Gary Sparrow

Gary Sparrow (played by Nicholas Lyndhurst) was the lead character in "Goodnight Sweetheart", a six series BBC sitcom that ran between 1993 and 1999.

Plot

During a service call out to a part of the East End he is not familiar with, Gary Sparrow, a TV repairman living an ordinary life in 1990s Cricklewood, unknowingly walks through a time portal to 1940s London. He does not realise what has happened at first and simply thinks he is lost. He wanders into a local public house (The Royal Oak) which, he decides must be a World War II theme pub; however, after an air raid, he realises the truth.

Upon discovering he can return to the future, Gary uses his time travelling ability to flit between the past and the present. He starts a cross-time romance with Royal Oak barmaid, Phoebe Bamford, while still living his regular life in the 1990s with wife Yvonne. Neither Yvonne nor Phoebe know that Gary is a time traveller (or an adulterer). Gary's only confidant is his modern day best friend and printer, Ron Wheatcroft. Ron is able to replicate items that Gary needs to get by in the past (such as period money and ration cards) and to help him present 'cover stories' to Yvonne, though he performs the latter rather unwillingly.

Gary exploits his obvious advantage as a person from the future by claiming to be a 'secret agent' with 'classified' information pertaining to the war. He also plays well-known songs on the piano that post-date his 1940s audience (for example; Beatles songs) and then claims he wrote them.

Eventually, both Phoebe and Yvonne are pregnant at the same time, making Gary's juggling of past and present lives even more complex. While Yvonne's pregnancy ends in miscarriage, Phoebe goes on to have a son they name Michael. During the pregnancy, Gary and Phoebe get married. In his conversations with Ron, Gary rationalises that he is not a bigamist, even though he is married to two different women: since Yvonne was not born yet during World War II (when Gary is married to Phoebe), and since Phoebe appears to have died at some point before the present (when Gary is married to Yvonne), Gary considers himself faithful to both wives. He argues that 'my wives exist in different temporal aspects of a four-dimensional space-time continuum' although Ron considers this to be a 'typical bigamist’s excuse'.

As the series progresses, Gary finds himself in increasingly complex time travel scenarios, for example; in one episode, he uses the time portal for what he assumes will be a routine trip back to the 40s, however, is surprised to find that he has actually gone back to the Victorian era. While there, a policeman tries to stitch him up for the murders of Jack the Ripper, though, after being chased down the street by rampaging locals, he manages to escape back into modern times.

Later episodes in the series found both of Gary's wives gaining notable success. In the present, Yvonne became a millionaire through the beauty-aids business she founded. In the past, Gary and Phoebe moved to a "posh" part of town and Phoebe became a night-club singer, as she and Gary became acquainted with Noel Coward. However, despite the glamorous turn of events, the subject of marital disintegration was still a prominent theme of the show, culminating in Gary being made to face the question of which wife he ultimately loved the most.

At the end of the final series, Gary prevents an assassination attempt on future Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, which leads to the time portal closing, giving him no choice but to remain in the 1940s. He paints a final message to Ron and Yvonne on the same Mayfair flat wall that Ron will one day strip old wallpaper from, and discover.