A Comedy On This Day: The Prince Of Denmark - Flaps & Light Ale (17 April 1974)

 It is quite extraordinary how appalling a man the Ronnie Corbett character is in this, and how little in the way of redeeming qualities he is given. Peevish, squirming and not keen for others to take the credit, it’s the type of role that Ricky Gervais would create a generation later.

 This viewer's sympathies where wholly with his wife, a very underwritten character in an attractive scarlet dress with a flat white collar, despite her not being called upon to do much other than discourage Ronnie from getting into scrapes and clear up his confusions with other people in the publican trade. A lot of what the viewer gets from the wife - appreciating her constant balance between matrimonial loyalty and running a tight ship - is much more the creation of Rosemary Leach, realised through responses, looks and vocal tone than the script itself.

 Thinking about the joint authorship of Graham Chapman and Barry Cryer causes me to speculate as to which bits come from which writer. There are a two sections in particular which one can imagine in Monty Python, and feel more like Chapman. There's a running joke with a customer preoccupied with a cryptic crossword, whose clues Ronnie takes literally, culminating in a cross-purposes dialogue in which Ronnie misinterprets the man's reading aloud of clues as a confession to the barman of his wife's promiscuity (spectacular and with multiple partners). The other moment is when Ronnie's failure to operate an electricity fuse box causes a bombardment of every sound and lighting device to go off simultaneously, soundtracked by the first bars of Status Quo's 'Caroline' from the jukebox repeating again and again.

A Comedy On This Day: Love Thy Neighbour - The Lift (16 April 1973)

 A relative truce between Eddie and Bill this week, as the main concentration of prejudice this edition is against wives and their unendurable feminine ways. When Joan invites the Reynolds round for drinks, Eddie's displeasure at the invitation ("I don't socialise with sambos") is overridden by Joan and Barbie's unendurable feminine conversation about needlework, dressmaking and cooking. So the two husbands come up with a ruse to escape to the club for the evening. In the club, Arthur complains about his wife - "I'll 'ave to get blind drunk before I can face 'er". The evening ends with all of the men trapped in a lift together.

 By far the most interesting moment is between Joan and Barbie, left alone together for the evening and watching a romantic weepie on television together. This is partly interesting because its the only moment of grace experienced by anybody in the episode, but mostly because a soundtrack for the made-up film on television has had to be devised, consisting of some clipped "I love you darling"s and sound effects of steam trains leaving stations. I wonder who the voices were.

A Comedy On This Day: Seven Of One - Spanner's Eleven (15 April 1973)

  Roy Clarke's other script for this anthology series (alongside of Open All Hours) is pretty hard to get a handle on. Sometimes Ronnie Barker's football coach-cum-taxi driver character seems besotted by soccer, and on other occasions using his position to further his own way. Everyone seems rather sketchily drawn and it’s hard to tell what's supposed to be funny.

 I do notice the same thing that I always do whenever I chance upon something by Roy Clarke, and that's the inevitable mention of knickers and ladies' underclothes - it even happens in his episode of Manhunt! There's a kind of feeble lechery that seems to run through his writing.

 I'm intrigued by where this is set, especially the dilapidated football ground. The characters speak with West Country accents, but it looks more like West London to me. I think the football ground is the old Edgware Towns White Lion Ground... (some derelict pictures about half way down this page).

A Comedy On This Day: The Liver Birds - Birds In The Club (14 April 1972)

 Another one of the handful of non-Carla Lane episodes by David Pursall and Jack Seddon, unique to series three. There's something a bit askew about it tonally, with both girls rather more airheaded and disengaged from the rest of the world than usual. Its very much a caper storyline about Sandra being entered into a rugby club Miss Hotpants 1972 competition, and her attempts to lose weight in order to be in with a chance of winning it. This lightweight tale is not helped by its hotpant-splitting climax being a very poorly-realised moment, where Sandra's ruse of padding herself up with a towel is exposed in a movement that fails to hide that the towel can't physically fit inside the hotpants...

