Gary gets away with it by having his best friend Ron Wheatcroft (Victor McGuire), a printer, print him easily forged 1940s white banknotes to fund his past lifestyle. He justifies his knowledge of the future events of World War II to Phoebe by claiming to be a secret agent, while he says he earns his money as a singer-songwriter, passing off much of the next fifty years of popular music as his own. In Series 3, Gary ends up running Blitz & Pieces, a 1940s memorabilia shop in front of the time portal, whose merchandise, while genuine, is suspiciously well-preserved.
Came fiftieth in Britain's Best Sitcom. The series originally ran from 1993 to 1999 and a one-off revival episode aired in 2016.
Oi, Tropes Present!:
- Aborted Arc: Crossed with Canon Discontinuity, this happens twice later on in the series:
- In the Series 4 finale, "The Bells Are Ringing", Yvonne is screwed out of her and Gary's life savings by her business partner Clive while attempting to set up an alternative therapy health franchise (in her words, "He's done a runner". In the Series 5 opener, "A Room with a View", Yvonne is a millionaire in charge of a health franchise who jointly runs it with that same business partner.
- The revival special "Many Happy Returns" ignores numerous plot points from Series 5 and 6, notably including the major story points of Gary and Phoebe moving into Mayfair and becoming close friends with Noël Coward in "A Room with a View", and Phoebe losing the Royal Oak due to the sexist brewery manager George Harrison in "California Dreamin'", leading to her and Gary purchasing a Soho nightclub while also ignoring a frequently brought-up plot point in the last two series about Phoebe wanting to leave London (potentially for America)... in favour of Gary and Phoebe inexplicably running the Royal Oak once more, with not even a casual mention as to why they would leave their luxurious Mayfair flat, abandon their profitable nightclub, and/or fail to move out of London entirely, particularly in consideration that World War II had long ago finished and the time portal's closure in 1945 means that Gary has no need or reason to remain in London. However, it's possible that they still own and run the nightclub and live in Mayfair, but also own the pub as well for the sake of nostalgia...
- Accidental Pervert: In "California Dreamin'", Gary ends up groping Daisy, the new owner of the Royal Oak, when he discovers her bent over in her underwear in the bedroom, thinking she is Phoebe.
- Acting Unnatural: When Ron successfully travels back to the past in "Mairzy Doats", his attempts to fit in (and later trying to give away the secrets of the future) end up with the locals believing him to be clinically insane.
- Actor Allusion:
- In "Come Fly with Me" someone props up the bar access behind Gary and he almost leans on the empty space, but then notices and nods to himself — this provokes gales of uproarious laughter from the audience, which will seem a strange non sequitur to anyone not familiar with the famous scene in Only Fools and Horses in which Del Boy (not Lyndhurst's character Rodney, oddly) does the same but goes crashing to the floor with a fixed expression.
- In one episode Gary claims he was taught how to speak in any dialect: his cockney is identical to Rodney.
- Advice Backfire: Ron goes to Gary for help with his failing marriage, since Gary having two women seems the obvious choice. Gary's advice of staying out all night to leave Stella guessing backfires spectacularly.
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: In "Mine's a Double", the portal is struck by lightning just as Gary enters it and he's split into three Garys; Yvonne (and, to a lesser extent, Phoebe) are quite taken with Bad Gary.
- Alliterative Name: Phoebe's father's name is Eric Elward.
- Anti-Hero: Gary. He's a bigamist, an adulterer, and a plagiarist, treats his friends Ron and Reg poorly, and apparently has no qualms about threatening Britain's wartime economy by passing around large sums of counterfeit money.note
- Artistic License – History: Surprisingly Averted, although Gary does meet some major figures, his interactions with them could have happened in the history we know today.
- Bad Present: After Gary accidentally changes the past in "The Leaving of Liverpool", he travels back to discover that amongst other things, Thatcher had been in power for over 20 years. And was somehow a president instead of Prime Minister.
- Big Eater: Ron, who can't decide between Indian and Chinese takeaway, so he has both. Later in the scene, the pizzas turn up.
