A Comedy On This Day: Shelley - Happy Birthday - R.I.P. (25 August 1992)

 Written by David Firth, one of four writers on this final series. This story feels like it could have been told much the same way in a fifties sitcom, with Ted pretending to be bedridden with a feigned slipped disc after no-one remembers his birthday. Contemporary detail comes from Shelley complaining about the Doctor's surgery having become a health centre with automated telephone booking and receptionists who type into their Wang personal computers when he's trying to speak to them. 

 Oddly, the one thing to make me laugh in this episode isn't even meant to be a joke, when Shelley snaps at Ted, "Will you stop mistaking me for a young person?" That's always an irritation of middle age, but not one often depicted - old people still thinking that you're young in some way, when you're acutely aware that you have nothing in common with the people who really are young.

A Comedy On This Day: Shelley - A Little Learning (18 August 1992)

 By Guy Jenkin this week, whose solo work is slightly coarser and less dextrous than his writing partner Andy Hamilton's scripts. Shelley is again a somewhat marginal figure in his own programme, largely there to make sardonic observations about Ted's plans, while David Ryall actually does stuff.
 

 Two interlocking storylines, Ted's prowess in pub quizzes and a private detective conducting surveillance operations from Ted's house. The greatest interest is derived from some bang-on specific 1990 details. Ted's nemesis in the pub quiz, a young Irishwoman, is wearing a tight satin bomber jacket with a very high waistband - a look that had a very limited shelf life. Meanwhile, the shifty detective - despite being middle-aged and too old for this sort of thing - is styled in a 'baggy' image with a mop-of-curls-shaved-at-the-sides hairstyle as if he was in The Milltown Brothers. Taking pride of place in his collection of expensive surveillance equipment is a Toshiba T1000 computer.

A Comedy On This Day: Shelley - Love Is... (11 August 1992)

 Andy Hamilton's final script for Shelley is another leisurely, drawn-out, affair formed of only three scenes, in which humour is mostly drawn from conversation rather than incident. Such actual plot as there is is culturally rather risky.
 

 Shelly and Ted are visited by a young Indian neighbour, who invites them out to his parents' restaurant. While there, they witness a dispute between the man and his family about his refusing an arranged marriage. The primary comic function of this theme works very well, creating many opportunities for Shelley and Ted to come up with tactless worldly pearls of wisdom about the matrimonial state and to react in embarrassment to the heated arguments around them. The secondary dramatic purpose is problematic, however, trying to engage sensitively with a serious issue from a culture outside the programme's regular characters in only 25 minutes. This isn't helped by matters becoming resolved by a very obvious development (when the prospective bride who the son has been refusing to see arrives - guess what? - she's a babe!) which is also rather poorly executed.

 I've realised something about Hywel Bennett's acting that's always nagged me. When Shelley is at his most oracular, his diction and delivery sounds just like Alan Bates. Homage? I can't think of any other actors of that generation who spoke in that manner.

 The detail that most pinpoints this episode to the time it was made is Ted getting a Poll Tax bill in the post. This provokes a series of reflections from Shelley about the unconvincing assurances given by John Major as Chancellor of the Exchequer - something that exposes the two-years-ago recording date.

A Comedy On This Day: Shelley - Come Fly With Me (4 August 1992)

 Shelley and Ted's flight to Greece is diverted, and they are stuck in Dubrovnik Airport. That exposes the 1990 recording date! It would be hard to derive much comedy out of a visit to Dubrovnik in 1992...

 If you can disregard that unfortunate detail, though, having this episode set in a transitional limbo space and time does the comedy a world of good, and gives Shelley something genuinely sympathetic to complain about. The entire first act is again just one scene and the long duration works to the story's benefit, accurately reflecting the tedium and discomfort of such situations.

 Andy Hamilton's script is very neatly patterned, with situations and exchanges in the first part then mirrored and reversed much later in the second, such as Ted's Act One beatific responses to Shelley's temper becoming Shelley's beatific responses to Ted's temper in Act Two.

 The best of these reversals is the presentation of the airline stewardess on reception. When Shelley complains in part one, she only offers a fixed smile and pat responses. But when Ted then remonstrates with her in part two, the cut glass accent and poise remain, but her response is unexpectedly beligerent: "Don't ask me, Sir. I don't service the bloody planes, do I? (...) The smile is there to stop me screaming. (...) Now, if you'll excuse me I'm going to the toilet to slash my wrists with a rusty razor blade."

 The effect of this is really unexpected and funny, working like Eliza Doolittle's "Not bloody likely!" speech in Pygmalion. Indeed, the actress gets a round of applause from the studio audience for her performance in the scene (helped by having a clear exit line). The actress who plays her has an unfamiliar credit, Deborah Barrymore... But she's better known as Deborah Moore, daughter of Roger! That makes sense. Judging by this performance, she definitely inherited something of her father's sense of playfulness and enjoyment.

A Comedy On This Day: Shelley - The Deep End (28 July 1992)

 The first episode of series ten and the 1990 production date and summer broadcast suggests that ITV no longer saw this programme as much of an asset... It's been a good ten years since an episode written by (series creator) Peter Tilbury, and Hywel Bennett is the only element left from the programme that it started out as. Shelley is more of an everyman discontented middle-aged man than the distinctive (unemployable graduate) character he once was, and the show now seems as much interested in Shelley's landlord, Ted (David Ryall).

 The entire first act of Andy Hamilton's script is a two-handed scene of Shelley and Ted at home, in which Ted persuades Shelley that he ought to take swimming lessons. Its very loosely structured and nothing much seems at stake. I could really have done with a bit more emotional impetus to engage me in this. You get the impression that both men are a bit bored and filling in time, and that Andy Hamilton is pleased to display his virtuosity in keeping an inconsequential scene spinning for over ten minutes.

 Things perk up slightly in the second act with some OB scenes of Shelley splashing about in a swimming pool and making some friends on the course - most interestingly, Samantha Beckinsale as a hydrophobic actress who's been cast as a mermaid in a film. But as soon as Shelley makes these new friends they then melt away disappointingly at the end of the episode, for reasons of expedience rather than pathos.

 The experience as a whole is one of watching a character comedy that has lost its sense of character.