A Comedy On This Day: All Gas & Gaiters - The Bishop Entertains (20 May 1971)

 This week's story operates on two different levels. The first is familiar jolly comedy in a sitcom reality, much as you would expect to see. It’s the annual fete at the Bishop's Palace, and the Dean's wife is put out (as only Joan Sanderson could be put out) to discover that the Bishop has invited another woman to open the fete. The Archdeacon is going to tell fortunes in costume. The Dean and his wife - who must be partially sighted for this one week - fail to recognise the Archdeacon in drag swigging the Bishop's sherry from the decanter and assume that he is the Guest of Honour.

 This is pleasant enough, but the second level is a lot more interesting. We learn that the Bishop has invited this unseen woman to open the fete because she is an old flame/ unrequited love from his 1930s youth who has crossed his path again, and that he intends to make up for decades of lost time and propose to her today. William Mervyn is given quite a lot of time and space to reminisce to (the rather uncomprehending) Noote and Blunt about this lost love, telling a sad tale of attacks of shyness, lost opportunities, flares of jealousy at perceived rivals for her hand, and a chance reunion years later in a theatre crowd during the war when he discovered that she has married.

 The Bishop comes across as bit deluded and not especially sympathetic during this reminiscence, but the writers' pleasure in telling a convincing tale of lost opportunities - and the performer's skill in rendering it - still gives him an unexpected vulnerability. So the more familiar comic mechanisms that follow eventually become frustrating in a way that they normally wouldn't. Having shown us this vulnerability, and set up a situation of very high emotional stakes - planning to propose to the great unrequited love of his life - the ball is then dropped. As you might expect the Bishop's plans are thwarted, but the reactions granted to him are only the usual familiar blunder and bluster. Tantalisingly, a little depth is momentarily introduced, but isn't then followed through.

A Comedy On This Day: Comedy Playhouse - The Bishop Rides Again (17 May 1976)

 The chemistry between the leads and general air of jollity makes this a one-off that glows with obvious potential for a future series [All Gas & Gaiters]. This initial playlet is rather stronger on silly situations than ecclesiastical politics, with much fun found out of a stipulation in a legacy that requires the Bishop to re-enact a medieval church ritual (handing out forty pairs of stockings to maidens of the parish on May Day) without deviating from Middle Ages custom, costume or transport. This doesn't score highly for plausibility, but it inspires some arresting comic images, especially in the filmed inserts - Derek Nimmo looking shifty outside a ladies' hosiers! William Mervyn, in a monk's habit, sat on a white horse!

 When dressed as monks and knocking on doors, the Bishop and the Chaplin get mistaken for reps from 'Monks Butter', with housewives presenting them with packaging and repeating a memorised slogan. This is something that comes into a number of sixties things, and which I have a dim remembered sense was still going on when I was an infant in the seventies. Its another one of those precise period details, like Green Shield Stamps or Hire Purchase being a new thing, which you start to pick up an out-of-time understanding of when you watch a lot of old British television.