A Comedy On This Day: Terry & June - The Eye Of The Householder (10 August 1987)

 Nothing could be more of its time than this week's theme - the Medfords have joined the Neighbourhood Watch Scheme! This makes at least three sitcoms to have had a Neighbourhood watch episode in 1987 (alongside of Sorry! and Ever Decreasing Circles) before an entire series, Wyatt's Watchdogs, was based around the scheme the next year. With the Medfords taken in by a bogus detective, the plot of this episode is remarkably similar to the one in Ever Decreasing Circles, but Terry & June got there first by five months. The two shows were infamously repeated back to back a year later…

 You can see why the scheme was a boon to domestic sitcom writers, giving busybody characters plausible reasons to act officiously and to make contact with authority figures supposedly as equals. In this episode it gives Terry the opportunity to blithely intrude into neighbours' homes with unintended consequences, as happens when he helpfully informs a husband that he's just seen an athletic young man enter his wife's bedroom...

 For added mid-eighties period specicifity, the Medfords are playing Trivial Pursuit with their neighbours when we join them. Some fun is derived from Terry's peevish incomprehension with every aspect of the game - whose go it is, which side of the card the questions and answers are on, etc. - but after you've seen a little of this befuddlement, it starts to look like the early symptoms of dementia, making me speculate about June's possible grim future as Terry's carer.