- Black Comedy:
- Some parts could be extremely black; not surprising, considering half the show was set during the Second World War.
- Perhaps the blackest part was in "Love the One You're With" when Gary met his old friend Reg Deadman (from the 1940s) in an assisted living facility in the 90s where he was suffering from severe dementia, although the scene itself ends on a sombre note.
- Blatant Lies: While Gary lies frequently, the lies are usually plausible. A notable exception is in "Flash Bang Wallop" when Gary finds his photo in a book about Noel Coward that Yvonne is reading. To prevent her seeing it, he throws it off the balcony. Yvonne sees him do it but when she asks why he did it, he simply keeps insisting he didn't do it.
- Bound and Gagged: Bad Gary does this to regular Gary with tape in "Mine's a Double" to allow him to take over Gary's life.
- Boyfriend-Blocking Dad: Eric never approved of Gary and Phoebe being an item, especially due to the fact that Phoebe was still married to Donald when Eric was still alive.
- Cannot Tell a Joke: Reg has a tendency to forget the punchline of the joke. There was also the problem that when he did a talent show he chose jokes which required a Straight Man, even though he didn't have one.
- Canon Discontinuity: When Gary and Phoebe move into a Mayfair flat together in "A Room with a View:, it's mentioned that their flat is on the first floor (the second floor in America) and a major plot point of "Love the One You're With" centers around the fact they live at number 15, but next series in "Something Fishie", they're referred as living at number 27 and their flat is considered to be high enough up that Gary briefly worries that Ron had committed suicide from jumping out of the window, something that would be extremely difficult to do from the first floor.
- Celebrity Paradox: In "Don't Get Around Much Anymore", Gary makes a reference to Pike from Dad's Army. When he meets his son from the past Michael in "My Heart Belongs to Daddy", he is played by Ian Lavender, who had played Pike.
- Comically Missing the Point: Used frequently with Reg, though other characters weren't immune. For example, in "Let's Get Away From It All" Gary felt bad that he would have to pretend his child was Phoebe's husband's, and was lamenting that his child would never be able to call him Daddy. Ron consoled him that it was too early to know if they were going to have a speech impediment.
- Compound-Interest Time Travel Gambit: Gary and Ron try buying shares in a small company in the 1940s in "Don't Get Around Much Anymore", knowing it will be a large multinational by the 1990s. But unbeknown to them, the company was split in the intervening years, and Major the bank manager, unable to locate Gary, invested in the wrong half.
- Contrived Coincidence: In the final episode, "Accentuate the Positive", Yvonne and Ron are in Gary's Mayfair flat just as he is writing his message to Ron on the wall back in the 1940s, revealing that he is now trapped in the past. There is probably no other way Ron could have convinced Yvonne that her husband was really a time traveller.
- Cranky Landlady: Early on, Gary had to deal with Mrs. Bloss, who disapproved of him having Phoebe in his room and would snoop through his things when he was out.
- Crossdressing: In "Change Partners", Gary goes to a fancy-dress party as Maid Marian, to match Yvonne's Robin Hood. Unfortunately for him, Yvonne was actually dressed as Peter Pan...
- Curse Cut Short: At the end of "The Yanks are Coming", Ron has just finished rebuilding a jeep and is ready to drive it out of the building. He attempts to open the door to the back of the building and realises it's blocked by some bollards. Ron begins to swear "Oh, b..." and Gary cuts him off with "Bollards, Ron."
- Deliberate Values Dissonance:
- Used several times to illustrate the differences between the periods. Phoebe and the other residents of the 1940s have a low opinion of Germans, Italians, and homosexuals among others.
- Similarly, in "There's Something About a Soldier", when Phoebe’s husband Donald confesses to Gary that he is gay (albeit without specifically spelling it out), Gary’s sympathetic reaction is indicative of his 1990s attitude - with even Donald jokingly suggesting “people will think we’re pansies or something” when Gary gives him a comforting touch on the arm.
