THE VOYAGE OF BARRACKS

How to go everywhere and get nowhere. The Gunns pick up house--literally--when a cement factory moves next door. Mr. Gunn (formerly a sergeant major) rounds up the troop (Mrs., Petal, and Tommy), then launches Barracks, as the house is named, via a balloon and net rigging to wherever--an African desert, Switzerland, Athens, a Pacific island, the Riviera, and back to England. At each stop they set up house: whitewashing it as camouflage against the snow to avoid excessively kind neighbors, transforming it into a tea house near the Parthenon until they run out of tea, turning themselves into sand sweepers on the beach. The Gunns never really get off the ground and the episodes never achieve the aimed-at looseness but instead perpetuate stereotypes (a fat Egyptian and zee French police on the Riviera, naked savages on the island).