A Comedy On This Day: Dad's Army - The Battle Of Godfrey's Cottage (8 March 1969)

 One of the two lost episodes recovered in 2001, watching this reminded me of Nancy Banks-Smith's peerless review of the repeat.

 I do find Dad's Army episodes a bit busy at times. I would have been happier seeing more than a minute of Godfrey's tea with his two spinster sisters, before it becomes disrupted and overturned by the usual capers (although watching the two old ladies accommodate themselves to the situation has an English absurdist quality). The actress who played the elder sister Dolly (Amy Dalby) died two days after the broadcast. She was born in 1888, a link far back in time that probably informs her performance as Dolly Godfrey, an out-of-her-time Edwardian figure who barely registers that she's now living in 1940.

A Comedy On This Day: Pardon The Expression - The Host With The Most (7 March 1966)

 The department store comedy moves away from Dobson & Hawks for one week, when Swindley kindly volunteers to put his boss, Mr Hunt, up for the night. Like some other ITV sitcom episodes, the more interesting stuff is before the break, with the second half taken up with familiar farcical happenings of both men, in their pyjamas, locking each other out and alarming Dandy Nichols' next-door neighbour.

 The chance to see Swindley at home in the Act One set-up, however, gives the episode an unintended tangential depth. We don't normally think about Swindley being a single man, because the plots concentrate upon his position as a well-meaning fussy store manager and don't ever really investigate his possible interest in women. Seeing him in his element at his home-for-one gives him a greater vulnerability and makes the viewer more sympathetic towards him, I think. Its curious to see the objects that he surrounds himself with; a 'Love thy Neighbour' sampler he tells Mr Hunt that he embroidered when he was in the navy, the television with the nine inch screen that he bought in 1953 to watch the Coronation. Most melancholy of all is the cordon bleu cooking set and hostess trolley on which he prepares steak Diane for Mr Hunt (which he must have purchased on a Dobson & Hawks staff discount). Waiting for the inevitable fireball and culinary disaster is funny, but it does set you thinking about whether he's ever had somebody else visit that he could cook for.

A Comedy On This Day: The Worker - Out Of The Mouths Of Casual Labourers (6 March 1965)

 I wonder if its possible to date a comedy programme just by the quality of its laughter? Charlie Drake's antics and bon mots bring his studio audience to a collective ecstasy here, but there's something that you can hear in their laughter that disappears sometime in the 1970s. Maybe it’s their willingness to derive pleasure from, and to be genuinely surprised by, the most pedestrian reversals of expectation. There's one woman - or more likely, girl - in this audience with a very noticeable high-pitched squeak of a laugh, whose sense of humour can be traced throughout the whole show. She seems to find some sort of release through Drake's performance, and I increasingly started to speculate about who she might have been and what her life might have been like as the business on screen ground onwards.

 There are a few odd of-their-time concerns and attempts at off-the-wall satire in the set-up of the Worker's assignment this week, at a large anonymous corporation which exists to make people happy ("S.U.Y.P. - Send Us Your Problems"), where Drake gets hailed as a Chauncey Gardiner-type seer. I'm not sure that this gels at all well with Drake's slapstick and mawkish irritating man persona, really, although the set for the S.U.Y.P. reception is an unexpectedly impressive marvel of depth and perspective.

A Comedy On This Day: The Arthur Haynes Show (5 March 1962)

 Disappointingly, Ken Morris and Joan Savage are separated for their two spots this week, diminishing the interest of both appearances. The husband's performance of 'Belissima' at the piano is straightforward, while the wife's bossa nova interpretation of 'I've Got You Under My Skin' is mimed on a curious set consisting of curtains, windows, table and a plant. It’s a representational, rather than realistic, setting intended to convey the essence of elegant continental living rather than looking like an actual place.

 I'm not sure that my sympathies are in the right place to find the first long sketch as funny as I might do. The tramp inveigles his way into a rich woman's home by having answered her job advertisement for a mother's help as 'Emily Haynes', sits down on her chair, starts to drink her sherry and eat her chocolates and runs rings around her protestations. I find it a lot easier to empathise with her alarm over the intrusion and threat, than with him for browbeating this unfortunate woman into providing him with accommodation and funds.

