A Comedy On This Day: Citizen Smith - Prisoners (20 June 1980)

 This final series does feel rather exhausted, and as though it doesn't really seem to know what it’s about or why it exists anymore. There isn't much comedy derived from the small beer revolutionary movement this episode, with an extremely familiar storyline of escaped convicts taking shelter in the heroes' home.

 Naturally, the chief villain is a menacing angry Glaswegian, with a towering physique and scar, downing litres of whiskey neat from the bottle. The most engaging moments derive from Wolfie's attempts at showing an aggressive stance towards him:

WOLFIE: Are you deaf as well as ugly? You think you're tough don't you? Come down 'ere from the Mull of Kintyre with your Stepney boxing glove! Well, let me tell you something, sunshine. You're nothing, you're fourth division. We ain't scared of you mate. These boys look scared? Eh?

(Shot of two of the friends cowering behind cushions)

 This conflict doesn't end well for Wolfie, but at least it's created one of the series' better moments of his leadership abilities being put to the test.

A Comedy On This Day: Citizen Smith - Bigger Than Guy Fawkes (23 May 1980)

 This first episode of the fourth and final series doesn't auger very well for the rest of it. Its an ambitious rise-and-fall narrative; Wolfie is presented with the opportunity to become a star by a showbiz impresario; then learns that he's trapped in a gilded cage, miming to other people's songs and speaking scripted lines to promote a ghost-written autobiography; rebels by speaking with his own voice, exposing his idiocy to the world; gets dropped, back into the Tooting gutter.

 Unfortunately, this sort of story really needs the opened-out form of a film (or the scatter-gun off-the wall Goodies approach) to work that well. As it is, what we get are a succession of scenes of Wolfie and his acolytes discussing their situation, while the interesting stuff happens almost entirely off-screen. These sequences (in an open prison cell and a - rather tatty-looking - luxury hotel suite) have an oddly temporary feel to them, with the sitcom not having a permanent base at this point. One short scene in a little corner of TVC of Wolfie being interviewed by Valerie Singleton on a Nationwide-type programme is as much as we see of his brief stardom.

A Comedy On This Day: Citizen Smith - Rock Bottom (5 January 1979)

 This episode revolves around a scam that would be much harder to pull off since the advent of the Internet, now that it isn't really possible for people to disappear without a trace for ten years, and return claiming to be a huge success in America.

 I've realised that watching Citizen Smith brings out the same responses in me that reading the early plays of Ibsen and Chekhov always does - a distracting awareness of preoccupations, characterization and situations that then go on to be better realized in the more mature works. Citizen Smith has a variant version of the Only Fools and Horses inner London milieu, delusional hero, circle of gormless friends and schemes that don't come off, but it isn't as funny or empathetic yet.

 Wolfie Smith is an odd lead for a sitcom. Seen 40 years on, failed radical chic is a rather niche characterization and the combination of vanity and thickness is hard to be much drawn to. I always respond better to Shirley, the tolerant girlfriend of an idiot personality being a type of person that one often meets in real life, although this is perhaps due as much to Cheryl Hall's performance as anything else.