You can see the promise in the situation, with the three astronauts preparing
to return to earth, the scientist frightened of the dangerous process, and the
Captain traumatised to learn that his wife has been having an affair at home.
That promise is dramatic rather than comic, though, in a Moonbase 3 sort
of way. Unfortunately, whenever the character and situation goes somewhere
interesting, the programme remembers that it's a sitcom and quickly (if
unamusingly) undercuts it.
This isn't helped by canned (rather than recorded with a studio audience)
laughter, a jarring feature in several ITV programmes of this period. Once you
start to notice it you can hear it, in the way that the laughter suddenly starts
and stops and the silences in between, and it sounds nothing like the organic
responses of a real audience. It also has an unfortunate editorialising effect.
Garden and Oddie's dialogue doesn't have much in the way of jokes, but it has
got a comic rhythm which gets undercut by sudden bursts of loud laughter at
exchanges which are only tangentially amusing in themselves. Then, once the
scientist astronaut gets frightened and the evangelist pilot attempts to
comfort her, you get a similar exchange like "God is your pilot/ I hope
that he has a fully qualified license", received in an unnaturally sterile
silence, because it was decided that laughter at a joke would be distracting
during a serious bit.
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