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...