A Comedy On This Day: Bless This House - Atishoo! Atishoo! We All Fall Down (7 May 1973)

 With the rest of the family down with the flu, Sid has to do all the work. This Carla Lane episode is onto a winner, with it's feminist theme about the relentless, underappreciated stress of the women's work of housework disguised through the highly entertaining sight of Sid James floundering about in a frilly apron.

 Its the simplest things that James does particularly well in this episode - especially when pressed into doing several things immediately, with the phone and doorbell ringing at once while his wife calls from upstairs. He turns around several times at speed considering which thing to do first, starts to walk up the stairs, gets called back downstairs, talks on the phone while simultaneously trying to shout instructions upstairs and to the door. Good farcical acting isn't primarily about the business of slamming doors or dropping trousers, it's at its most affecting when just conveying panic at speed.

 Like a lot of sitcom plots, the situation then has to escalate in the second part and gets less funny as a result, but Sid's attempts to cope with circumstances in the first half of this are to be cherished.

A Comedy On This Day: Bless This House - Watch The Birdie (12 March 1973)

 This episode has that "This will just about do, at a pinch" quality that you often find in series with a large turnover of episodes from multiple writers. It’s a broad farce, where the labouredness of the many plot contrivances heavily outweighs the intended hilarity of their eventual consequences. So this man happens to be a photographer and his fiancée happens to be a model and short-sighted and temporarily working behind the bar? So Sid happens to be in his son's photographic studio when his son has conveniently absented himself with the flu and the model is in her underwear and the curtain falls down and she stumbles into Sid's arms and the camera goes off? Hmmm...

 Probably the element that works best is the most distinctive part that has least to do with the main plot. There's a doleful taxidermist with a stuffed parrot. David Battley, who must have been the automatic first choice for lugubrious eccentric supporting roles for a generation, plays him.

A Comedy On This Day: Bless This House - Mum's The Word (9 March 1971)

  Writing episodes for other people's series brought out some of the best qualities of Carla Lane's comedy early in her career. This is typically light domestic family comedy, but with intriguingly high emotional stakes in this episode, in which middle-aged Sid gets the wrong end of the stick and thinks that Jean has got pregnant.

 This quickly established situation becomes the source of two different (but complimentary) strands of humour; how Sid deals emotionally with an unexpected total change of circumstances, and how long the family can keep a misunderstanding going. The first strand is interesting - Sid shows Jean a rather refined solicitousness, and there's a particular sense of difficulty when he tells the children and the son says that they should put the baby out for adoption. The pleasures of the second strand rely more upon the viewer's understanding that this is an artifice, and the sheer amount of inappropriate ways that conception and pregnancy can be referred to under a misunderstanding. Its a remarkably zippy episode, packing a lot of narrative neatly into 25 minutes, and you can hear in the studio audience's responses that it touches upon a real need in them.

A Comedy On This Day: Bless This House - Blood Is Thicker Than Water (19 February 1973)

 Sometimes you get a sitcom episode where the premise is so weak that anything that gets done with it comes over as painfully laboured. When a distant American cousin of Sid's unexpectedly comes to stay and the family believes him to be a mafia boss on the run... this is one such episode. The funniest thing in it is Jean Abbott worrying that this intimidating master criminal has come to steal her books of Green Shield Stamps.