“Jane, you’re touching me”: The case for Waiting For God

How often does the same show have comforting, retro, fall-asleep-to-it appeal, while also being genuinely hilarious and politically astute? Waiting For God, a British sitcom that ran from 1990 to 1994, fits all of this and more, and I’d promised Paul Gowder an ode to the show, so here goes:

Waiting For God is set at Bayview Retirement Home in the south of England, and centers on next-door neighbors, retirees Tom and Diana. Much of the show consists of the pair having nonsensical or philosophical conversations in the spirit of the show’s namesake play. If this sounds stuffy and pretentious, bear with me, because it’s neither. Episodes tend to revolve around the residents protesting the home’s fairly impressive mismanagement.

So let me get this out of the way: I don’t believe that, for a TV show to be good, its politics need to be in order by contemporary standards. Too often, this quasi-requirement effectively makes all shows produced before, say, 2014 unwatchable. And yet, a show whose politics are eerily spot-on, but in a way that feels natural, not didactic, can be a joy.*

It’s entirely possible that the show is the most feminist one ever made. Not rah-rah empowerment feminism where a beautiful (but Sanders-supporting!) model poses nude on a horse. A different, perhaps more relatable variant.

Some of this comes from the constant but subtly-done gender role reversals in the various opposite-gender pairs: Diana’s an atheist, Tom a believer. Tom’s friendly and smiley, while Diana’s proudly negative and critical. Tom had a typical middle-class family life, while Diana lived dangerously as a (single and childless) war reporter. Tom is lost in daydreams, while Diana is always conniving and sometimes running for office. And, as eventually emerges, once they’ve become romantically involved (starting with a drunken hookup initiated by guess who), Tom wants to get married, while Diana is having none of it. Diana isn’t a Cool Girl. She’s just honest-to-goodness not trying to please.

Then there are Tom’s son and daughter-in-law. The son’s the picture of dull stability, while his wife is basically a suburban Keith Richards. Oh, and there’s the fact that the only nudity in the show is male. (Yes, there’s some nudity. Britain’s at least a little bit European.)

But the most interesting of these set-ups — the buried lede this post would open with, if edited — is the relationship between Harvey and Jane, the man who runs the retirement village and his assistant, respectively. Harvey might best be described as a wannabe pre-elections Trump (but nice-looking), driven by greed, and untroubled by ethics. His thing is being awful and uncaring. His hope: Becoming a rich 1980s-style tycoon by running a retirement home at a profit. Jane (the character/styling, not the actress) is plain-looking, goody-two-shoes… and madly in love with Harvey. A love of a beautiful but content-free man of the sort Angela Chase had for Jordan Catalano, but that’s rarely ever seen onscreen, more rarely still when the one pining is a grown woman, and not a pretty teenage girl of the sort everyone but a same-age bad-boy crush would be interested in.

The show’s catchphrase, “Jane, you’re touching me,” is what Harvey says whenever Jane tries to comfort him over whichever neurotic concern he’s plagued with at the moment. The shoulder-patting could seem creepy and harassment-ish (and yes, sometimes does), except that Jane’s the much-mistreated and underpaid employee. (At one point Harvey suggests she voluntarily go unpaid.) Yes, it’s messed up (if normal within the context of the show) that Tom and Diana plot to have Harvey engaged to be married to Jane against his will. But he’s been manipulating her via her crush, and in the context (of an absurd sitcom, not life) seems to have it coming. Most of the time, though, Jane unashamedly embraces an unreciprocated crush on Harvey, without asking for anything in return. The crush is the point.

I find the Jane-Harvey dynamic fascinating and, in TV terms, unique. Maybe it can only exist because it’s a British show, without the US requirement that all actors, especially the female ones, look gorgeous. (Let me repeat: it’s Jane the character who doesn’t; this is how the actress plays her/how she’s made up for the part.) It’s about female heterosexual desire, but not the desire of a woman to be or to be thought beautiful herself. It’s unrequited love, but not in the sense where a woman’s been dumped by a cad, or when a single woman’s married lover refuses to leave his wife. There’s no pretense that Jane is or ever was sexually desirable to Harvey.

I’m not going to say that this dynamic is itself some sort of feminist #goal — reciprocated love has its advantages. But there’s something important as well as just realistic about this depiction of one facet of women’s desire for men. Sometimes it really is about gazing, not being gazed upon.

*Yes, it’s a 1990s Britcom, and an attentive millennial could pick up the odd microaggression here and there. While two of the show’s black female characters call out white characters’ sexism-infused racism (and also exist as characters beyond this), this in, again, a 1990s Britcom, there are also references to, and occasional appearances from, a certain Mr. Kwok, a chef whose preference for unusual meats hovers between a complaint about food served in retirement homes and anti-Asian bigotry, with one specific episode falling, I believe, squarely in the latter. There’s also a line where Italians are referred to as having hairy foreheads. Many marginalized groups discussed today are left out entirely or close.

A case for gets it wrong could be made, and by all means the individual doesn’t-hold-up missteps should be noted, but to land there would be, I think, to miss the point. This is a show that gets so much right that it’s almost startling: aging, disability, class, and even consent (Basil Makepiece, the community’s eldest and horniest resident, spells out that he’s always “invited.”) It’s also just wonderful.