- Denser and Wackier: Started as a fairly straight sitcom about a cheating husband with a time travel twist but in the final series we had Gary being split into multiple Garys in "Mine's a Double", Jack the Ripper coming to 1999 in "The 'Ouses in Between", a time travelling teenage criminal (named Brick Beckham, after the Prime Minister) from the future in "Just in Time", and Gary fooling German troops by dressing up as Hitler in "How I Won the War".
- Didn't Think This Through: For Gary in "We Don't Want to Lose You...". If you go around wartime London claiming to be a spy, then eventually MI5 are going to take an interest in you, which ends with Gary being sent to Occupied France.
- Dirty Coward:
- As a young man who is not serving in the armed forces and has apparently spent most of the war living in America and writing songs, some people in the past accuse Gary of this.
- Gary at first. When called up for fire watch duty in "As You Wave Me Goodbye", he does everything he can to get out of it, and only goes through with it after being shamed by Phoebe and Reg. But by the end of the series, he becomes brave enough to lead a bunch of performers to take out some Germans in "How I Won the War".
- Also from "How I Won the War" was Rock Justice. His plan is for the others to sacrifice themselves while he hides and then runs to tell the tale. Gary responds to this by threatening to tell the Nazis that Rock is a British agent with a very high pain tolerance.
- Disappeared Dad: Gary was this to his daughter Ellie, albeit unwittingly. He only learns of her existence when the time portal re-opens and he returns to 2016 in "Many Happy Returns".
- Downer Ending: In the final episode, "Accentuate the Positive", Gary discovers the time portal has closed, meaning he will be trapped in the past for good. In spite of everything, he and Yvonne are genuinely upset that they won't see each other again. In a touching last scene, they speak to each other, unknowingly, on opposite sides of the now-closed portal.Gary: I'm never gonna see Yvonne, or Ron, or Baywatch ever again!
- Dramatic Irony: Used frequently, both for drama and comedy. For example, in "Turned Out Nice Again" Yvonne was talking about Gary. She claimed he was a workaholic and was never at home because he was always in his shop. She concluded therefore that "Frankly, (she) think(s) he lives in the past".
- Driven to Suicide: Ron is devastated after Flic leaves him and spends most of "Something Fishie" threatening to throw himself out of the window.
- Everybody Smokes: In the '40s. Gary, at first, is shocked and tries to warn Phoebe of the danger to her health, but by Series 3, he's happily puffing away himself after an Of Course I Smoke false start. However, he does convince her to give up during her pregnancy.
- Exact Words: Gary will sometimes use this when Yvonne or Phoebe ask questions, exploiting the difference in time periods to say something which is technically true even though it's also misleading. For example, in "You're Driving Me Crazy" he assures Phoebe he loves her more than anyone else alive.
- Expy: Celeste from "...But We Think You Have to Go" is one of Michelle Dubois from 'Allo 'Allo!. Both are beautiful women in the French Resistance who have dark curly and wear a beret and trenchcoat. Celeste even utters those immortal words, "Listen very carefully, I shall say zis only once".
- Flanderization: Compare the portrayal of Reg Deadman in the pilot, "Rites of Passage", with what he would become by series 2. He essentially transforms from a dopey yet competent constable into an older and thinner (but far nicer and uncorrupt) version of Chief Wiggum.
- Food Slap: In "Out of Town" Gary gets Ron to pretend to be Phoebe so he can practice giving her the bad news that he has to cancel their holiday. Ron throws a drink in his face.
- The Ghost:
- Reg's first wife, Minnie Deadman, who was never short of young fellas to cheat on him with.
- Clive, Yvonne's shady, ponytailed business partner in the last three series.
- Groin Attack: In "Change Partners" Ron sees Stella's boss making out with a woman he believes to be Stella (it's a costume party and Stella had swapped costumes with the woman). He punches the man in the face, only to realise the woman is actually the man's wife. Stella gets mad at Ron and goes to slap him in the face. Ron protects his face and tells her not to hit him in the face, so she knees him in the groin instead.
