A Comedy On This Day: People Like Us - The Actor (10 June 2001)

 David Tennant plays a young actor (Rob Harker) spending a day around Soho, who manages to cock up a voice-over, an interview and an audition within the space of a few hours.

 Although the comedy of this piece - mainly concerned with escalating misunderstandings played in a minor key - does raise genuine laughs, I get left with a sense of melancholia and unease after watching it, rather than mirth. In its muted way, it’s very skillfully constructed with each scene showing a new aspect of this young man's flaws, traumas and neuroses. The viewer is given particular empathetic insight through an interview with his uncomprehending parents, and the unexpected appearance of an ex at what appears to be the one moment's grace that he gets.

 The mood of unease is perhaps magnified a little by 17 years' historical distance, with the actor spending his day in the part of Central London that I knew best when I was young. I'm struck in the Soho street scenes by the presence of more ordinary life and less conspicuous wealth. Always interesting to see theatre (or cinema) fronts in West End scenes, as you can date what you're seeing precisely by what's on. Rob Harker walks outside the Wyndham's and Albery several times, where respectively Art (already in its fourth year) and the bold transfer from the Royal Court Upstairs of Caryl Churchill's Far Away are playing.

A Comedy On This Day: The Smell Of Reeves & Mortimer - Flight 709 (9 June 1995)

How nice to have your garments removed by a bird of prey these days.

 The final episode, and there's an end of term, exhausted, feel to this one. There's more corpsing than usual, which reminds you just what a fine line there is between it being a charming glimpse of the real friends behind the personae and the point where it becomes annoyingly amateurish. If they were small children, this would be the point where you'd say, "I think they're getting over-tired now".

 I'd forgotten that Charlie Higson's Swiss Toni first appeared here, almost fully formed, years before The Fast Show. He attempts to sell the bra men a convertible - "You know, I can picture you now, driving along in the summer with your top down."

A Comedy On This Day: Sorry! - Dream Time (8 June 1987)

(Middle-aged brother and sister Timothy and Muriel Lumsden are having a heart-to-heart conversation in the family kitchen)

MURIEL: You know the facts of life...

MRS LUMSDEN (suddenly appearing without warning): No he DOESN'T, Muriel, thank you very much!

 This is how I like Sorry! best, when it plays like one of Sigmund Freud's darker case studies. The mother is particularly frightening here, staying with her son when he's away at the Librarians' Conference in Eastbourne at the start of the episode, and removing the spark plugs from his car and throwing them in the bushes to stop him seeing a woman at the end. But unlike Harold Steptoe failing to pull the cart away from home, Timothy does manage to get away from home, thanks to a helpful push from his sister. Admittedly he then loses control of the car and crashes it into a lamppost, but its still a curiously hopeful conclusion.

 Mrs Lumsden gives something of an explanation of her fears and motivations this week, when she tells her husband that they have to prevent Timothy from getting married, because if he left they'd have to go into sheltered housing. Mr Lumsden also gets a character moment with his son in the pub, telling Timothy about a lost romantic opportunity 40 years ago, something which barely emotionally registers with him now, but has a greater effect on the son.

 The story is framed around a pastiche of the famous balcony scene from Private Lives, with Timothy reunited with a childhood sweetheart (whom his mother banned him from seeing) when they meet on adjacent balconies at the Eastbourne Hotel. The balconies then reappear in a dream for Timothy, in which he assumes a more sophisticated persona, a dream that then acts as a catalyst for him to break out from home and seek the woman. Sitcom dream sequences are normally not to my taste (opportunities for performers to lark about in costume and act out of character which betray that confidence in the programme's actual setting is starting to ebb away), but this is a rare one that actually enhances an episode. The Noel Coward idiom is recognisable and playing about with that register is funny, and the dream genuinely advances the plot and creates insights into Timothy's character that the viewer wouldn't otherwise get.

A Comedy On This Day: You're Only Young Twice - The Desperate Hours (7 June 1979)

 The plot of this episode is something of a sitcom staple: two criminals on the run take shelter in the regulars' home and take hostages. For what it is, it's well orchestrated in a modest way, with each of the regulars affecting the situation's outcome, and acting in character to do so.

