A Comedy On This Day: The Two Ronnies (20 March 1985)

 This week, Ronnie Barker is wearing a contemporary-looking blazer in wide stripes of several pastel colours that puts me in mind of Neapolitan ice cream. Even more bang-on mid-eighties is Elaine Paige's performance of 'Smoke Gets In Your Eyes'. The old standard has been arranged as a modern-sounding power ballad with emotive guitar lines and moody 'Careless Whisper'-style saxophone solos. The singer is dressed in a baggy blue satin jacket with black satin skirt, has a voluminous Princess Diana hairstyle and pendulous earrings and - for no good reason - sits down on a step to sing to us against a backdrop befogged with dry ice. The performance is topped and tailed by close-ups of the saxophone and the hands playing it in the foreground with Paige sat in the middle distance.

 There's a parody of the Private Lives balcony scene, played between two burglars rather than Elyot and Amanda, making Barker's usual puns much more interesting than usual by hearing how they fit into a Coward idiom. Also a funny scene with Barker as an impatient waiter silently clearing away Corbett's courses before he's eaten them, that I'm guessing is by David Renwick (it has the feel of One Foot In The Grave). The positive effect of these imaginative sketches is then rather offset by one unfortunate blackface gag when a passing Rasta hails Corbett, covered in soot after putting his head and hands in a fireplace. "Heey maaan!" the dreadlocked passer-by hails Corbett, slapping his outstretched hands. You feel embarrassed for the black actor.

A Comedy On This Day: The Two Ronnies (6 January 1979)

 Watching Ronnie B in the opening jokes and the monologue, I'm struck by how he registers each lexical double entendre to the audience with the same expression and eye movement every single time.
 

 Ronnie C is wearing an off-white blazer with thick black piping this week.

 Call me perverse, but the section that I derive by far the most pleasure from is The Manhattan Transfer's synthy interpretation of 'On a Little Street in Singapore', enhanced by some role-playing and dramatic mime. On a small set of stock BBC Chinosarie, the ManTran play two couples, one a pair of inter-war American tourists who admire a canary in a cage, the other a pair of native Singaporeans (the man in yellowface, the woman coyly hiding behind a fan). The Chinese couple kiss, which is broken up when the tourists, who take their photo, hail them. This shonky but sincere routine has a degree of charm that the sketches lack, and made me laugh more than any of the jokes.