- Harmless Electrocution: Gary survives being struck by lightning in "Mine's a Double". As he was going through the time portal at the time it kept him alive, with the side effect of creating good and evil clones of Gary.
- Haughty Help: In “Careless Talk”, Gary and Phoebe encounter a very snobbish salesman at Harrods who makes Phoebe feel uncomfortable. Gary flashes some cash about and slips him some petrol coupons, making it clear that he needs to treat Phoebe better, at which point the man behaves much nicer.
- Henpecked Husband:
- Gary to Yvonne, who finds any excuse to put him down or turn down sex. It's no wonder he decided to stay with Phoebe in the end.
- Ron to Stella, culminating in a long divorce throughout Series 4.
- Historical In-Joke: Jack the Ripper was never caught because he was a time traveller who got run over in modern-day London while fleeing from Gary in "The 'Ouses in Between".
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Ron does this while trying to impress the people of 1940s Britain with stories of the future in "Maizy Doats"; lampshaded by Reg.
- I Call Him "Mister Happy": Gary and Yvonne both seem to call his penis Nobby Nobbit.
- Identical Grandson:
- Reg has an identical grandson in the nineties who pops up a few times and as shown in "The 'Ouses in Between", an identical grandfather in the Victorian era.
- Ron has an identical grandfather Albert in "The Leaving of Liverpool".
- Also from "The 'Ouses in Between" is Real Life music-hall singer Marie Lloyd. As she's identical to Yvonne, she's presumably an ancestor of hers.
- Identical Twin ID Tag: "Bad Gary" (Gary's evil double from "Mine's a Double") looks exactly like Gary but can be told apart by eagle-eyed viewers who notice that he is almost always chewing gum.
- I Have Nothing to Say to That: Gary tries to warn Phoebe about the dangers of smoking, but she retorts that it's silly to worry about smoking when a bomb could fall on your house at any moment. Gary has no answer to this.
- I Love the Dead: When Eric is injured during an air raid in "Rites of Passage", Gary jumps in to give him the kiss of life. Everyone else is horrified at this (as CPR wasn't known in 1940s England, they all just assume Gary is snogging a corpse) so Gary has to quickly lie that it's a new technique from America.
- I'm Mr. [Future Pop Culture Reference]: Ron calls himself James Bond while in wartime Britain in "Maizy Doats".
- It's All About Me: Gary can be very callous towards others, ignoring their issues and only focusing on himself. Even when Ron is in jail in "Pennies from Heaven" or reeling from the end of a relationship in "Something Fishie", Gary only wants to focus on himself and his life in the '40s.
- I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine: In "Something Fishie", Gary runs into trouble with two "insurance salesmen" gangsters. One of them (Mr. Jones) is played by Kenneth MacDonald, who had a recurring role in Only Fools and Horses with Nicholas Lyndhurst as Mike Fisher, the barman at the Nag's Head.
- Karma Houdini: Stella. She was continually abusive to Ron, cheated on him, and then blackmailed him into accepting a one-sided divorce (following an altercation with Stella's fancy man when Ron came home early) that ended up leaving him without his money, home, or business.
- Killed Offscreen:
- Phoebe's father Eric was killed in a bomb blast between the first and second series.
- Pheobe's husband Donald met the same fate in "And Mother Came Too"
- Knife-Throwing Act: Sid and Nancy Potter (part of the entertainment troupe in "How I Won the War") do a knife throwing and lasso act.
- Laser-Guided Karma: In "Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking?" Gary gets a dose of this in a nightmare, in which Phoebe, Yvonne, Ron, and Reg all confront him together and call him out for his treatment of them.
- A Little Something We Call "Rock and Roll": Gary, a pianist, would play songs from the future and claim he had written them himself. By the end of the series, he has laid claim to most of The Beatles' back catalogue. One of the show's cleverer aspects was that they were sometimes arranged in a more contemporary style, such as a jazz version of "California Dreamin'" in the episode of the same name.
