5/5 take a prozac and call me in the morning....
  by B. Angelo (boston, ma)
With regards to the person who has spent hours interpreting Hyacinth Bucket's vain attempt at class climbing. Yes, that's the point, it's not sad, or pathetic, it's funny. And the funniest thing about the show is that her sisters, who are on welfare, keep showing up to foil her attempts at social climbing. please, juse enjoy......and take a prozac

5/5 I laughed out loud
  by Susan M. Souza (Grass Valley,CA)
I have enjoyed every "Keeping up Appearance" DVD I have purchased. I can watch them over and over, I have been watching while I walk on my treadmill.

5/5 Keeping up Appearances
  by Discover (Yuma, Arizona)
This movie is funny funny funny!!!! If you like British humor you will love this movie.

5/5 Comedy or Tragedy?
  by viktor_57 (Fairview, Your Favorite State, USA)
I remember the first time I saw "Keeping Up Appearances" and incorrectly thought, with the bouncy title music, incessant laugh track, and the perpetually frustrated shenanigans of the main character Hyacinth Bucket, that I was watching a comedy. Boy, was I wrong.

This particular DVD contains the first six episodes of the fifth and final season, with a total runtime of 3 hours, as well as an interview with the stars Patricia Routledge and Clive Smith, outtakes, and biographies. All good stuff and highly entertaining, at first.

As an American of the U.S. variety, I have never experienced the strictures of the British class system, and did not realize that it was still in powerful effect to this day. Of course, social classes exist in the U.S. as well, but not to the historically rooted or culturally pervasive extent I imagine it to be in Britain. This class system provides both the context and subtext to the "Keeping Up Appearances" series. Each episode involves a new scheme by Hyacinth to improve her social standing, which is the context. The subtext, however, comes from her deep-seated feelings of inferiority and lack of identity resulting from the oppressiveness of the class system. After coming to this realization, I began to see Hyacinth's desperate and futile attempts to strive for an imagined ideal of social respectability as lamentable and deeply sad. So sad, in fact, that I can no longer watch an episode of "Keeping Up Appearances" without becoming horribly depressed and lachrymose. Still I watch, however, because although the spectacle is indeed pitiable and pathetic, it is also strangely moving. I am not sure why watching a middle-class British woman's laughably vain attempts at respectability should cause such profound stirrings in my psyche--perhaps I too am caught in a desperate and doomed struggle of my own design--but I somehow find the whole spectacle deeply edifying.

Perhaps I have not thought deeply enough about Hyacinth's answer to the existential prison of her own delusions. Maybe her social climbing and complete obliviousness to her own absurdity bespeak not foolish ignorance, but a noble futility, a la Don Quixote. If so, then her faithful helpmate and hapless husband Richard must serve in the Sancho Panza role as the steady and sensible comic foil. Seen in this light, Hyacinth and "Keeping Up Appearances" represent a true flowering (ha ha) of British television.