A Comedy On This Day: Terry & June - They Also Serve (3 August 1987)

 It's the final series, and there's a distinct sense of things winding down. Apart from the ageless June Whitfield, everyone is looking notably older - Reginald Marsh, John Quayle - and Terry Scott, never a picture of health in the first place, looks ill (which he was). When the script calls for him to fall over you think about the effort that it's going to take for him to get up again and feel a bit worried. The final onscreen appearance of an 83-year old Ballard Berkeley only adds to the mood of the enterprise drawing to a close.

  The world of Terry and June, however, is preserved in aspic. The only things which date this to the time that it was made is that Terry wears a more lightweight suit than previously, and is the proud owner of a compact disc player (news which is greeted with incomprehension by everyone that he tells).

 The episode is an inversion of the familiar plot that everyone (not entirely fairly) associates with Terry & June. This time, instead of Sir coming to the Medfords for dinner, June starts a home catering company and the Medfords come to Sir for dinner... The script is a bit frustrating and could really do with another draft. The set-up (the hired Butler is drunk, so Terry has to step in, having to prevent himself from being recognised by Ballard Berkeley) is quite convoluted and laborious. But then the pay-off of the Medfords serving the dinner (with Terry in an ill-fitting Butler's uniform and blinded by his heavy prescription spectacles disguise) is rather fumbled, rushed and simplistic, and leaves the viewer feeling that their patience in sticking with this hasn't been fully rewarded.