Top 10 TV couples

For better, but usually for worse!

JR AND SUE ELLEN EWING

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BPr681cwvaY%3Frel%3D0

“If she doesn’t come back, I don’t come back. I can’t be playing JR Ewing without Sue Ellen.”

That was Larry Hagman’s threat to his bosses on Dallas after they briefly sacked his co-star Linda Gray, as he knew the two were greater than the sum of their parts.

TV’s greatest-ever villain and his wayward wife, who battled the booze as well as her bully-boy husband, were crucial to the success of the oil-soaked soap and central to all its major storylines. But that didn’t stop the producers making the jaw-dropping decision to fire Linda Gray at the end of the eighth season when she asked for her contract to be adjusted so she could direct an episode, just as her on-screen husband Hagman and brother-in-law Patrick Duffy had.

Gray recalls: “When I finally told Larry, he went with me into the office and said: ‘If she goes, I go.’ He really went to bat for me. He was very loyal and, honestly, a very smart businessman. He knew that truly it was a huge relationship to the show.”

We’ll drink to that!

John Ross Ewing Jr and Sue Ellen, all shoulder pads and smeared mascara, divorced and remarried more times than anyone can remember in one of telly’s greatest love-hate relationships, before she finally left for Europe. But bizarrely Sue Ellen was never the main suspect in Dallas’s most famous plotline, who shot JR? Bookmakers made her a 25-1 outsider with her lover, Dusty Farlow, the hot favourite. Of course, it turned out that Sue Ellen’s sister, Kristen, did the deed.

When Hagman’s death forced a rewrite of last year’s revival series, the producers gave JR a right royal send-off. Before he was buried at Southfork next to the graves of Jock and Miss Ellie, Sue Ellen read out a letter in which he said he wanted another chance with her. She then admitted the ol’ rascal was “the love of my life”.

Gray was nominated for many awards for her portrayal of Sue Ellen, and no doubt Hagman would have agreed when she said: “She was one of the most interesting characters on TV in the 1980s. She was the original Desperate Housewife. She led the way for all those girls.”

JR and Sue Ellen might have fought like cat and dog on screen, but they were inseparable off it. Gray described Hagman as her “best friend for 35 years” and was at his bedside when he died last year.

BASIL AND SYBIL FAWLTY

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HuEn77Lkw30%3Frel%3D0

THE classic Fawlty Towers episode The Anniversary reveals this pair were married for 15 years, but their on-screen relationship ran to just 12 programmes. But that was enough to burn John Cleese’s paranoid, bullying hotel manager and his elaborately-coiffed wife into our minds for ever more.

Prunella Scales was faultless as Fawlty’s long-suffering “little piranha fish” and he was often on the end of her sharp tongue. His claim to have been in the Korean War when: “I killed four men” was met with the withering put-down: “He was in the Catering Corps, he used to poison them.”

DEN AND ANGIE WATTS

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CcqqJc4xYxQ%3Frel%3D0

THEY did more than anyone else to put Walford on the map. Their stormy love-hate relationship, played out behind the bar of the Queen Vic, was real car-crash viewing but no matter how bad things got, we knew they were devoted to one another and we’d be able to enjoy further ding-dongs the following week. Which is why Den handing over divorce papers with the sneering line: “Happy Christmas, Ange” came as just as much a shock to the Great British public as it did to the stunned and sobbing Ange. A record-breaking 30 million of us, more than half the UK population at the time, forgot all about the turkey ’n’ trimmings as EastEnders’s 1986 Christmas Day episode dropped one of soap’s greatest-ever bombshells.

JACK AND VERA DUCKWORTH

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KNjhuRPfgeQ%3Frel%3D0

WEATHERFIELD’S been home to Stan and Hilda, Ken and Deirdre, Alf and Audrey and, er, Janice and Les but this pair were the king and queen of Corrie’s couples. For 33 years, they provided much of the comedy on the cobbles, such as when Jack joined a dating agency as fake Frenchman Vince, and Vera laid a trap by pretending to be a young widow. When she ambushed him in the Rovers, he exclaimed: “You’re no flippin’ widow!”, and she shot back: “No, but I will be 10 minutes after I get you home!”

Vera’s the only character ever to come back to Corrie as a ghost, when Jack’s death reunited the two much-loved characters for one last dance.

GEORGE AND MILDRED ROPER

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HLutTJlDkJM%3Frel%3D0

THE Ropers were TV’s ultimate odd couple he was too lazy and feckless to get a job, while she was a wannabe snob, constantly frustrated by his lack of amorous intent. Perfectly played by Brian Murphy and Yootha Joyce, George & Mildred was a spin-off that proved more popular than the original show, Man About The House.

Viewers couldn’t get enough of Mildred constantly being embarrassed by hen-pecked George’s buffoonery, prompting her exasperated catchphrase, simply: “George!” Sadly, Joyce died suddenly, aged just 53, from chronic alcoholism as the cast were looking forward to filming the planned sixth series.

KERMIT AND MISS PIGGY

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OxZk3cWzf5s%3Frel%3D0

IT sounds ridiculous, but the long-running love affair between one pig and her frog has lasted almost 40 years. Not bad considering the fame-hungry porker’s main interest is in what the Muppet Show-running amphibian can do for her career. They’ve stood the test of time, but if the frog puts a flipper wrong, the karate-trained diva sends him flying with a pork chop, accompanied by her trademark “Hi-yah!”.

COMPO AND NORA BATTY

https://youtube.com/watch?v=sds9TFBT9e4%3Frel%3D0

NOT a couple as such, but the small-screen’s longest-running unrequited love story. For 36 years, until actor Bill Owen’s death in 1999, Compo Simmonite lusted after his next-door neighbour, Kathy Staff’s stout Yorkshire housewife, scheming to win her affections away from husband Wally, inflamed by his passion for her wrinkled stockings. It was the sight of Nora in chorus girl clothes that finished Compo off but, as she pointed out, he died smiling.

JERRY AND MARGOT LEADBETTER

https://youtube.com/watch?v=GBogWsfAS50%3Frel%3D0

FORGET Tom and Barbara, those annoyingly twee do-gooders, the real stars of The Good Life were their next-door neighbours. A social climber and staunch Conservative, Margot is horrified by her neighbours’ self-sufficiency drive in Surbiton, and tells hen-pecked husband Jerry, the model of suburban middle-management, that he is, too.

Despite being bullied at school for having no sense of humour, it’s actually Margot who gets the biggest laughs, thanks to Penelope Keith’s note-perfect portrayal. I’m with Jerry, I was always a Margot man myself.

TERRY AND JUNE MEDFORD

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QA9IQycyMX4%3Frel%3D0

TERRY SCOTT and June Whitfield first worked together in 1968’s Scott On before being “married” for 13 years, firstly in Happy Ever After and then in Terry And June. So no wonder they were so convincing as a middle-aged, middle-class suburban couple filling their time after the kids left home.

The goings-on at 71 Popular Avenue, Purley made it the ultimate “sofa sitcom” and the nine series attracted huge viewing figures. Sadly, when it was ended, Scott had a breakdown, partly brought on by his confessions of extra-marital affairs.

HOMER AND MARGE SIMPSON

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vXrwddlp53w%3Frel%3D0

NO screen wife has had to put up with as much as Marge, the long-suffering blue-haired matriarch of the Simpson clan. Hapless Homer is a loveable manchild who simply can’t help creating mayhem, as well as the odd meltdown at the nuclear plant where he works as an ineffective safety supervisor.

He’s been named the greatest comic creation of all time, but even he knows he’d be nothing without Marge, the well-meaning and patient wife who regularly tops real lists of influential American moms.