Bread

Hello yes?

Bread was a British television sitcom, written by Carla Lane, produced by the BBC and screened on BBC1 from 1 May 1986 to 3 November 1991.

The series focused on the staunchly-Catholic and extended Boswell family of Liverpool, led by its matriarch Nellie (Jean Boht) through a number of ups and downs as they tried to make their way through life in Thatcher's Britain with no visible means of support.

Nellie's feckless and estranged husband, Freddy (Ronald Forfar), left her for another woman known as 'Lilo Lil' (Eileen Pollock). Her children-in age order-Joey, Jack, Adrian, Aveline and Billy continued to live in the family home in Kelsall Street and contributed money to the central family fund, largely through benefit fraud and the sale of stolen goods.The show's title is a reference to the use of 'bread' as a slang term for money. A regular scenario in each episode was that of Nellie opening a cockerel-fashioned kitchen storage pot prior to the evening meal, into which the family would place money for their upkeep. The amount of money placed in the pot by each depended on how successful a day they'd had. The pot would be at the forefront of the screen at the end of each episode as the credits rolled.

Other frequently-seen scenarios included Nellie answering a cordless phone (a newfangled item in the mid-1980s) which she kept in the pocket of her pinny (she always said "Hello yes?" when answering); and the parking places outside the terraced house for the family's many vehicles being kept free by some illicitly-acquired police traffic cones, normally used by police to keep road-sides free of stationary traffic.

One of the main reasons for the show's success was its use of soap opera-style cliffhangers. This meant that viewers had to tune in each week to see how the previous week's cliffhanger would be resolved. This also meant that each episode was not self-contained, but the plot unfolded as the series progressed. This was very unusual for a comedy at the time, but has been used to great effect by comedies since.