A Comedy On This Day: Bless This House - Mum's The Word (9 March 1971)

  Writing episodes for other people's series brought out some of the best qualities of Carla Lane's comedy early in her career. This is typically light domestic family comedy, but with intriguingly high emotional stakes in this episode, in which middle-aged Sid gets the wrong end of the stick and thinks that Jean has got pregnant.

 This quickly established situation becomes the source of two different (but complimentary) strands of humour; how Sid deals emotionally with an unexpected total change of circumstances, and how long the family can keep a misunderstanding going. The first strand is interesting - Sid shows Jean a rather refined solicitousness, and there's a particular sense of difficulty when he tells the children and the son says that they should put the baby out for adoption. The pleasures of the second strand rely more upon the viewer's understanding that this is an artifice, and the sheer amount of inappropriate ways that conception and pregnancy can be referred to under a misunderstanding. Its a remarkably zippy episode, packing a lot of narrative neatly into 25 minutes, and you can hear in the studio audience's responses that it touches upon a real need in them.