A Comedy On This Day: After Henry - Home Comforts (6 February 1990)

 This week's plot is exactly what you'd expect from an After Henry storyline, with Eleanor threatening to leave Sarah and go to live at The Sycamores home. Clare spends much of her time in this episode with a female friend, not something that I can remember seeing in any other one. Come to think of it, Sarah doesn't seem to have any woman friends, either, although Russell would fit most narrative purposes when they might otherwise feature.

  I am intrigued to see in the set dressing for Clare's flat that she still hasn't got rid of her 1982 Patches annual, which feels authentic. In a rare incidence of comparative time-and-place London 1989 specificity Eleanor wants to get to Sainsbury’s early on a Saturday morning, "before the yuppies wake up" and leave her queuing behind their trollies filled with "Perrier water, mange tout and garlic".

A Comedy On This Day: Desmond's - Hold De Front Page Part II (5 February 1990, also Part 1, 29 January 1990)

 The second run of Desmond's is a series flying with confidence and optimism. You can hear it in the audience's enthusiastic responses - at seeing characters and places that they recognise who have rarely been shown on television before - and see their appreciation lift the performances of the large ensemble of inexperienced actors, experienced performers like Ram John Holder (Porkpie) who haven't had much TV exposure before, and major actors who have rarely been given TV leads before (Carmen Munro and Norman Beaton).

 Now given a 13-episode run by Channel 4 (series one had six) Desmond's had the space to try new things out and take some risks. Such as doing a two-part story with a cliffhanger, the tale of an armed siege at Desmond's barber shop. The first part works very well, because of the surprise and novelty of the situation, to which all the regulars respond in character.

 This second part is more problematic, with the situation escalating beyond the shop into exterior scenes of the police responding in the street and an attempt at a satirical portrait of the media reaction, which don't exactly play to the comedy's strengths. The problem created by the situation - combining a convincing siege drama with a funny comedy - becomes more and more problematic to deal with, and the acting holds the story together by the end, particularly Carmen Munro's innate ability to convey maternal authority.

A Comedy On This Day: You Rang M'Lord? - Fair Shares (4 February 1990)

 I am unconvinced as to the wisdom of the 50-minute sitcom format. While it made sense for Only Fools & Horses to expand in 1989, that was its sixth series - the longer episodes taking advantage of the groundswell of the audience's identification with these characters and familiarity with their situation. Whereas You Rang M'Lord started from scratch, and I always got the feeling was given as something of a reward to Perry & Croft for 20 years of exemplary BBC Comedy service.

 What they produced is an intensely plotty long-term serial narrative about blackmail and family fortunes that makes this individual episode very exposition-heavy. The essential comic story within the episode (Alf needing funds quickly and coming to grief with a pawnbroker) would be better dealt with in a more concentrated half-hour. There are plenty of funny moments within it, but they all feel a bit subsidiary to the plot. Plus Alf is quite the nastiest piece of work in the Perry and Croft canon - the very first thing that we see him do is attempt to rob a corpse! - making him a problematic protagonist. Captain Mainwaring, Battery Sergeant Williams, Ted Bovis et al all had their considerable flaws, but was easier to see their good points and empathise with their position.

A Comedy On This Day: Chance In A Million - Winning Streak (3 February 1986)

 Chance In A Million's elaborate join-the-dots plot construction (in which every implausible action has a logical reaction, sometimes several scenes on) sometimes impresses me more than it amuses me. I found the simplest things in this episode to be the most enjoyable ones - Tom's handling of the tricks in his Paul Daniels magic set (the first prize that he wins on his unlucky lucky day), and a well-worked sequence where Tom helps a woman in the street with her box of groceries and ends up helping an identically-dressed lady to unintentionally steal them. The latter is an OB sequence on a rainy West London street, achieved without dialogue or sound in one fluid shot, filmed overhead from the other side of the road - something that could have worked in the earliest days of the moving image.

A Comedy On This Day: Spitting Image (2 February 1986)

 This must be the week after the Westland debate, and you get the sense of that story having petered out with no new news to replace it save for a skiing holiday for Charles and Diana. The cabinet sketch even ends with a swivel-eyed camouflage-jacketed Hestletine announcing that "I'm going to walk out again!"
 The only two things that I could remember from this one were "Nippon - They don't half bugger up the British car industry" and the making of Desmond Wilcox's fly-on-the-wall documentary series The Voyeur. This week's puppets that I didn't remember them doing were Max Bygraves and John Craven.

 Perhaps the best moment is the bit that shows the most teeth - a rendering of 'Jerusalem' with tableaux of the Conservative government enacting various Victorian values. Mrs Thatcher as Queen Victoria figure daintily drinking tea while pith helmeted soldiers fire machine guns as the song goes, "I shall not halt with my great plan/ no matter how insane it seems/ till we have built Jerusalem/ and made it look like Milton Keynes"; Health Secretary Norman Fowler is a sawbones surgeon; a top-hatted Cecil Parkinson turns away a wronged mother and child into the snow, etc., although the images do zip past in rather too quick succession to register as much as they might.

A Comedy On This Day: Victoria Wood As Seen On TV (1 February 1985)

 A series with a very distinctive visual style. All those thick-bordered freeze-framed images flipping around at the end of sketches, the blue-and-pink colour scheme, Claymation credits and that set made it look quite distinct from other sketch shows at the time. These days it looks of its time, but its a visual register that still comes over as unorthodox, and hard to read at times. Especially during the song ('Go Away'), which flicks between Wood at the piano and bits of her interpreting it in character on a separate set and back to Wood at the piano with two saxophonists in silhouette in the foreground. It takes me a while to register that this isn't some sort of pastiche, but done in earnest in a Marti Caine-style LE idiom. It looks just as odd as Acorn Antiques.

 Watching the initial stand-up (not fitting into clothes) followed by a gynaecological two line Doctor's surgery sketch between Wood and Duncan Preston, followed by a gruesome sketch at a cosmetic surgery clinic brings home how much of this comedy is about - and comes back to - the body. In Wood's humour the body is something that you're never in complete control of, a cause of embarrassment couched in euphemisms whenever you try to talk about it. This bodily humour isn't often gross-out comedy, so it comes over as quite palatable, but there's something quietly radical about it.

 I always find the filmed documentaries in these shows to be the funniest bits. This week's one is On Campus. Its one of several works by graduates of the University of Birmingham that refer to a dystopian tower looming over a campus...

A Comedy On This Day: The Mistress (31 January 1985)

 This is rather unsatisfactory, and exposes all of the problems with Carla Lane's writing that are usually more latent in other works. Characters continually stop to pontificate and philosophise at the expense of whatever dramatic situation is supposed to be going on, and I think, "No-one would actually talk like this, ever". Even the bits that are funny don't quite ring true. It starts with Felicity Kendall burning an elaborate meal a la Butterflies, but it’s hard to understand how she wouldn't have noticed or smelled the smoke. Because she takes a wire tray out of the oven and places it directly onto a work surface, she must have already turned all of the heating off some time earlier without noticing any smoke or that the food is burnt.
 
 Later on there's supposed to be some business when Maxine fails to uncork an obstinate bottle of wine, but Felicity Kendall abandons the bottle with such unseemly haste that its another moment that makes her look feeble, rather than defeated by circumstances.
 
 This was not Gareth Gwenlan's finest half hour as a director.

 I could do with more explanation of the economics of the characters' situation. Maxine has an impressive home for a single florist, so presumably must have come into money at some point... Jenny McCracken as her assistant is wearing a (very precisely mid-80s) Laura Ashley-style outfit in grey with a tight waistline and a lot of fabric around the shoulders that doesn't do her any favours.