Falling in love with Judi Dench and Michael Williams in A Fine Romance on Rewind

Written by Bob Larbey – of The Good Life fame – it takes its name from the Jerome Kern song whose lyrics run: A fine romance with no kisses, a fine romance by friends this is. We should be like a couple of hot tomatoes, but you’re as cold as yesterday’s mashed potatoes.

Sung by the sitcom’s leading lady Dame Judi Dench, it perfectly encaptures her character Laura’s relationship with Mike, played by her then real-life husband the late Michael Williams.

Like Dench’s later sitcom As Time Goes By, it has everything: charm, pathos, engaging characters, heart, soul and humour.

The latter seems to be a given – I point you to Not Going Out or My Family – not a laugh in either, just bickering and the hurling of insults.

Like Larbey’s Ever Decreasing Circles with Penelope Wilton’s Anne married to the dull Richard Briers’s Martin besieged by the handsome and interesting Peter Egan’s Paul, it is underlined by an aching melancholy.

That is something the romantics among us can wallow in while we wait for our prince to come – knowing he never will or has already ridden by.

The premise of A Fine Romance, middle-aged Laura and Mike meet at her sister's party, hate each other, gradually that turns to like then love – but a love that neither party seems to be able to enjoy.

Mike is a landscape gardener and Laura an interpreter – they are miles apart in background, class and aspiration.

In common – neither are among the ‘beautiful people’, both are blunderers, lonely underdogs and have never found ‘the one’.

That is in contrast to the happy married lives of Laura’s younger sister Helen and her husband Phil – played respectively by Susan Penhaligan and Richard Warwick.

They are younger, better looking, better off, successful and live in semi-detached, Laura Ashley wall-papered, pine-furnitured bliss.

They also want Laura and Mike to have what they have got – not only beautiful, handsome and well-off but generous too. They make you sick – which is the point.

That the two actors hold their own with only soppy sentiment to play against Dench and Willaims is testimony to their talent.

The four series ran from 1981 to 1984, was nominated for 10 BAFTAs and was a winner of two for Dench’s performances in 1982 and 1985.

Dench was considered its star. She was the one with the reputation. Her performance has depth and nuance. She is wonderfully watchable.

For me, it’s Williams who steals the show. His Mike is a pessimist, repressed, he seldom smiles and is dressed every episode in brown.

He is not only a glass-half-full man but if anyone’s beer mat is going to stick to the bottom of the glass when he lifts it, it’s Mike’s – and it does every episode.

It’s a running gag – like when the keys stick on his fingers when he tries to flick them to a hotel porter or he misses the peg when he tosses his hat towards the coat stand – James Bond never misses. See Sean Connery in From Russia With Love.

They are visual gags, sure, but they are also there for a reason – to signal character. Mike never gets it right and life always smacks him in the face.

In one episode Mike accompanies Laura to a seminar in – of course – an out-of-season rainy Worthing.

He plays a lone round of crazy golf and his ball goes missing on the course. Williams never said a word, his expressions of disappointment and defeat made me cry.

He says more with a look than Dench does with two pages of dialogue.

Laura and Mike’s relationship is rocky, prickly, buttoned up, fragile emotionally backward and yet you still root for them because they are lovely people who deserve to be happy – every bit as much as beautiful people do.

The fact Dench and Williams were married in real-life means the chemistry between them fizzes.

Willaims revelled in his wife’s success. He also adored her and had a single red rose delivered to her every Friday, no matter where in the world she was.

To find out if Laura and Mike get their happily ever after tune into Rewind every week day at 6pm.