1999. Another series aired the following year.
In the opener, Robin returns from visiting a client to tell Dirk that he has decided to decline the contract. The partnership's main line of business is nursery schools and day care centres for the prosperous families of Surrey. The client in question was demanding more parking for SUV's. Dirk suggests that Robin's generally curmudgeonly outlook is due to not having a happy family life like him. Robin responds that he doesn't need other people in his life and that the person he most respects is himself.
Next morning Robin wakes up in his house, to find Leslie next to him and "his" children Ned and Maxine arguing over access to the bathroom. He decides that Leslie and the kids are ingenious squatters, but abandons that when he sees that "his" kitchen looks entirely different. He then thinks that it is all an elaborate practical joke created by Dirk. This theory crumbles bit by bit, the coup de grace being delivered when the local police and emergency services are called to the house of their neighbours, the Needhams. In Robin's universe the family are irritatingly perfect. In this universe they are dysfunctional alcoholics whose children are well known to the local magistrates. In addition, the constable in charge of the situation is Robin's dentist in the other universe. Even Robin's mother Julia is changed: in his universe she is married to his father and is inclined to let fly with a shotgun at anything that moves on her land, but in the new universe she is a serial monogamist who marries and divorces younger men. Robin also has two new half-brothers, both called Ian.
As the series proceeds Robin begins to warm to his sudden family, especially "his" precocious son Ned who believes him and even has some theories about alternate universes. Just as Robin and Leslie have begun to have marital relations, which ironically convinces Leslie that he really is not her Robin, women begin showing up demanding that Robin acknowledge paternity of their children.
Robin engages a children's entertainer for Ned's birthday, who turns out to be comedian Arthur Smith. Robin tries to launch Arthur's career with the material created by the Arthur Smith in his universe. Arthur seems more interested in dating Maxine at first, but rejects her as soon as he begins to become successful.
Series 2
In the second series, Robin seems to be trapped in the alternate universe despite an occasional fall through into ours and back. His life in our universe has been wrecked by the other Robin, who has liquidated all his assets and absconded with the money. To add insult to injury, his "wife" Leslie divorces him in the alternate universe, forcing him to leave the house he owned in both universes for a damp basement flat. From time to time, however, the evil Robin slips back to add mayhem, as when he kills Leslie's lover, a "puffinologist" from Scotland called Murdo.
Comedian Arthur Smith appears as himself, both as the "original" and as an alternate version who steals his alter ego's material, becoming a fabulously rich resident of the select enclave of Worthing, West Sussex.
In one episode, Robin realizes that antique collecting is unknown in the new universe, so he can buy fine old furniture for a song and sell it to the prosperous citizens of Newcastle-upon-Tyne at a high profit. Unfortunately his alter-ego's problems with the Inland Revenue mean that he is told to either stop the business or pay all the back taxes he owes.
As the second series ends, universes collide resulting in two Tony Blairs indulging in fisticuffs on television, while the evil Robin returns, only to dissolve into green goo. Robin Lightfoot returns to his "family", Leslie gives birth to twins and daughter Maxine pops out a baby as well, the father being one of the Arthur Smiths. Bliss is forestalled when the Leslie whom Robin knew is replaced by one from our universe. Her only encounter with him resulted in a trip to the hospital. She abandons the home and leaves Robin in charge. Maxine rejects Arthur, as she preferred the other one who rejected her.
Series 3
The third series opens with England recovering from the devastating effects of the collision of universes. Whole towns have disappeared, BBC reporters are being killed and eaten in the countryside, and there is a campaign to help all the "glops", people who find themselves sharing a body with a personality from the other universe. One such has the personalities of TV presenters Mariella Frostrup and Carol Smillie.
Robin goes through personality changes as Leslie becomes an artist while Dirk, who had always coveted the other Leslie, ingratiates himself with her. A new character, Alan, was Maxine's best female friend before the universes collided, but has changed into a boy who wants a boy-girl relationship with Maxine. Temporal and spatial anomalies keep springing surprises which are used to drive plots, such as the episode where the King's gay lover suddenly materializes, having been trapped in a pink bubble since the Universes collided.
The fourth episode of the third series was not broadcast until 2007. This episode involves an adventure in a time anomaly where Robin and Leslie were imprisoned in a Surrey ruled by Americans, while Dirk was their gaoler. The episode was presumably omitted due to the events and aftermath of September 11, 2001 (the scheduled transmission date was 21 September 2001), and not reinstated until the series' third repeat run on BBC7.
The third season ends with Robin using a time portal in his bath, leading from his birthday in 2001 to the day of his birth in 1955, in "his" universe. He finds himself sharing "his" house with Muriel and Archie, a perfect 1950s couple who have all the right things and regularly drink themselves senseless to alleviate the boredom.
Robin tries to return when all the other members of his household follow him to 1955, but discovers that the time portal is no longer there as it is after midnight, and no longer his "birth" day. He is trapped with the Lightfoot children and grandchildren, the "wrong" Leslie, and Arthur Smith, who is several decades too early for "alternative" comedy. Dirk attempts to go to 1955, but instead ends up in 1978, a time which he thinks he will enjoy.
Related Research Articles
Brian Arthur John Smith is an English alternative comedian, presenter and writer.
Judging Amy is an American legal drama television series that was telecast from September 19, 1999, through May 3, 2005, on CBS. This TV series starred Amy Brenneman and Tyne Daly. Its main character (Brenneman) is a judge who serves in a family court for the Connecticut Superior Court's Hartford district; in addition to the family-related cases that she adjudicates, many episodes focus on her experiences as a divorced mother and on the experiences of her mother, a social worker in the field of child welfare. This series was based on the life experiences of Brenneman's mother.
