Goodnight Sweetheart

I hope you are all well.

[upbeat music] My special guest today is Nick Phillips, a prolific television director who, as well as 20 hard-hitting episodes of The Bill, his many directing credits include Brookside, Casualty, Coronation Street, EastEnders, and the sitcoms Barbara, Birds of a Feather, Desmond's, Goodnight Sweetheart, and My Family.

[upbeat music] Working in the screen trade since 1968, Nick got his drama directing debut on LWT's The Gentle Touch, the first police procedural with a leading female detective, DI Maggie Forbes, played by the late great Jill Gascoine.

I interviewed Nick last year to capture his memories of working on The Gentle Touch for Best of British Magazine.

You do.

Like, uh, Nicholas Lyndhurst in Goodnight Sweetheart?

[laughs]

[laughs]

Do you not know that reference?

I know who that is.

Do you know Goodnight Sweetheart, where he basically gets traveled back in time to wartime-

Oh, this is a wild sitcom idea

If you're going back in time...

I would do, and I think about this all the time, do you remember Goodnight Sweetheart?

Oh, yes, I loved that.

When Rodney would go back in time.

Nick Lenhurst too was very busy.

He didn't start Goodnight Sweetheart until 1993 but from 1990 until 1992...

He was also busy working on The Piglet Files.

I guess quite surprisingly at this point in 1991, they were actually able to find the time to fly to Miami to film on location for the 1991 Christmas special Miami Twice.

I wanted to give a quick mention to something else as well.

Goodnight Sweetheart, the TV show, has finally got its series seven.

Our friends over at Idiot Box Books managed to get their Kickstarter funded, and the novel is coming out that they were Kickstarting.

That is coming out on the 1st of October.

Was this when Open All Hours again came back?

Possibly, yes.

Yeah, I think it was, and I think they picked up a version of Porridge as well, which seemed weird, 'cause out of all of them in there, Goodnight Sweetheart was the one that, that seemed to get the most traction, and then the BBC just, for whatever reason, decided that they weren't gonna do it.

So the novel also moves things into 1962.