Keeping Up Appearances

Keeping Up Appearances is a British sitcom by Roy Clarke. It was shown on BBC One from 1990 to 1995 and is set in the West Midlands. It stars Patricia Routledge as middle-aged, middle-class, English housewife Hyacinth Bucket, who has narcissistic and obsessive-compulsive personality disorders and lives in a suburban house with her civil servant husband Richard. She insists that her surname is pronounced Bouquet. She is the eldest of four sisters. She has a gay son who lives away from home and is studying needlework at a polytechnic college. She is proud of her sister Violet, who is married to a rich but eccentric man. Hyacinth is embarrassed by her lazy sister Daisy, her lazy husband Onslow, her histrionic sister Rose and demented father, who are underclass and live in a nearby council house. The sitcom is about Hyacinth's attempts to prove her superiority and high social status (and that of her husband and unseen son), her attempts of being accepted by the upper class and people of high position, and her trying to hide her underclass family.