A Comedy On This Day: Hancock's Half-Hour - The Cold (4 March 1960)

 The first episode of a new series, and there's been enough time in advance to record filmed inserts (Sid taking Tony for a run) on location! There's not much of it, but the roads and leafy pathways are still an unexpected expansion of the comedy's terrain. The outside world of East Cheam that Tony and Sid live in generally exists more in the viewer's imagination. Did they ever do that on other occasions?

 Tony Hancock's acting skills are particularly good at conveying illness, employing a wide range of all of the nasal and husky effects that change someone's voice when they have a cold. His face also looks oddly feminine when shrouded in a towel that acts as a headscarf over a steaming bowl. I've always found what's funny about the Hancock character curiously malleable. Sometimes it’s his delusions; sometimes his selfishness, and we see something of this moment-by-moment shift in his scene with Patricia Haynes' urban witch doctor here. He's pathetically credulous at one instant and then sharp and insulting the next, with both reactions equally amusing.

 There's an acute little routine of Hancock impersonating a (still wholly recognisable) television medicine advertisement to Sid. There's one thing on television that hasn't changed a lot over the subsequent 58 years! It’s a rare moment of reference to something modern in a story that could have otherwise been told the same way 30 years earlier (50 years earlier if you cut out some of the more elaborate dialogue).

A Comedy On This Day: The IT Crowd - Aunt Irma Visits (3 March 2006)

 There's an appealing handmade quality about the IT Crowd. Its not just because it was still a studio audience sitcom made at a time when these were largely considered to be old hat. Its also something in the performances - exaggerated and quite broad while remaining psychologically true - and the way that the jokes are set up that differentiated it from a lot of other television comedy at the time. I think that it’s a quality of the pleasure of sharing funny ideas. Its crammed full of very ingenious and elaborate jokes but is keen to ensure that they all register so that the viewer can enjoy them, rather than to demonstrate their creators' smartness and taste.

 It's cheerful nature can also conceal quite how highly ambitious it is. The premise of this episode - Moss and Roy picking up Jen's PMT by osmosis - is fraught with pitfalls. Its only once you think of the many ways that this theme could be handled badly (it could be condescending, in poor taste, over-elaborate or overly right-on) that you fully appreciate how well achieved it is, and the range of funny mileage that it gets from the idea. But what I like best about this series is that its one of the best depictions of how friendship between men and women can work in television comedy. Indirectly, its a programme about how three friends get on with - and care for - each other in a way that feels convincing, optimistic and true.

A Comedy On This Day: Spaced - Change (2 March 2001)

 I never saw this much-admired series at the time (and have never seen it since). It always sounded like the sort of cult television-fanboy thing that I wouldn't enjoy very much to me. Everyone has some similar instinctive prejudices about the programmes that we don't watch. Because no one can watch everything, everybody has some sort of instinctive "don't need to see that" filter. So it’s interesting to discover what I was missing out on.

 The central premise from which the comedy seems to stem is through applying the principles of culty popular culture to everyday life. Because I haven't seen most of the things that are being referenced, I always feel that I'm getting these sorts of jokes at one remove and they work at an intellectual, rather than empathetic level. Its also a bit of a jolt when you see something from the turn of the century after watching a lot of earlier television - the average shot length is much shorter and scenes are now shown from any number of perspectives and distances, making the thing feel more assembled and less free-flowing. I can also tell that there are a lot of gags and details that are designed to reward multiple viewing, which is fair enough if you're committed to watching something a lot of times, but perhaps detracts from the initial viewing experience.

 What is interesting is how precisely of its time the setting is, and how it reflects something of the lives and concerns of people of around my age and background, living in the very last years before the Internet much affected how we did things. Urban life with little funds, but precariously cushioned against actual poverty, these people in the last throes of youth have spent a lot of time in their teens and twenties sitting around and watching videos together. There's something smart about their frame of reference, but there's also a lack of any broader social-political-historical-cultural context to their worldview, which feels a bit hollow to me.