A Comedy On This Day: Sez Les (2 Aug 1974)

 Thanks to its half hour form, one of Sez Les's great virtues is that (unlike many comedy LE spectaculars of the time) it zips along. You almost never see a sketch that outstays it's welcome. You have just enough time to appreciate what's funny about an idea and then it's gone, as in the best sketch this week, Dawson and Cleese as two pub drinkers who have both lost their voices and communicate through 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'-style boards. It's an original idea - they shout through bolder type, they have a silent brawl, etc. - but having hit upon something genuinely unusual, many sketch shows would stretch it until it breaks, rather than getting out of it within a couple of minutes.

 There's a Colditz sketch with both prisoners and guards as cowardy custards - seeing Roy Barraclough as Bernard Hepton's commandant is incongruous.

 Brenda Arnau is back with the Irving Davies dancers, performing 'Fever'. It’s another elaborately edited routine this week, including a costume change. She starts out in a shiny snakeskin dress, pestered by a nimbus of the male dancers' disembodied hands.

 When she changes into a looser tangerine dress, the lighting changes from contained chiaroscuro to cycloramic sky blue, and the female dancers turn up to join in the fun. Brilliant and fascinating though they are, once you've seen half a dozen Irving Davies Dancers routines, you do start to notice repetitions of some of their specialities. In this routine, we get; the singer lying on top of all the men who propel her along like rollers; two concentric circles of male and female dancers, one moving clockwise and one anticlockwise; and (a particular treat) a cutaway shot of three sultry sirens beckoning the viewer...