 Sandra's boyfriend this week is David (Gan from Blake's 7) Jackson as a rugby player, and the most interesting part of the script is the initial scene in the club bar, in which the male authors use the two girls to investigate codes of masculinity. The episode starts with the striking image of the rugby players around the piano bellowing a sexist song, while all the bar tables are occupied by their ignored womenfolk. As Beryl says, the players talk about women, sing about women, tell jokes about women, but they never actually spend any time with women. Beryl and Sandra try to pass the time by joining in the manly pursuit of beer drinking, with some physical comedy created by the idea of women handling pints. Although as they're drinking from the old-fashioned heavy dimpled glasses with handles they have my sympathy in finding them difficult to pick up.

 (The greatest excitement that I derived from this episode was watching Nerys Hughes use an old Cadbury's chocolate vending machine with the drawers. Although it was always maddening on the frequent occasions when they took your money and then wouldn't give you chocolate, these are definitely one thing from the past that I'd love to come back. Especially because of the dainty special vending-size bars, with their eight little squares in foil and paper and the exciting options of otherwise unavailable varieties like peppermint and tiffin.)

A Comedy On This Day: Up Pompeii - The Senator & The Asp (13 April 1970)

 "Not you, you dirty beasts! Step back! This isn't The Wednesday Play".

 Although one's primary focus is always on his face and what he's saying, Frankie Howerd's hands are interesting once you start to notice them notice them in this. He almost always holds them up at elbow height to gesticulate with them when he talks to us, while also using them to keep the world away whenever he gets asked to do anything - especially anything that he can construe as being lecherous. Once I started to notice this posture, Frankie Howerd began to remind me of a dog on his hind legs holding out his paws, which fits Howerd's hangdog persona quite well.

A Comedy On This Day: Not In Front Of The Children - Change Of Policy (12 April 1968)

 Both Not In Front Of The Children and Marriage Lines do turn up occasional intriguing insights into middle class life of the 1960s as ordinary people might have experienced it.

 This week one of the daughter’s school friend’s parents gets divorced, and the Corner family make a point of inviting her to dinner with them (some other families are ostracizing the girl). The Corner children end up envious of the new freedoms that their friend is now experiencing, relieved from the threat of "Wait until your father gets home". This makes the parents self-conscious of how they might be restricting their children, so they allow them more autonomy and less structure... I'm sure that Richard Waring wasn't setting out to create a work of social history when he wrote these, but he did indirectly achieve it.

 These some good costume work this week when the Corner parents dress themselves for a school concert. Jennifer chooses a quaint hat with no brim and a wobbly bow on the crown, while Henry ties a large 19th century-style bow around his neck. Then the children are appalled by these old-fashioned items, and ask their parents to change them. Their response was exactly what this viewer had been thinking when he watched the parents getting dressed, which demonstrates - fifty years on from the details of 1968 clothing - that the BBC costume designers knew what would register as looking a bit wrong.

 It's nice to see John Scott Martin holding a door open for Wendy Craig at the school concert.

A Comedy On This Day: Two Of A Kind (11 April 1964)

 Even though you never quite get the killer lines and ideas that Eddie Braben could come up with, and Sid and Dick never do anything much other than stand around, I generally find sixties Morecambe & Wise more fun to watch than the later series. Half an hour is probably enough and they have notably more energy. In particular, you sometimes get a vigorous dance routine, always a pleasure that never outstays its welcome like some other routines. This week, the duo performs a medley of twentieth century dances with two women. The tango is done straight, but Eric disrupts the Charleston by dressing as a flapper and - best of all - dances the soft shoe shuffle in hobnail boots.

 This week's special guest Janie Marden has been dealt a poor hand by posterity, with not even a Wikipedia page to explain why her credits stopped in 1969. Her performance of 'Happy Days Are Here Again' is quite something, rendering it as an expressive ballad, rather than the blaring jazz age choon that I'm familiar with (I now realise that the recording is indebted to the 1962 Barbra Streisand recording, though with none of the star power). Her expressive facial and bodily interpretation of the number is performed to camera, but it might have been less quaint if recorded by a camera that was further away. It’s like watching a West End musical performance that's signalling to the back of the gallery from the front of the stalls. Janie Marden then gets a sketch with the two leads, asking Eric "Why do you never do anything with the girl singers?" and letting the two jostle each other for the chance to mime actions for 'Just The Touch Of Your Lips' with her. Janie is a striking lass, notably taller than the funny men (especially with her lacquered blonde hair), and her physical mismatch to them makes their routine jolly to watch.