How Goodnight Sweetheart baffled the BBC – and made Nicholas Lyndhurst a cult hero

The BBC didn’t understand its 1990s time-travel sitcom, Goodnight Sweetheart. Not at first, anyway. The show’s creators, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran pitched it to a BBC head of comedy as “the story of a man who’s in love with two women – one of whom is probably eighty but might be dead.” To which the BBC man was forced to admit, “Look, I just don’t understand it… Is it going to be funny?” When Marks and Gran assured him that Goodnight Sweetheart would indeed be funny, he said. “Alright, do s