If you’ve ever watched British television, you might remember a gem called Keeping Up Appearances, a classic BBC sitcom that ran from 1990 to 1995. The star of the show is Hyacinth Bucket—pronounced “Bouquet,” of course—an upper-class wannabe with delusions of grandeur and an almost Olympic-level obsession with impressing the neighbors. Patricia Routledge’s performance as Hyacinth is legendary, a masterclass in social-climbing snobbery set against the very ordinary backdrop of British suburbia.
Hyacinth spends her time trying to erase any trace of her working-class roots, while her chaotic, lovable relatives—especially her sister Daisy and Daisy’s beer-swilling husband Onslow—keep crashing her carefully curated image. It’s brilliant British humor: all about class anxiety, self-delusion, and the uncomfortable gap between how we see ourselves and how the world really sees us.
Watching the show again recently made me think of a couple we knew in Oceanside. She was lovely—a former sorority sister of my wife, smart, well-educated, worked as a schoolteacher. He? Let’s say he was no scholar. Nice enough, but a big guy with very little going on upstairs. No education, worked a menial job. Still, we tried to help them. We brought food, introduced them around, even gave the guy a Mets jersey. We were neighborly, the way you should be.
But here’s where the Hyacinth Bucket thing kicks in. He was a social climber. In Oceanside. Not the Hamptons. He thought he was some big deal because he had dinner with the Oceanside fire chief. He acted like he was hosting the Governor. Meanwhile, they moved into their house in 2012 and—no joke—only sided half of it. Thirteen years later, the other half is still bare. Trying to keep up appearances without the budget—or the self-awareness.
Eventually, they cut us off. Why? Well, I have this annoying habit of telling people how I feel. Turns out, honesty isn’t great for social climbers trying to project an image they haven’t quite earned.
The truth is, Keeping Up Appearances isn’t just a sitcom. It’s a mirror. There’s a little Hyacinth in every neighborhood. And every so often, you meet someone who thinks Oceanside is Buckingham Palace and dinner with the fire chief is an audience with the Queen.
