My Good Friend

I had forgotten about this one. I was sitting on it because each episode needed about 5 minutes of adverts removed from the middle. My Good Friend was a mid-90's gentle comedy starring George Cole (The Bounder, Blott On The Landscape, Minder, Dad, Comrade Dad, Root Into Europe) with Richard Pearson (Freddie And Max, Love Hurts) and Michael Lumsden. Matilda Ziegler (Mr. Bean, Swiss Toni, Lark Rise To Candleford) was in the first series but replaced by Annabelle Aspion (The Lakes, Micawber, Outlaws, Shameless) in the second as was Minnie Driver in the first replaced by Lesley Vickerage (Grafters, Inspector Lynley) in the second. Joan Sims appeared in 3 episodes. There's not much available information on this one, but someone contributed this to IMDB:
A charming, gentle sitcom from the mid-1990s, My Good Friend starred George Cole as Peter, a lonely old man living with his daughter and her husband, and all too aware that his presence in their house was an unwelcome irritation for them. Feeling very lonely and at a permanent loose end, he meets the similarly melancholy Harry (Richard Pearson), with whom he strikes up a tentative friendship. Then the two of them encounter young single mother Ellie (Minnie Driver), and her son, with whom the two old gents start to spend their days; as time goes on, the three main characters find themselves fulfilling the various gaps in each others' lives… My Good Friend is a very little known, low budget ITV programme that has totally slipped into obscurity over the last few years, and undeservedly so; a thoughtful, realistic sitcom (albeit one rightly devoid of a laughter track) that showed wit in its writing but was more remarkable for its touchingly realistic look at a couple of very lonely old pensioners. Cole and the lesser-known character actor Pearson were both splendidly natural in the lead parts, but the show's first season was especially notable in that it featured Minnie Driver in one of her earliest starring roles, only a year before she decamped to the US and started to hit it big in Hollywood with films like Grosse Pointe Blank and Good Will Hunting. Driver was wonderful in My Good Friend, and, as a dreamy teenager, I fell in love with her warm, kind-hearted single mother character, a young woman (Driver was only in her early twenties when the show was made) with the weight of the world on her shoulders, but one who also manages to find the time to provide care and friendship for two very lonely old men.
There is some audio interference buzz on some of the episodes but it doesn't interfere with hearing the dialogue or anything. Sort of like back in the olden days of analog FM transmissions when a helicopter passed overhead.