In some ways this is the most interesting of the current Landmark Sitcom Season reboots, in some ways it is the least interesting. Original writer of Keeping Up Appearances Roy Clarke has come up with a prequel following the fortunes of the young Hyacinth to show how the future Hyacinth Bucket was shaped. 

The always good and very versatile Kerry Howard is the star and it is basically Howard that makes this so watchable. She works as a maid in a 1950s posh house where she learns long words and gets a taste for the middle class lifestyle and bone china even though her employers the Cooper-Smiths (Tony Gardner and Debra Stephenson) seem to be at each other’s throats most of the time.

Back in her own home Hyacinth lives a life of “genteel squalor” with her three sisters Violet (Tamla Kari), Daisy (Katherine Pearce), Rose (Katie Redford) and her father, a brush salesman played by Mark Addy. Addy seems to be channeling Les Dawson as he trundles drunkenly along the canal path on his tricycle (with inevitable damp consequences). He does have some good Lawson-ish lines though. He says his wife was killed in the Blitz when she actually left him and was partial to a tipple: “she was often bombed, I’ll give you that.”

The story is certainly pretty to watch - Roy Clarke was also behind that other scenic long-runner, Last of the Summer Wine, and Young Hyacinth could do for canals what that sitcom did for baths rolling down hills. This is pleasant enough but after a run of striking remakes of classics this may be a little too soft-centred and sentimental for some tastes.