A Comedy On This Day: For The Love Of Ada - Ada & Walter Are Haunted (26 August 1971)

 This first episode of the final series certainly moves For The Love Of Ada into unexpected territory, as Walter and Ada discover that they share their new home with a ghost.

 The new home is the cemetery lodge, and Thames' designers have done a good job in conveying the historical character of this building, furnishing it with interesting-looking, chests, carved wooden chairs, brasses and Victorian portraits on the wall and the like. The haunting is dealt with in quite a sober way for a comedy, with Ada treating the matter practically ("Does this mean our rates will go up?") and cheerfully, sitting up for the night in the hope of meeting the ghost.

 When it looks like an apparition might be happening, the programme goes into a completely different register, with suspenseful incidental music, a close up of a slowly turning door handle and the camera panning through the room before returning to the handle. It isn't a spectre at the door, of course, but the ghost is given further attention, with Walter and Ada conducting some offscreen research about the history of the lodge and the ghost's identity. Its established in a few lines of dialogue that they've taken action to honour the ghost's wishes, and then in a detail in the final scene the viewer is led to believe that the ghost has been a real presence.

 This is subtly done for a Powell & Driver script, and is really only a subplot for the usual domestic concerns. But it's a really good way of establishing that Walter and Ada have moved into a new home, encouraging the viewer to understand on a subliminal level that the lodge a different sort of environment to what we've seen before.

A Comedy On This Day: For The Love Of Ada - Ada Tries To Make Walter Jealous (18 May 1970)

 Although Irene Handl's smiles when she says them are endearing, Ada's malapropisms never seem to be very funny in themselves. Far more comically resonant are the occasional, now long-redundant, expressions that someone born in about 1905 must have still used. For example, once a rival for Walter's affections has left the room, Ada exclaims, "Silly bitch! Well, she is... Dressed up like a hambone and grinning like a horse collar."

 More work for John Scott Martin this episode, starting a pub scene in the second half, walking across the bar carrying a pint in each hand and inadvertently looking into the camera.

A Comedy On This Day: For The Love Of Ada - The Mortgage (3 April 1971)

 Now that their children's baby is due, Walter and Ada need to find a place of their own. The plotting of this episode is absolutely minimal, with Powell and Driver barely bothering to craft any of the reversals of expectation that any comedy scene requires to some extent. The fortune that the couple require to get their flat turns up through Ada just finding an old savings books. The subsequent disappointing reversal happens off-screen, when Walter goes to the bank - there wasn't any money in it after all, he reports.

 Strangely enough, this rudimentary plotting doesn't harm the show. Indeed, it’s actively preferable to the contrivances, coincidences and implausibilities that mar many comedies of this period. Because the programme's great strength lies in the characterisation of Walter and Ada, as realised through Irene Handl and Wilfred Pickles' unforced-feeling performances. They do feel genuinely like a actual couple, in a way that's quite rare. It doesn't really matter that the savings book story is so flimsy, because it’s how the couple respond to the disappointment that encourages viewer empathy. Really, you're happy to just watch them being themselves - the opening credits are superimposed over a studio shot of the pair on a bench reading a local newspaper together, and even without any dialogue its touching to observe them.

 Their costumes, and the way that Walter and Ada respond to each other remind me of my own (paternal) grandparents when I was a boy. They lived in Chiswick, so absolute Thames Television West London heartland... When did you stop seeing old people like them in London? That generation became thinner on the ground in the 1980s and had disappeared by the end of the century.

 Slightly disconcerting to see William Maxwell as a kindly vicar, when he went on to become Terry Sullivan's father in Brookside for many years.