I have to admit I always saw Marge as the typical US sitcom wife/mum. Smart and capable and sorting out the messes caused by her often well-meaning but dimwitted other half. Of course, the UK sitcoms that paralleled ‘The Simpsons’ in that way were firmly middle-class -’Terry and June’ being the classic. The working class sitcoms here were different. In most of them, the wives were iron-fisted tyrants and the comedy lay in their hapless husbands’ attempts to escape their control for at least a short time. The exception being ‘Till Death Us Do Part’, whose main protagonist, Alf Garnett, was a thoroughly unpleasant (and unfunny) specimen of right-wing bigotry and sexism -Hank Hill on steroids — his wife, Elsie, who he often called a ‘silly old moo’, was downtrodden and emotionally, if not physically, abused. To be utterly frank, for all his coarseness, laziness and drunkenness, I suspect that Homer Simpson would have absolutely despised Alf Garnett, if only for the way he treated his wife!