Waiting for God: Season 1 (1990)

7/20/06

My first britcom and still my favorite is Waiting for God, which once ran ubiquitously on our local PBS affiliate in the mid-to-late 90's, has finally had its complete first season released on one DVD. Created by Michael Aitkens (who was only in his forties at the time), the show is set at the Bayside Retirement Village whose inmates, I mean residents spend their golden years waiting to meet their maker. Tom Ballard (Graham Crowden) is a retired accountant whose boring life has left him prone to flights of fantasy. When Tom's notoriously dull son Geoffrey (Andrew Tourell) at the bidding of his shrewish wife Marion (Sandra Payne), decides to check his father into the retirement community into which they have invested, the 'old man' is unhappily resigned to his fate. That is until he meets Diana Trent (Stephanie Cole), a former photo-journalist and his neighbor at Bayview who is a decided cynic and just lives to torment the community's cheap-skate administrator Harvey Baines (Daniel Hill) and his sweet natured, plan faced assistant Jane Edwards (Janine Duvitski). Full of reflections on death, God, and what it means to be old, Waiting for God is a rather philosophical sitcom that treats 'the aged' with both humor and dignity.