A Comedy On This Day: And Mother Makes Five... - To The Aid Of The Party (22 May 1974)

 This is one of those stories that initially looks like it might be more interesting than it eventually turns out to be. As often the way in Richard Waring's middle class light comedies, it touches on underexplored contemporary anxieties, when the Redway's daughter and younger son both come home with seemingly reasonable complaints about being badly treated by authoritarian teachers. Reluctantly, both conflict-averse parents agree to complain and meet the teachers at the school the next day. It’s a promising situation, of wider societal relevance with something genuinely emotionally at stake for the protagonists, as seen when the parents are about to leave the house. Wendy Craig looks in the bedroom mirror, trying on different hats and rehearsing different approaches that she might take with the teacher. An essential truth of this series - realised through Craig's performance - is that being recognised as a competent mother is largely a matter of performance, which it takes some courage to accomplish.

 Disappointingly, this situation is then immediately defused in the scenes at the school, the complaints merely having been a catalyst to set up a more conventional comedy situation that takes up the rest of the episode. Both teachers in question turn out to be attractive and charming young people (Jenny Hanley and Norman Eshley) whom the Redways invite round to dinner the next day, the complication being that Mr. Witherspoon's jealous wife - who believes that her husband is having an affair with Miss Jenkins - is also coming.

 In what is - even by sitcom standards - an exceptionally hare-brained scheme, the Redways decide that the best way to avert a scene is to get all of the guests blind drunk. Although watching Wendy Craig and Richard Coleman plying the visitors with drinks are amusing, the most fun is produced from the elaborate prop of a new barbecque, which is made to produce plumes of smoke and suddenly produce leaping two foot-high flames. When did barbecues first appear as consumer goods in Britain - the mid-sixties? It feels like a comical investigation of a comparatively new phenomenon.