Joint Account

1 9 8 9 – 1 9 9 1 (UK)
16 x 30 minute episodes

Mid-Counties bank manager Belinda Braithwaite (Hannah Gordon) wanted to jump off the executive ladder and retire, but her househusband David (Peter Egan) liked things the way they were – despite being a graduate engineer who once had his own company – and didn’t want to go back to work, having spent eight contented years bringing up the children, cooking, ironing and doing social voluntary work.

He delivered meals on wheels, held coffee mornings, and helped out dispensing sympathy or solutions at the Citizens Advice Bureau.

They lived a cosy life in Overton, a small village just outside the market town of Elmsford. Like all other inhabitants of domestic sitcom land, the pair lived almost exclusively in a kitchen apparently designed by a winner at the Ideal Home Exhibition.

Now, with the children grown up and at university, Belinda was slightly disenchanted with her job and thought David should go back to work so she could escape the rat race and return to being a housewife.

Of course, there was a plump and irrepressibly cheerful neighbour (Lill Roughley) – self-described as “the slut next door” – who let herself in with her own key, popping in for chats with David in Belinda’s absence and making sexy innuendos and propositions

John Bird was impressive as Ned Race – Belinda’s harrassed deputy who was openly after her job – as he squeaked furiously in crumpled defeat.

Don Webb’s groan-a-minute script did no justice to two fine actors in Hannah Gordon and Peter Egan, and when the dialogue wasn’t banal it was bursting with innuendo more suited to a pair of teenagers than an old married couple.

Belinda Braithwaite
Hannah Gordon
David Braithwaite
Peter Egan
Ned Race
John Bird
Louise
Lill Roughley
Jessica 
Ruth Mitchell
Charles Ruby
Richard Aylen
Ricketts
Andrew Hilton

Video