A Comedy On This Day: The Morecambe & Wise Show (15 July 1970)

 There's a curious sketch this edition in which George Cooper and Margery Mason - in braces and pinny respectively - play Eric's parents. They live in an archetypal North Country working class home, but with twenty ducks on the wall, and the sketch starts with a pastiche of Eric Spear's Coronation Street theme. Eric is dressed in an effete Southerner's costume of matching pink shirt and necktie and brings Ernie home with him to meet his parents. Almost nothing funny is extracted from the situation save for the usual interjections, but there's an intriguing dramatic possibility in it. There is with the 'at home' sketch this edition, too, when Eric answers the door to an eight month's pregnant woman asking to see Ernie and Eric panics about the trouble he believes that his friend has got himself into.

 Three musical guests; the inevitable Kenny Ball & His Jazzmen, Kenneth McKellar and - more intriguingly - former Vernons Girl Samantha Jones. Like so many British female singers of the 1960s at least one of her singles became hailed as a Northern Soul favourite years later, but little of that comes over in this performance. She sings 'You've Got Your Troubles' in a big band style, as if she is trying to seduce the listener. This interpretation feels one remove away from the song's mood of shared gloom, as heard in The Fortunes' original rather morose performance of the song in 1963.

A Comedy on This Day: The Morecambe & Wise Show (19 April 1976)

 The last of their regular BBC shows presents the duo at the pinnacle of their popularity. Their innate likability does a lot of work in getting the duffer patches of some sketches over the line. I think that because so many people associated them with happiness, there was a collective willingness on the part of audiences to go along with them, making their shows a kind of communal celebration of good cheer.

 The best bit is the most-repeated moment - the famous breakfast dance which mimes 'The Stripper' to various actions with eggs, pancakes, sausages, grapefruit, etc. The section when Eric tosses the eggs to Eric, who then breaks and beats them in time must have taken a bit of rehearsal. I'd forgotten that there are a couple of minutes before the dancing, mostly of the pair dropping things. You'd wonder where this sketch was going if you were watching for the first time.

 Its something of a surprise that the BBC's top comedy talents at the height of their powers didn't find more impressive musical guests this week. Diane Solomon, who did at least have minor hit albums at this time, sings a song of undying devotion ('Whistle Me') from the perspective of a dog. Her performance of the song is wholly upstaged by the large grey Afghan hound sat on her lap - "His name's Kafka. Isn't he lovely?"

 Top recording artistes Champagne don't even have pets to hide behind. They are a 3M 2F group, but one of the men is a drummer, perched behind his kit of a dais at the back of the set. The remaining quartet are lined at the front in a Brotherhood of Man-type formation, but unfortunately the two men (one of whom sports an impressive afro and beard that reminds me of George Berry) are encumbered by guitars, so interaction between the sexes is minimal. The women try to make the best of things by walking back and forth and raising their arms in trousered outfits formed out of six tiers of fringed pink material that flaps about in unison a bit. Their song, 'Love for All Seasons' ("The flowers that we picked in June/ would die too! soon!", etc.) is unfamiliar and a bit confused.