Edward "Ned" Leeds is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. A supporting character in stories featuring the superhero Spider-Man, he has been a reporter for the Daily Bugle, and husband of Betty Brant. Leeds is one of the characters that appears under the mantle of the supervillain Hobgoblin. For a long time believed to be his true identity. However, ten years following his assassination, he is retroactively established to have been brainwashed to serve as a stand-in for actual Hobgoblin and later left to be killed when he was no longer deemed necessary. The character was revived in a 2018–2021 storyline, and later brainwashed again to serve as Hobgoblin once more. Synergetic with his MCU adaptation, Ned's Hobgoblin was revealed to be a sorcerer, having trained under Baron Mordo in the art of reality-altering chaos magic in Symbiote Spider-Man.
Catweazle is a British children's fantasy television series, starring Geoffrey Bayldon in the title role, and created by Richard Carpenter for London Weekend Television. The first series, produced and directed in 1969 by Quentin Lawrence, was screened in the UK on ITV in 1970. The second series, produced and directed in 1970 by David Reid and David Lane, was shown in 1971. Each series had thirteen episodes, most but not all written by Carpenter, who also published two books based on the scripts.
"Viva Ned Flanders" is the tenth episode of the tenth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It first aired on the Fox network in the United States on January 10, 1999. In the episode, Ned Flanders, who is revealed to be 60 years old, feels that he has not lived his life to the fullest. He asks for help from his neighbor, Homer Simpson, who takes Ned to Las Vegas to show him "the right way to live". However, while there, the two become intoxicated and accidentally marry two cocktail waitresses.
The Tertiary Phase, Quandary Phase, Quintessential Phase and Hexagonal Phase are respectively the third, fourth, fifth and sixth series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series. Produced in 2003, 2004 and 2018 by Above the Title Productions for BBC Radio 4, they are radio adaptations of the third, fourth, fifth and sixth books in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series: Life, the Universe and Everything; So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish; Mostly Harmless and And Another Thing....
Maximilian "Maxie" Zeus is a supervillain appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics, primarily as a minor enemy of Batman. He is depicted as a mentally ill former history professor who is obsessed with Greek mythology and believes himself to be the god Zeus, becoming a crime lord in Gotham City.
Roger Michael Hilary Minster was an English character actor.
Leslie Maurin Thompkins is a fictional character appearing in comic books published by DC Comics, usually as a supporting character in stories featuring Batman, of whom she is an ally. Created by writer Dennis O'Neil and artist Dick Giordano, she first appeared in Detective Comics #457.
Thomas Alan Wayne, M.D. is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. He is the father of Bruce Wayne (Batman), and husband of Martha Wayne as well as the paternal grandfather of Damian Wayne. Wayne was introduced in Detective Comics #33, the first exposition of Batman's origin story. A gifted surgeon and philanthropist to Gotham City, Wayne inherited the Wayne family fortune after Patrick Wayne. When Wayne and his wife are murdered in a street mugging, Bruce is inspired to fight crime in Gotham as the vigilante Batman.
"For the Man Who Has Everything" is a comic book story by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, first published in Superman Annual #11 (1985). It contains the first appearance of the Black Mercy, a magical, extraterrestrial, plant-like organism which, upon symbiotically attaching itself to its victims, incapacitates them while causing them to hallucinate living out their greatest fantasy.
In most of the DC Comics media, the Multiverse is a "cosmic construct" composed of the many fictional universes the stories of DC media take place in. The worlds in this multiverse share a space and fate in common, and its structure has changed several times in the history of DC Comics.
George III has featured in many examples of popular culture.
Walter Harold Bishop, Ph.D. is a fictional character on the Fox television series Fringe. He is portrayed by John Noble. Noble also plays Walter's counterpart in the show's parallel universe, who is referred to in the show as Walternate.
Ian Gallagher is a character from the British Channel 4 comedy drama Shameless and its American remake on Showtime.
Richard Daniel "Rick" Sanchez is one of the two eponymous characters from the Adult Swim animated television series Rick and Morty and resulting franchise. The character was created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, and voiced by the former during the first six seasons of the series, then by Ian Cardoni beginning with the seventh season. Yōhei Tadano provides his voice for Rick and Morty: The Anime, after voicing the character in the Japanese dub of the series and various promotional short films. Rick is a misanthropic, alcoholic scientist inspired by Christopher Lloyd's Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown from Back to the Future and Reed Richards / Mr. Fantastic from Marvel Comics. In September 2021, Lloyd portrayed Rick himself in a series of promotional interstitials for the series.
The first season of the American streaming television series The Punisher, which is based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name, sees Frank Castle uncover a conspiracy while seeking revenge for the death of his family. It is set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), sharing continuity with the films and other television series of the franchise. The season was produced by Marvel Television in association with ABC Studios and Bohemian Risk Productions, with Steve Lightfoot serving as showrunner.
Earth to Ned is an American television show on Disney+. It stars Ned, an alien from outer space who comes to Earth on a mission to invade it. Upon arriving, he fell in love with its pop culture, and instead hosts a late night talk show to meet and be entertained by Earth's celebrities. Earth to Ned premiered on September 4, 2020, on Disney+ and consisted of ten episodes. Ten more episodes were released on January 1, 2021. The series was removed from Disney+ on May 26, 2023.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
United Kingdom 
