Till Death Us Do Part is a British television sitcom that aired on BBC1 from 1965 to 1975. The show was first broadcast in 1965 as a Comedy Playhouse pilot, then as seven series between 1966 and 1975. In 1981, ITV continued the sitcom for six episodes, calling it Till Death.... The BBC produced a sequel from 1985 until 1992, In Sickness and in Health.
Created by Johnny Speight, Till Death Us Do Part centred on the East End Garnett family, led by patriarch Alf Garnett (Warren Mitchell), a reactionary white working-class man who holds racist and anti-socialist views. His long-suffering wife Else was played by Dandy Nichols, and his daughter Rita by Una Stubbs. Rita's husband Mike Rawlins (Anthony Booth) is a socialist "layabout" from Liverpool who frequently locks horns with Garnett. Alf Garnett became a well-known character in British culture, and Mitchell played him on stage and television until Speight's death in 1998.
In addition to the spin-off In Sickness and in Health, Till Death Us Do Part was remade in several countries including Germany (Ein Herz und eine Seele), and the Netherlands (as Tot de dood ons scheidt) in 1969 and as Met goed fatsoen in 1975, the latter was never broadcast; In Sickness and in Health was adapted as in 1991–1997). It is also the show that inspired All in the Family in the United States, which, in turn, inspired the Brazilian A Grande Família. Many episodes from the first three series are thought no longer to exist, having been destroyed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as was the policy at the time.
In 2000, the show was ranked number 88 on the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes list compiled by the British Film Institute. The title is a reference to the Marriage Liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer.
Series
Success years The series became an instant hit because, although a comedy, it dealt with aspects of working-class life comparatively realistically and in the context of its time. It addressed racial and political issues that had been becoming increasingly prevalent in British society. Mitchell imbued the character of Alf Garnett with an earthy charm that served to humanise Alf and make him likeable. According to interviews he gave, the fact that some viewers overlooked Alf's racist views and regarded him as a "rough diamond" disappointed Speight.
The show captured a key feature of Britain in the 1960s – the public perception that the generation gap was widening. Alf, and to a lesser degree his wife, represented the old guard, the traditional and conservative attitudes of the older generation. Alf's battles with his left-wing son-in-law were not just ideological but generational and cultural. His son-in-law and daughter represented the younger generation. They supported the aspects of the new era, such as relaxed sexual norms, as well as new fashions and styles of music. The same things were anathema to Alf and in his opinion indicative of everything that was wrong with the younger generation and the liberal attitudes they embraced.
Alf was portrayed as the archetypal working-class Conservative. His two primary passions were football and politics, though his actual knowledge of either was limited. He used language considered unacceptable for television in the 1960s. He often referred to racial minorities as "coons" and similar terms. He referred to his Liverpudlian son-in-law as "Shirley Temple" or a "randy Scouse git" (a phrase that caught the ear of Micky Dolenz of the Monkees, who heard it while on tour in the UK and used it as the title of the group's next single – though their record label renamed it "Alternate Title" in the UK market to avoid controversy), and to his wife as a "silly [old] moo" (a substitute for "cow" which was vetoed by the BBC's head of comedy Frank Muir). Michael Palin wrote in his diary for 16 July 1976 that Warren Mitchell told him that "silly moo" was not scripted: "It came out during a rehearsal when he forgot the line 'Silly old mare'." Controversially, the show was one of the earliest mainstream programmes to feature the swear word "bloody". The show was one of many held up by Mary Whitehouse as an example of the BBC's "moral laxity".See, for example, her responses to an episode referred to as "Bird Fancier" (first transmitted on 20 September 1972), which features a discussion of the virgin birth of Jesus, as detailed in Michael Tracey and David Morrison (1979), Whitehouse, London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 110–116. The episode is also known as "Pigeon Fancier", but the recording as broadcast contains no identifying caption.
