A Comedy On This Day: The Arthur Haynes Show (15 February 1964)

 The two long sketches inspire more laughter this week, even though both start to peter out before they finish. A respectable man buttonholed by a loquacious eccentric in a single railway carriage was an absolute staple of sketch comedy of this period, but the interesting surprise element this time around is that Haynes is impersonating Parsons. Two parallel seams of comic mileage are mined out of this scenario - why is this character behaving like this? - and, can Haynes sustain the performance and how will Nicholas Parsons respond to it? There are a couple of ambitious unexpected cutaway close-up shots of Haynes' face from the perspective of the luggage rack and carriage door as his character explores the space of the carriage. But also one of the blinds over the railway door falls off, with no back projection through the window... In the second sketch the Tramp and Irish cause havoc in a bank ("You'd give us an account if we were The Beatles!") starting a cockney brawl of a type that will become familiar in Till Death Us Do Part.

 This week's musical guests (that survive in the truncated ITC print) are Freddie & The Dreamers, whose songs are so short (and whose popularity was at the time so great) that they manage to fit both 'You Were Made For Me' and 'Over You' into their slot. Watching the familiar 'You Were Made' routine (best-known from their often-shown Blue Peter appearance) is an object lesson is ill-considered LE direction. The band quite spaced-apart on the set, so when they perform their synchronised knee-kicking movements in a very wide shot they look like beat boom ants rather than distinct personalities (especially on a little 1960s TV set).