- The Load: Arguably, Yvonne. Gary clearly wasn't happy in the '90s to begin with and most of his problems stem from trying to juggle his life with her and his life with Phoebe. One could argue that the fact Gary keeps going back to the past is a clear indication that it's the only place he actually is happy and all his problems stem from his time period.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: Averted by Gary after he meets his daughter, Ellie, when he returns to the present in 2016 in "Many Happy Returns"; he decides against telling her who he is.
- Never My Fault: Yvonne can be like this, even insisting that the fact she and Gary don't have children is because he must have a low sperm count and at no point questions her fertility might be the cause. We the audience know he's not the problem because he got Phoebe pregnant without trying.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Averted. Many famous faces appeared in the 1940s... but of course, none of them are around to complain about their portrayal:
- Noël Coward was a recurring character and Gary and Phoebe's neighbour in the final two series.
- George Formby and his wife Beryl Ingham come by the Royal Oak in "Turned Out Nice Again".
- Gary saves Clement Attlee's life in "Accentuate the Positive".
- No Sympathy:
- Played both straight and for laughs, after Phoebe finds out that Donald had died in "And Mother Came Too". Gary is happy that he and Phoebe can get married, even talking to the local vicar about wedding plans on the day he came to talk to Phoebe about Donald's memorial. Phoebe is rightfully outraged at how callous Gary is acting. In the same episode, it was played for laughs, when Gary goes to visit Ron (who's in prison for beating up the man Stella cheated on him with). Gary is so overjoyed about getting engaged to Phoebe, that he doesn't seem to care about Ron's plight, or about Phoebe's husband dying:Gary: Sorry, I'm just so happy!
- Ron frequently responds this way when Gary complains of having to deal with two relationships while Ron himself is in a failing marriage/divorced/broken up.
- Played both straight and for laughs, after Phoebe finds out that Donald had died in "And Mother Came Too". Gary is happy that he and Phoebe can get married, even talking to the local vicar about wedding plans on the day he came to talk to Phoebe about Donald's memorial. Phoebe is rightfully outraged at how callous Gary is acting. In the same episode, it was played for laughs, when Gary goes to visit Ron (who's in prison for beating up the man Stella cheated on him with). Gary is so overjoyed about getting engaged to Phoebe, that he doesn't seem to care about Ron's plight, or about Phoebe's husband dying:
- Oblivious Guilt Slinging: In "Someone to Watch Over Me" Yvonne confessed that she had been tempted to cheat on Gary, though it hadn't progressed past holding the man's hand in a restaurant. She reminded Gary about their agreement that, if either of them felt tempted, they'd tell the other. It's obvious from Gary's face that he's very uncomfortable and feeling very guilty as she talks about how she nearly betrayed him, especially as he's done far worse than she has by this point.
- Oh, Crap!: Gary, when Phoebe and Yvonne come face to face in "When Two Worlds Collide". Luckily, neither learn the truth - Phoebe thinks Yvonne is Gary's boss, while Yvonne thinks Phoebe is Ron's date.
- Pass the Popcorn: In one of Gary's nightmares in "Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking?", he's confronted by both Yvonne and Phoebe whilst Ron also calls him out on his behaviour towards him. The women then demand Gary choose between them while Ron sits watching and tucks into a bag of popcorn.
- Percussive Maintenance: Name dropped by Gary in "Many Happy Returns" when he repairs the television. Subverted in that it stopped working again ten seconds later.
- Politically Correct History: Subverted in the episode "The Yanks are Coming". Niles and James, two black American soldiers, find themselves the victims of racism at the hands of the Southern Sergeant Billy Joe McCarthy. Also notable in the kind but surprised reactions of Phoebe and Reg, who had never seen black men in the East End before.
- This is Truth in Television. Many pubs, when ordered to impose a colour bar, banned racist White US troops, and happily served Black ones. The Other Wiki has many incidents of Brits fighting alongside Black US soldiers against White ones in riots like that at Bamber Bridge.
