A Comedy On This Day: The Arthur Haynes Show (13 February 1962)

 First episode of a new series without Nicholas Parsons, whose absence is felt. First long sketch is a domestic scene of the tramp "at home", rowing with his wife on a church bench. Speight has fun with presenting familiar marital niggles between a couple who have nothing, but after several minutes of this I started to find the combination of homelessness and unhappy marriage depressing to think about, rather than funny. The second sketch is a long vaudeville routine with Haynes as a pain-inflicting dentist. I was interested to see that dentists were still using cocaine in 1962.

 Musical guests are husband-and-wife duo Ken Morris & Joan Savage, who will be appearing throughout the series. The unassuming Morris is behind the piano, while Savage sings, a ball gown-and-peroxide Babycham vision in the 1950s style. She has an exceptionally expressive face, and looks a bit cross-eyed and fish-mouthed at times when miming 'As Long As I Have You' (which concludes with her producing a large photograph of a baby, to the audience's delight). Their second song, 'Rock-A-Bye Baby With A Dixie Melody' (sung by both) reveals the thinking behind this extreme performance style, when they extract considerable comedy from picking up the wrong cues and impersonating each other miming each other's voices, Savage moving behind the piano, and so forth. I found watching them work together in this routine actually made me laugh rather more than Haynes did, their cheerfulness working well as a corrective to the rather sour comedy that surrounds them.

A Comedy On This Day: Marion & Geoff - The Wife (12 February 2003)

 A programme that I'd never seen before. There's an interesting essay by Steven Peacock in which he describes Marion & Geoff as being a comedy of gaps and spaces - between hopeful Keith's understanding of the world and the way the world treats him, between his recollection and anticipation of events and the unseen events themselves. The writing seems artless and spontaneous, but is really very finely crafted, registering several different tenses and timescales. 

 Looking at this episode visually, I'm struck by its perpetual in-between locations - parked outside the buildings where the family the chauffer works for are doing tangible things in, or driving through London roads and streets (some of which I recognise as Dulwich - the landscape has that leafy feel of the more prosperous districts of South London). And the character of Keith fills in the gaps with his generous readings of his employers, and misplaced optimism and makes the story affecting.

 Only one thing mars the comedy - the recurrent use of some godawful indie-schmindie mopey-wopey singer-songwriter dirge. This type of musical editorialising is usually distracting even when it uses really good songs, but with music of this low a calibre it breaks a spell and kills a mood.

A Comedy On This Day: Big Train (11 February 2002)

 I didn't have a television in 2002, so this is the first that I've seen of the second series. Amelia Bullmore and Julia Davis have gone, replaced by Rebecca Front, Tracy-Ann Oberman and Catherine Tate. Of those three, Front appears to have been given the most interesting stuff to do, but she must have had more of an established TV sketch comedy pedigree at the time of production.

 I've always found an equation-type quality in appreciating this sort of comedy, in which a setting that carries one set of expectations is juxtaposed with an outlandishly wrong element within it, leading to a conclusion that encourages the viewer to consider the sketch from a new perspective. It's a type of humour that provokes a kind of critical engagement within me (how is this situation going to develop, they've got those details right) while rarely making me actually laugh. I didn't find any of this episode very memorable once it finished, apart for one sketch - the development of a relationship and marriage between a couple (Pegg and Front) where the woman has huge sponge hands, perhaps because its the only part that encourages viewer empathy and where it felt like something emotionally real was at stake.

A Comedy On This Day: The Brittas Empire - Gavin Featherly R.I.P. (10 February 1997)

 Carrying on a series without its original writer-creators is always tricky, but especially one that had as original a tone and structure as The Brittas Empire. Terry Kyan's script (concerning the supposed death at sea of a regular) aims for outrageous black comedy, but feels a bit too messy to pull it off. A lot of it happens away from the leisure centre (at the seaside, at sea and at the cemetery), which doesn't really play to the series' abiding strengths of the peculiar manager of a bizarre workplace.

 The most interesting aspect of the episode is the two guest characters - Donald Pickering and Rowena Cooper as the bickering grieving parents - in whom the writer could create something new and follow his own interests.

A Comedy On This Day: Paul Merton In Galton & Simpson's... The Radio Ham (9 February 1996)

 Dear oh dearie me... Paul Merton isn't much of an actor, is he? From memory, I think that this one was as bad as this project got - mostly no other performers in the room for Merton to interact with, the memory of Tony Hancock's inflections on every joke, the particularly awkward fit of 1961 material into the world of 1996.

A Comedy On This Day: French & Saunders (8 February 1996)

 This should be interesting. 1996 must have been about the height of their popularity, but after I'd stopped watching. Seeing it now is an ideal test of the instinctive prejudices that meant that I didn't see it at the time.

 I think that it was the combination of a perceived self-satisfied quality about them - combined with the amount of emotional investment that so much of the British public had in them, as much for what they represented as celebrities as their actual comedy - that put me off. I was largely right, though there are still enough funny bits to make it worth watching.

 By far the worst section is the v-e-r-y l-o-n-g parody, a mash-up of Judge Judy as populated by characters from Star Trek. The production values are right, but it’s a long stretch of them and their comedy friends doing funny business (like going "woosh" whenever the doors open) rather than a tight, pertinent, sketch.

 

 Another long sketch is the pair playing two soppy brides planning a double wedding. Here the details are funny and the initial effect of their characterisations is impressive, but something goes a bit wrong when the two women have to fall out and be reconciled. The emotions are rushed and the performers corpse a little, and I start to feel that it would benefit from more guidance from a third party.

 The best part of the show is the final sketch, a The Making of Pride & Prejudice-type feature with F & S as the two posh homeowners who unwittingly continually disrupt the filming on their estate. Rosemary Leach is fantastic in this, not only when playing herself but especially in the disrupted scenes from the fake serial, which she always manages to make wholly convincing but just pushed a little further to show how they can look absurd. It’s the best-judged comic performance in the show, and it’s from an actor rather than a comedian.

 I am curious to identify which bits of additional material were written by the young Mel & Sue. I'm fairly sure that I can tell, but who knows?

A Comedy On This Day: The Brittas Empire - Staff Pilfering (7 February 1991)

 Few things are more compelling (or entertaining) to watch than a terrible marriage, and the depiction of Helen Brittas (strung out on valium, depressed after the end of an affair to which her husband is completely oblivious) is surprisingly grim for an ostensibly family-friendly BBC1 comedy. Because her scenes are usually set away from the leisure centre, they work at a different, complimentary, tenor to the main storyline and give the viewer the chance to consider Gordon's Brittas's awfulness and insensitivity from another, domestic, perspective (this week, trying to persuade him to try marriage guidance counselling).