THE JOHNSONS

A lovable blond buffoon. A bald schemer. An exasperated other half — and narrow escapes from a series of blunders. Marking 30 years of The Simpsons, meet...

CAN it really be 30 years since The Simpsons began? After its first full episode aired in 1989, Matt Groening’s beloved cartoon has now become the longest-running American sitcom of all time.

There are some famously wacky adventures among the 672 episodes broadcast so far, but Homer and his wife Marge — along with their children Bart, Lisa and Maggie, neighbours and friends in Springfield — depict the reality of daily life for the average American family, as well as the tears and joys of the human condition.

We don’t really have an equivalent in the UK or — hang on a minute — do we? On these shores, a comedy show called The Johnsons has been fascinating millions of us.

How on earth do these citrus-hued hustlers, united by their blond moptops and unquenching thirst for power and glory, get away with it? Somehow they do, and the similarities between these two dysfunctional dynasties, divided by nothing but an ocean, are uncanny.

Like The Simpsons, The Johnsons are led by a lovable buffoon who is always getting into scrapes. At heart he is a simple soul who likes his beer cold, his doughnuts sugared and his women complicated. A

ND like Homer, Boris has been fired multiple times, but somehow always gets his job back. Sometimes he even gets a better job than before, and this is often arranged by his boss, the sinister Mr Cummings.

This chrome-domed schemer is a dead ringer for Mr Burns, the evil billionaire who employs Homer Simpson at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant.

Also like Homer, golden boy Boris has interfering relatives who thwart his comfort and peace of mind, including his militant sister Rachel (‘I’m not voting for you!’) and his boring father, known as Grandpa Stanley (‘I’m voting for me!’).

Boris is comforted in all this by his sweet girlfriend Carrie who, like Marge Simpson when it comes to Homer, is rather too accepting of his many flaws.

In this affectionate parody, we look back at some of our favourite episodes of The Johnsons over the past year.