A Comedy On This Day: Duty Free - Forty Love (19 March 1984)

 Duty Free is an odder series tonally than you might remember it being. There's an attempt to bring emotional depth to the farcical shenanigans in this episode, with David's redundancy being exposed and Keith Barron being given a dignified speech that plays to his strengths as an actor (before a fish falls out of his trousers) and a surprisingly large amount of 12 Certificate swearing in the arguments between husbands and wives... But it really could do with another draft to make it better structured, especially the convenient presence of a large trolley of cream cakes in the hotel bedroom for the wives to through at each other and their husbands in the rather arbitrary and desperate climax.

 It also has the weirdest bit of non-speaking extra choreography in a scene where impoverished David is trying to smuggle food out of the hotel dining room. A row of silent figures stand at the breakfast bar, each one implausibly rooted to a single bowl or dish, unable to communicate with anybody else or move on or away from their own little spot. They look more like a Greek chorus than anyone that I've ever seen at any buffet.

A Comedy On This Day: Duty Free - Praying Mantis (27 February 1984)

 Its only the third episode, but this most formulaic of comedies is already set in stone... You can hear the usual Eric Chappell strength of pleasurably-crafted dialogue in Amy's complaints about David's middle aged delusions of youthful physicality (which probably ring a bit more true through being co-written by a woman), but the whole thing is so agreeably predictable that its never going to feel sharp.

 The highlight is the appearance of an Alsatian (credited to 'Woofers Animal Agency') with David's shoe in his mouth - it’s a shame that they didn't get this hound to do some more.