A Comedy On This Day: Astronauts - Going Home (23 August 1983)

 The final episode, broadcast on this day only in certain ITV regions, and at 11.35pm. An ignominious end for a series initially held in high hopes...

 You can see the promise in the situation, with the three astronauts preparing to return to earth, the scientist frightened of the dangerous process, and the Captain traumatised to learn that his wife has been having an affair at home. That promise is dramatic rather than comic, though, in a Moonbase 3 sort of way. Unfortunately, whenever the character and situation goes somewhere interesting, the programme remembers that it's a sitcom and quickly (if unamusingly) undercuts it.

 This isn't helped by canned (rather than recorded with a studio audience) laughter, a jarring feature in several ITV programmes of this period. Once you start to notice it you can hear it, in the way that the laughter suddenly starts and stops and the silences in between, and it sounds nothing like the organic responses of a real audience. It also has an unfortunate editorialising effect. Garden and Oddie's dialogue doesn't have much in the way of jokes, but it has got a comic rhythm which gets undercut by sudden bursts of loud laughter at exchanges which are only tangentially amusing in themselves. Then, once the scientist astronaut gets frightened and the evangelist pilot attempts to comfort her, you get a similar exchange like "God is your pilot/ I hope that he has a fully qualified license", received in an unnaturally sterile silence, because it was decided that laughter at a joke would be distracting during a serious bit.

A Comedy On This Day: Spitting Image (13 May 1984)

 This first series is still taking an age to find its feet. The only moment to really capture my imagination is a choreographed sequence in a diner during the 'Do Doo Ron Ron' Reagan musical number. For some reason they've decided to include full size figures of Ayatollah Khomeini and an Iranian woman among the revellers, meaning that - in a tiny space of a few feet - a dancer in heavy robes and a rubber mask has been expected to jump into the arms of (and be caught by) a similarly incommoded figure. It brings it home to you just how on the hoof production of this programme was.

 One thing that will invariably - if only momentarily - perk up my interest watching these old episodes is that two or three "I don't remember them having a puppet" faces will always turn up every edition. Alongside of Gary Hart, this week also features Saatchi & Saatchi and Len Murray. Len Murray! I doubt that they were still using models of trade union leaders by the mid-nineties (John Monks? Bill Morris?)

A Comedy On This Day: Outside Edge (28 April 1994)

 This is a series that I own by accident, because I only bought the disc to get the 1982 LWT version of Richard Harris' original play. Watching this episode (in which the team spend the night at a lavish seaside hotel on the eve of a match) I'm very much struck by how of its time it is televisually.

 Taxonomically, it’s really a lot more of a comedy-drama than an actual comedy programme, and if it were an hour rather than 30 minutes, it would probably have got classified as one. It has the classy trappings of quality television drama of his time - film, location rather than sets (so no audience laughter), incidental music. What it doesn't really have is anything much in the way of actual scenes, but rather little character vignettes which build towards a larger plot. The most interesting aspects of it seem to come from the player's wives, their interactions with each other and insights into how their marriages work (or don't).

A Comedy On This Day: Spitting Image (27 April 1986)

 First lines after the opening credits are: Casper Weinberger: "Mr President, what are we doing about Syria?" Ronald Reagan: "We're going in, Larry!"...

 Its 12 days after the US bombing raids on Libya, launched from RAF air bases in Britain. The note of genuine - rather than synthetic - outrage (at both Reagan's hawkishness and Britain's complicity) in the skits that refer to the event gives them a rare sense of urgency when viewed 32 years later. The highlight is a love scene at an airport between Reagan and Thatcher, with the president handing the Prime Minister a ticking bomb just before she boards her plane.

 The sketch that I remember being talked about at the time in our second form, however, is Russell Harty interviewing Samantha Fox's disembodied breasts, each of which is given a separate personality and a pert little red mouth in place of a nipple. Watched now, I'm struck by how surreally grotesque the image is, and by how it treads a fine line between satirising the commercial exploitation of a young woman and just mocking her. Unfortunately, it falls horribly on the wrong side of this line in the punch line about Fox's brain forming a double act with the breasts called Little and Large... and you realise just what a disagreeable boy's club this enterprise is sometimes.

 No new song this week, just a reprise of 'The Chicken Song' over the end credits. They've created a monster there...

A Comedy On This Day: Spitting Image (8 April 1984)

 Episode 5 and I wouldn't say that this programme had found its feet yet... This one attempts a unified format (a day in the life of the Royal Family), rather than a sequence of quick-fire sketches. It means that it does goes on a bit and keeps on having to return to the same place, and even at the best of times Spitting Image jokes about the Royal Family worked better in small doses. The House of Windsor is also weirdly incomplete at this early stage, with no Anne, Edward or Queen Mother. Oddly, Prince William's baby puppet looks much like he does today.

 It never worked very well when they put a performer in a mask because they needed a puppet to do something with their legs. This week they want to have the Queen crossing her legs in one sequence, and the programme's sense of scale feels magnified and wrong when it happens.

A Comedy On This Day: Spitting Image (18 March 1984)

 Only the third episode... Has any other programme of the significance and stature of Spitting Image ever had quite so poor a first series? In the 1980s, one used to often hear public figures and commentators diplomatically opine that they thought that the puppets were much better than the material. If they'd only seen the early ones, that was a understandable verdict.

 Something that's odd is how little of it is really topical. The only jokes that come out of that week's news are brief skits about Arthur Scargill (threatening response to pit closures announcement) and Mark Thatcher (dubious Oman deal). To my mind, these to-the-point one-liners and mini-sketches have dated rather better than long convoluted routines about Reagan being senile or Thatcher being authoritarian.

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.