In a demonstration of Speight's satirical skills – after a successful libel action brought against Speight by WhitehouseMark Ward (1996). "A Family at War: Till Death Do Us Part". The Main Event (Kaleidoscope brochure). . – he created an episode, first broadcast on 27 February 1967, in which Alf Garnett is depicted as an admirer of Whitehouse. Garnett was seen proudly reading her first book. "What are you reading?" his son-in-law asks. When he relates that it is Mary Whitehouse, his son-in-law sniggers. Alf's response is "She's concerned for the bleedin' moral fibre of the nation!" The episode ends with the book being burnt.Thompson (2012). Ban This Filth!: Letters From the Mary Whitehouse Archive London: Faber p. 12
Ultimately "silly moo" became a comic catchphrase. Another Garnett phrase was "it stands to reason", usually before making some patently unreasonable comment. Alf was portrayed as an admirer of Enoch Powell, a right-wing Conservative politician known particularly for his strong opposition to the immigration of people from non-white countries. Alf was also a supporter of West Ham United (a football club based in the East End) and known to make derogatory remarks about "the Jews up at Spurs" (referring to Tottenham Hotspur, a north London club with a sizeable Jewish following). This was a playful touch by Speight, as Warren Mitchell was both Jewish and a Tottenham Hotspur supporter.
In interviews, Speight explained he had originally based Alf on his father, an East End docker who was staunchly reactionary and held "unenlightened" attitudes toward black people. Speight made clear that he regretted that his father held such attitudes, which Speight regarded as reprehensible. Speight saw the show as a way of ridiculing such views and dealing with his complex feelings about his father.
It was later claimed in the book about the series, A Family at War by Mark Ward, that the only similarities between Alf and Speight's father were that his father was a hard-working, working-class East End docker and manual labourer who voted Conservative, revered traditional British values, and was very polite to everyone he met, no matter their background. It is claimed that Speight picked up the idea for Alf's bigoted personality from railway station porters he met when he had worked in temporary jobs for British Rail in the London area. The political views of both Alf and Mike were reflective of Speight's own perception of people both on the left and the right, with the ignorance and bigotry of those on the right represented by Alf and the idealism of many sections of the left represented by Mike.
Original decline Johnny Speight gained a reputation for late delivery of scripts, sometimes unfinished and still in the form of rough notes (which would be finished and finalised as a script by the script editor and cast during rehearsals), either close to, on, or occasionally past the deadline. This was claimed by Speight to ensure maximum topicality for the series, although this was disputed by the programme's first producer, Dennis Main Wilson, who stated that Speight was frequently found late at night in a regular selection of West End bars, and that on more than one occasion the writer had to be physically dragged out of such establishments by Wilson and driven home to get the scripts typed up and finished.
This was the reason for the second series consisting of ten episodes rather than the commissioned thirteen. As three scripts that were scheduled to be recorded and broadcast towards the end of that series were not ready and actors, crew and Speight had already been paid in advance for thirteen episodes, it was decided that an Easter Monday bank holiday special – "Till Closing Time Us Do Part" – would be made and that this would mostly be made up of the cast and crew ad-libbing within the broad confines of a plot. For accounting reasons, this would be considered an 11th episode of the second series. At double the usual length, it also made up for screen time of a 12th episode. The addition of this episode meant that only one week's worth of pay was wasted, rather than three. Normally, a sitcom would have plenty of time (ranging from several weeks to several months) between recording and transmission to iron out any such script delivery problems. To ensure maximum topicality, most episodes of the second series of Till Death Us Do Part were recorded less than seven days before their intended transmission date, and as all studios would be booked on other nights for other – sometimes more important – productions, this meant that the recording of Till Death Us Do Part episodes could not be moved to another night or another studio should the script not be ready in time for rehearsals or recording. Should this happen (which it did towards the end of the second series), this would mean no episode ready for transmission that week and, because of the very short gap between recording and transmission and lack of unbroadcast episodes to replace them, other programmes had to be used to fill in the schedule in the last three planned weeks of the second series' thirteen-episode run. It is because of these problems of topicality delaying (sometimes cancelling) scripts that the third series is noticeably less topical than the second and had some weeks between recording and transmission to act as a "cushion" to ensure continuity of the series should one or more episodes fall through.
The late delivery of scripts had been a problem that had first reared its head during production of the first series. The second series got off to a good start in this respect with the first four scripts being delivered ahead of the deadline, but it became clear as that series wore on that Speight was having these problems again. Amongst a myriad of other problems (detailed below), the final straw for the original run appears to have been a script in the final (third) series of eight episodes not being delivered in time for rehearsals to begin and thus losing one episode. This confirmed to the BBC their suspicions that Speight was not an ideal writer to be writing for a topical sitcom.