The Post-Nostalgic World of Hyacinth Bucket

On nostalgia, lost pasts, and Keeping Up Appearances.

Originally published in The Victorian Writer, December 2023—February 2024

Someone very close to me, who has read most of my writing for the last few years, once put down a draft, looked me dead in the eyes and said: ‘What is it about your childhood that you can’t let go of?’  

The draft was Hyacinth, which became a novella published earlier this year. It was originally written as a weekly online serial to entertain a handful of subscribers to my newsletter and keep me writing through the pandemic.

It’s a strange book. Using characters and scenarios from British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, it’s a dreamy horror story about grief and ageing, and how the two collude to make time collapse in on itself. Elderly characters revert to childhood. Buildings contain windows to other decades. Traumas loop. A TV show from my childhood becomes something else.

I mumbled through something in response to that very good question. The past, in all its forms, perpetually returns to haunt the present. Art is a marker for memory. The memories you accumulate in your childhood and the art that you experience return to you forever, in new forms, with new contexts, ever shifting your understanding of the past and the present.

It doesn’t have to be good art.

I grew up in rural northern Tasmania, in a small town known for its historic buildings. It was the mid-nineties. Francis Fukuyama had declared that history was over, though I didn’t know that yet. But I knew that we were at a distance, temporally and geographically, from anything that mattered. In Australia, we’d trampled the past and imported our own Anglo version of it. We were living in the detritus of that past. On weekends my parents, who were older than everyone else’s, would take me to National Trust homes, where I was the youngest visitor by a long way. We’d eat lunch at the tea rooms, and look reverently across the cordons at century-old sitting rooms and meticulous gardens. At night we’d watch the ABC on our old wooden television set, which showed news about far-away wars and repeats of mannered British sitcoms.

Everyone seemed old. It seemed to make plenty of sense to be old at the end of the twentieth century. The rest of the world was a distant place that had passed its prime long ago. Now, we were just stuck in a tape loop of repeats and throwbacks.

Keeping Up Appearances was one such throwback. It wasn’t old, it just felt like it was. 

The show ran for five seasons between 1990 and 1995. It stars Patricia Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket (she prefers to pronounce it bouquet, though no one else agrees), a middle-class [ANH1] social climber in her fifties. Hyacinth wants to be regarded as somebody, as a member of the elite. She places great value on cleanliness, good quality china, and the opinions of the wealthy and powerful. She’s a social pariah to all except her long-suffering husband Richard (Clive Swift) and her nervous neighbour Elizabeth (Josephine Tewson). But they don’t seem to like her much either. The writing on the show is flat and predictable. Each episode hinges on the performances, particularly that of Routledge. Hyacinth’s social embarrassment draws raucous laughter from the disembodied voices of the audience – [ANH2] they howl and bay for her misfortune, as Hyacinth falls backwards into a hedge to escape the same dog each week, raises an eyebrow at the pronunciation of her name each week, and boasts about the many talents of her perennially absent son, every week.

Its fifties attitudes, oddly timeless setting, and endless loops and repetitions were like wallpaper, constant and drab. Each episode repeats the same jokes, and each incident is interchangeable with the next, so episodes could be repeated out of order, ad nauseam. It’s a reliable and safe world, a flat plain of existence where the march of time has no dominion, a hamster wheel of crippling routine. A thunderdome of existential dread.  Hyacinth, who has been loathed and mocked all of her life, will remain loathed forever.

The show was repeated on the ABC so often that its syntax worked its way into my brain, where it had no right to be. It worked in concert with my imagination. When I think about Longford, Tasmania, I think about Keeping Up Appearances. When I think about my burgeoning understanding of class, of ageing, of death, of how jokes work, of love and failure, I think of Keeping Up Appearances. I think of other shows too, but none make me laugh as much as the incongruous place that this one holds in my consciousness. While researching to write this book, I realised I’d seen every episode of the show multiple times, without ever seeking it out. It was in my bloodstream.

My interest in Keeping Up Appearances is not exactly nostalgia. It’s not ‘a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past’, as a cursory Google defines it. There’s longing, sure, but there’s little wistful affection. Svetlana Boym, author of The Future of Nostalgia (2001), defines the word as ‘a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed’. Given our colonial backdrop, that’s far from wistful. That’s melancholy, almost sinister.

To quote critic Merlin Coverley in his book Hauntology, my own strange attachment to lost or entirely non-existent pasts might be ‘post-nostalgic’ – the condition of ‘a world in which the present can no longer be experienced as a thing other than a sum of its pasts’.

The term ‘hauntology’ is a disorderly one with a shifting meaning. Derrida coined it in the 90s to talk about the spectre of Marxism that still haunted Europe in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Twenty years later, it cropped up in cultural criticism circles to refer to a specifically British aesthetic which collaged a 1970s world of horror films, children’s television, and hauntingly rickety public information advertising, spinning it into a new folk culture. The internet art and music that made up the hauntology movement drew on the unease of that past, a post-industrial malaise where the natural world met Cold War nuclear anxiety.

Today, the media landscape is fuelled by nostalgia more than ever, and yet it asks fewer questions about it. Endless revivals and franchises seek only to remain faithful to what has gone before. Familiarity is the highest (or only) aspiration. Even Keeping Up Appearances was revived, for a very strange reboot pilot, Young Hyacinth, set in the 1950s (‘They must be desperate’ said original Hyacinth Patricia Routledge).

This really started in the 1990s. As pop music began to eat itself, sitcoms were a perfect way to express and challenge nostalgia. There’s something haunting about them. Films like The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) and Pleasantville (1998) played directly with sitcom tropes, colliding them with the ‘real’ world. More recently (and effectively), the short film Too Many Cooks (2014) depicted characters stuck in an endlessly rebooting 90s sitcom title sequence.

But it was American writer Carmen Maria Machado that gave me permission to do it. Her novella Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU, collected in the book Her Body and Other Parties, took the familiar elements of that show, freed them from conventional logic, and submerged them into a fever dream.

So much of our life is media. It loops and dances in our brains. It pervades our subconscious and returns in the form of dreams, familiar but unstructured, threatening our careful sense of order. I haven’t seen Law & Order SVU, beyond catching half an episode on TV here and there, but Machado’s fan fiction of the unconscious mind felt exciting, like someone was speaking to me in a secret language.

All texts respond to or engage with existing works, whether they set out to or not. But writing so plainly in conversation with another work is like writing in code, a code that other people will interpret in their own way.

Some Hyacinth readers have told me they’ve never seen Keeping Up Appearances. God knows what it was like going in blind. That’s exciting to me – that the lack of a common language could lead to a completely different reading, one that I could never hope to understand, like watching a film in a foreign language with the subtitles turned off. I don’t fully understand the language myself – but that lack of strict interpretation makes it endlessly shifting and rewarding, even now, as the book is on the shelf.