- Portal Slam: Gary finds himself trapped in 1945 in the final episode, "Accentuate the Positive", although in the 2016 revival, "Many Happy Returns", the portal re-opens again, and he is able to return to the present day.
- Reading the Stage Directions Out Loud: In "Would You Like to Swing on a Star", Yvonne plays the female lead in a play. Gary wants to play the male lead but instead gets given a character who says a single line then exits the scene. When he first reads that line he adds the "exit" as if it were part of the line.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: In "Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking?", Reg delivers one to Gary (in a dream):Reg: Really? Really? That's a laugh coming from you. Nothing real about you as far as I'm concerned, Gary Sparrow. You're not really a spy, are you? Or a talented songwriter? You're just a conman with a pocket full of counterfeit fivers. If I wasn't such an exceptionally stupid policeman, I'd have run you in years ago!
- Rich Language, Poor Language: The contrast was especially sharp in the 1940s: compare Noël Coward and most of the Mayfair residents with characters like Phoebe and Reg. (Gary himself was somewhere in-between).
- Rule of Cool: The writers make no attempt to explain why only certain people can use the time portals or why they can be affected by outside influences such as bombs, lightning, and rescuing future British Prime Ministers. Probably for the best.
- This could be a case of
Fridge Brilliance; the first two instances can be explained as the result of the time portal being hit with a large blast of energy (from the bomb, or lightning) temporarily destabilising its normal effect. In the last case, it was mentioned in "Just in Time" that time agents from the future had identified Gary's time portal, but were not closing it, despite closing another portal nearby. Gary theorises in "Accentuate the Positive" after he finds that his portal had closed that he was originally sent back in 1993 to save Clement Attlee (the future prime minister) from assassination, owing to the fact that it was later on that same night that the portal had vanished.
- This could be a case of
- Running Gag: In the earlier series, any swearing was met with an irrated "Oi! Ladies present!", most often from Stan, an old codger who was a regular at the Royal Oak.
- Sadistic Choice: Gary has a nightmare in "Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking?" about Yvonne and Phoebe forcing him to choose between them.
- San Dimas Time / Meanwhile, in the Future…: Rarely used but occasionally crop up, for example in the last episode, "Accentuate the Positive", where Gary's message to Ron and Yvonne in the future appears as he writes it in the past!
- Sarcastic Confession: Gary makes one to Yvonne. Naturally, she doesn't believe him.Gary:I wear these when I go back to 1940 to see my girlfriend, and I take her chocolate, and cigarettes, and stockings because she can't get them in the war!
- Sequel Hook: "Many Happy Returns" ends with Gary able to travel between the past and the present again and planning to resume his dual life, setting up potential future episodes.
- Series Continuity Error: The show was inconsistent about the distance between the present and past end of the portal. Gary was shown to travel to the same date by an even number of years (e.g. having to choose which woman he spent Christmas with). Explicitly, Gary started in 1993 and travelled to 1940 (53 years). The series ended 6 years later in 1999 (with the year stated explicitly) but it was only 1945 in the past (54 years). Different episodes used the 53 and 54 year figure (necessary since only 5 years could pass in the past to stay within the war, while there had been six series and six years had passed in reality). This was particularly confusing in "Many Happy Returns" where the inconsistency shows up within the episode. It is a plot point that Gary is about to turn 53 in 1962 and therefore about to be born (clearly suggesting a 53 year gap). Yet when he travels back to the present he travels to 2016 (54 years).
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Ron sometimes talks like this. As Gary puts it, "He never uses one word when ten will do".
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
- In "The Leaving of Liverpool", Gary goes to Liverpool and runs into Ron's grandfather Albert, getting him arrested for pickpocketing Gary's wallet. Somehow this leads to an alternate timeline where Margaret Thatcher is the President, Yvonne is married to another man, and Ron is a priest, so Gary has to set things right.
- In "My Heart Belongs to Daddy", Gary is upset to discover that his grown-up son Michael has fallen on hard times and is selling some of Phoebe's belongings. Gary therefore returns to the past and arranges for Michael to receive the royalties from a song he "wrote" in the 1940s. When Gary meets Michael again, he finds that the money helped him, and he is now more prosperous and married with children.