 The canny casting of the two guest Post Office raiders is probably the most interesting aspect. As the older (more capable) criminal, Victor Maddern knows what to do - conveying just enough reserves of menace and force to look convincing when pointing a gun at the old ladies, but obviously nice enough to reassure the viewer that he wouldn't do any real harm. He's accompanied and handicapped by having his gangling, illiterate, simpleton young brother as partner-in-crime. Within the very limited parameters of this programme, Christopher Mitchell (of It Ain't Half Hot, Mum fame) does well with this character, even finding little moments of unforced pathos when he strikes up a rapport with Pat Coombs' childlike Cissie.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor At Large - Let's Start At The Beginning (6 June 1971)

 A really interesting script from Graham Chapman and Bernard McKenna, in which Dr Upton gets seconded to a psychiatric practice. There's ambivalence about the value and use of psychiatry (which maybe comes from Chapman's own experience), which says different things about the treatment with each successive patient.

 The first patient is a council gardener with an embarrassing tic, another chance to utilize David Jason's abilities to grey up and play an old man and be physically funny. This patient is shown to be a sympathetic character that is capable of being cured, and whose life gets shown to be improved by the treatment. It's as though the programme feels a responsibility to present a positive depiction of psychiatry, to alleviate the anxieties viewers who may come into contact with the treatment and feel stigmatised by it.

 Having got that out of the way, the second patient mainly serves the narrative comic function of showing Dr Upton having a go at psychiatry and initially not succeeding very well. Noel Coleman plays the imposing patient, and viewers who remember the 1969 Doctor Who story The War Games will recognise aspects of his performance as General Smythe being used again - especially when the patient wants to emphasise his authority to the Doctor and puts on a pair of glasses!

 The final patient is an eminent psychiatrist (a Nobel Prize winner, we are told) played by Freddie Jones in deranged mode. The comedy here stems from a misunderstanding between who is the Doctor and who is the patient, and is sceptical about the value of the techniques that psychiatrists use. Despite the acting pedigree this bit isn't as funny, but compensatory interest comes from the sterling work of the LWT designers in imagining how this distinguished man might decorate his room and realising it in an audacious set. Sir Robert Joyce first appears sat at his desk, dwarfed by a terrifying, hideous, mural of a foetus in the womb, placed under a canopy of a sinister ghostly shroud against a Roger Dean-style backdrop of a fantastic landscape. The eminent psychiatrist's surgery also has exposed piping in green and pink, strange triangular criss-cross lighting on the ceiling and a psychedelic rainbow lighting cabinet of a type sometimes also seen on the set of Top Of The Pops around this time. 

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor In The House - Hot Off The Presses (5 June 1970)

 This Garden & Oddie episode has particularly close affinities to The Goodies; the Doctors taking on a job assigned to them (revitalising the hospital magazine); a lot of choric reactions from the other Doctors to the one speaking; a filmed sequence of sight gags (the Doctors distributing their magazine on the streets); one character's changed circumstances immediately indicated by them returning to headquarters in a striking brand new costume.

 The depiction of female characters is particularly regrettable this week with only two women in the story - the one a dolly bird model for the Doctors to pursue and the other a plain spinster for them to avoid. Oddly, the spinster character, her status denoted by her short hair and ordinary clothes, now looks just like an ordinary woman to contemporary viewers.

A Comedy On This Day: Rob Brydon's Annually Retentive - 1984/ Who Do You Think You Are? (4 June 2007)

(Rob Brydon arrives in his car outside the Public Records Office in Cardiff.)

BRYDON (inside car to camera): (smugly) Here we go. They make a bit of a fuss of me in Wales.

(He leaves the car, which he - surely illegally - parks right in front of the building.)

INCREDULOUS PASSERBY: (in strong Welsh accent) WAN-KER!

 The series ends in a curious way - with the mock panel show perhaps having exhausted itself, we see Brydon appearing in (and behind the scenes of) a mock episode of Who Do You Think You Are? instead, skewering how some egotistical personalities seem to have little interest in family history in that programme.

 As you'd expect, it feels a bit different than before, partly because the parodied programme is of a higher quality, but also because there's rather less of a distinction between an obviously-performed programme like a panel show and the comedian's life offstage than there is in a biographical documentary.

 The distinction is quite subtle at its best moments, such as Brydon interacting awkwardly with his father - because the father is acting inappropriately for the camera in one scene, and then because that's how the two men are together in the next. It works well though, and was a good way to end it.