- Shout-Out:
- Gary claims his boss at MI5 is called M and he has a secretary named Miss Moneypenny.
- "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" featured a bank manager called Mainwaring and a chief clerk named Wilson who act identically to the characters of the same name in Dad's Army. Gary even sings the show's theme song to Mr. Mainwaring, getting a bemused reaction. Subverted when the bank's tea boy shows up; Gary asks if he's called Pike, but his actual name turns out to be Major.note
- "Come Fly with Me" features a nod to a famous scene from Only Fools and Horses (which also starred Nicholas Lyndhurst), Gary is about to lean against an open bar flap but stops himself at the last moment and gives an Aside Glance wink to the audience.
- In "...But We Think You Have to Go", Gary ends up meeting the Resistance in Occupied France, who are represented by Celeste, an Expy of Michelle from 'Allo 'Allo!. She even uses her Catchphrase, "Listen very carefully, I will say zis only wurnce".
- In "Grief Encounter", Noël Coward offers Gary and Phoebe two small roles in his newest film, Brief Encounter.
- The Slow Path: Hinted at in a couple of episodes. Used by Gary a few times to send messages to himself in the future in "Accentuate the Positive".
- Small Name, Big Ego: Rock Justice from "How I Won the War", an actor who was in a small role in an Errol Flynn film, though Rock insists that Flynn was in a movie with him.
- Speed Sex: Implied in "In the Mood". Yvonne, who'd been feeling unwell thanks to being pregnant, claimed Gary had propositioned her at three in the morning. He defended himself saying she'd been feeling better at the time. She insisted she was only feeling better for a minute and he responded "Yeah, well?" as if it's not clear what the issue is.
- Straight Gay: Phoebe's husband Donald. He only married her because his family forced him into it and had had plans to move abroad with another man whose death he was very upset about. He happily handed Phoebe over to Gary in "There's Something About a Soldier", admitting he didn't love her but was fond of her in a brotherly way and wanted her to be happy.
- Stealing the Credit: In "The Leaving of Liverpool", Ron's grandad takes the credit for rescuing people from a burning building when it was actually Gary who did it. Gary lets Ron believe his grandad really was a hero though.
- Subverted Punchline: In "Out of Town" Gary's father mentions taking his wife to the West Indies. Ron sets him up for the obvious joke by asking "Jamaica?" but he misses the joke and says, "Yeah, unless we go to Barbados."
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Many times, Gary learns that his trips to the past aren't just fun and games:
- In "Is Your Journey Really Necessary?", he learns about a raid and gets Phoebe to a shelter. This causes him to be suspected of being an enemy spy because how else could he have known?
- Gary resolves to live in the past permanently with Phoebe in "Wish Me Luck...". However, in "As You Wave Me Goodbye", he soon discovers that life in wartime Britain isn't much fun without his modern luxuries and a supply of counterfeit fivers. Within days, he gives up and heads back to the present.
- While Played for Laughs, Gary's time in the blitz causes him to have issues with PTSD, diving for cover when he hears fireworks or looking up in fear when he hears a plane. After pulling fire watch duty and a bomb going off right near him and Phoebe in "As You Wave Me Goodbye", he comes home in the 90s clearly traumatised.
- While Phoebe is the sweeter and more understanding of her and Yvonne, her patience has its limits and she's living in a stressful time, so eventually she's going to get mad with Gary. Especially when they get married and have a child together as she rightly expects him to be there for them.
- Tainted Tobacco: In the Series Finale, "Accentuate the Positive", Gary celebrates VE Day with Phoebe, Reg, and company, and saves guest-speaker Clement Attlee's life when Kenneth, a foe, tries to kill him by adding cyanide to Attlee's pipe.
- Talk About the Weather: Gary and Reg resort to this in "Someone to Watch Over Me". They agree not to talk about the war. They can't talk about sport since there's no sport because of the war. The only films Reg likes are George Formby films, which Gary refuses to talk about. This leads to such exciting observations as how it's grey out and that the needle on Reg's barometer is broken. Reg enjoys it anyway.
- Teeny Weenie: In "And Mother Came, Too", Reg finds Gary's wallet which includes a modern condom. Since packaged condoms were much larger in the 1940s, he assumes that this trope must apply to Gary.
- Temporal Paradox: Gary encounters this when passing off later popular music as his own. He points out in "Grief Encounter" that if he takes the credit for writing a Stevie Wonder song to make money from it, then Stevie Wonder will never write the song, meaning Gary won't be able to steal it from him in the first place.
- Time-Travel Romance: Gary, a down-on-his-luck TV repairman in a failing marriage, discovers a time portal which leads to 1940s London. Once there, he meets a young woman, and they fall in love. And now suddenly there's no need to go through the trauma of a divorce in the 1990s because he can have two separate lives...
- Time-Travelers Are Spies: Gary gets mistaken for a spy in "Is Your Journey Really Necessary?" after having prior knowledge of a bombing raid near the Royal Oak. He manages to convince his captors that he's a British spy.
- Title Drop: Gary to Phoebe as they fall asleep on their wedding night in "Heartaches".
- Too Dumb to Live and Cloudcuckoolander: Reg Deadman, the most incompetent man on the police force. This works in Gary's favour, as when Reg temporarily becomes smarter in "When Two Worlds Collide", he begins catching on to Gary's suspicious activity.
- Took a Level in Badass: The time portal has this effect on Gary. In the present, he's just a lowly TV repairman in a drab marriage. In the 1940s, aided by his knowledge of the future and some forged banknotes, he's wealthy, a spy, a singer-songwriter, and a playwright, and has access to luxury items that were scarce in wartime Britain.
- Of course, once the time portal closes in the final episode, "Accentuate the Positive", Gary loses his endless supply of future-forged banknotes and his access to modern luxury items. Still, his future knowledge should allow him to make enough money to live off for the rest of his life. This is a possible explanation as to how the Royal Oak came back into their possession by the 1960s as shown in "Many Happy Returns".
- Took a Level in Jerkass: When Emma Amos was recast as Yvonne in Series 4, Yvonne became considerably more bitter and demeaning towards Gary in comparison to Series 1-3 Yvonne. In-Universe, Yvonne's personality change could be explained by her miscarriage in "How Long Has This Been Going On?" and becoming a millionaire in "A Room with a View".
- Twin Switch: In "Mine's a Double", Gary is struck by lightning going through the time portal which creates "Bad Gary", an identical double who proceeds to leave Gary Bound and Gagged and attempt to take over his life.
- Two-Timer Date: Gary has one with Yvonne and Phoebe in "Who's Taking You Home Tonight?", ducking back and forth through the time portal between the 1940s and the 1990s.
- Unseen No More: Ron's wife Stella was The Ghost in Series 1, only making her first appearance in the Series 2 episode "Wish Me Luck...". She would go on to make a few more appearances in Series 3 before divorcing Ron.
- Victoria's Secret Compartment: In "You're Driving Me Crazy", Phoebe hides a stolen watch in her bra after Gary gives her a Wonderbra from the nineties.
- Waxing Lyrical: Gary is fond of slipping song lyrics into his conversation with people in the 1940s, such as quoting "You're the One That I Want" to Phoebe in "All About Yvonne". Naturally, since the songs haven't been written yet, they don't realise what he's doing.
- We Named the Monkey "Jack": In "Many Happy Returns", Gary has a lazy and overweight dog named Ron. Ron is offended when he finds out, especially once Gary mentions that he didn't know that Ron the dog wouldn't turn out that way when he was a puppy.
- Write Back to the Future: After the time portal closes in "Accentuate the Positive", Gary writes a message on the wall of his Mayfair flat in 1945 to explain to Ron what has happened. Ron and Yvonne are in the flat in 1999 and see it being written on the wall in real-time.
- Young Future Famous People: Gary meets the Kray twins as children.
