A Comedy On This Day: The Prince Of Denmark - Publican Or Delivery Man? (8 May 1974)

 This episode pulls off a narrative of wildly escalating circumstances rather well - something that many sitcoms of this period habitually failed at. The climax is of a piece with many of Graham Chapman's Monty Python sketches, with more and more distinct and loud people turning up and crowding out an initially controlled and low-key situation.

 Much of the success lies in the patient set-up. Its Saturday night at the Prince of Denmark, but the place is dead, with only a few regulars in attendance. The script doesn't stint on conveying the inertia and boredom of the situation, spending a good half of the episode following Ronnie trying to fill the time by failing to entertain the punters with his jokes, dancing and attempts at sophisticated conversation. This walks a fine line with some skill, conveying inertia convincingly while incorporating just enough off-the-wall imagery and exchanges to prime the viewer for the eventual bizarre chaos. It's a cleverly orchestrated piece with each new customer - the heavily-pregnant wife, the centenarian - having something to contribute to the conclusion that isn't immediately telegraphed to the viewer.

A Comedy On This Day: Bless This House - Atishoo! Atishoo! We All Fall Down (7 May 1973)

 With the rest of the family down with the flu, Sid has to do all the work. This Carla Lane episode is onto a winner, with it's feminist theme about the relentless, underappreciated stress of the women's work of housework disguised through the highly entertaining sight of Sid James floundering about in a frilly apron.

 Its the simplest things that James does particularly well in this episode - especially when pressed into doing several things immediately, with the phone and doorbell ringing at once while his wife calls from upstairs. He turns around several times at speed considering which thing to do first, starts to walk up the stairs, gets called back downstairs, talks on the phone while simultaneously trying to shout instructions upstairs and to the door. Good farcical acting isn't primarily about the business of slamming doors or dropping trousers, it's at its most affecting when just conveying panic at speed.

 Like a lot of sitcom plots, the situation then has to escalate in the second part and gets less funny as a result, but Sid's attempts to cope with circumstances in the first half of this are to be cherished.

A Comedy On This Day: Seven Of One - I'll Fly You For A Quid (6 May 1973)

 As anyone who's seen Thick As Thieves might agree, not everything that Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais wrote was solid gold, even at the height of their powers. This story of gambling mania in a Welsh valleys village is pleasant enough little playlet, but doesn't really have much emotional purchase beyond passing the time engagingly.

 The comedy is at its most stimulating when it investigates death rather than gambling, with the lead character's father, Grandpa Owen (an opportunity for Barker to double), manipulating his family on his deathbed, the most dramatically interesting element. The effect used to convey this character's death in a filmed insert - a shaft of light projecting from Grandpa Owen's window and moving towards the sky - is the most surprising moment in the programme, and a bold device to deflect potential complaints of trivialising death.

 One of the more interesting aspects is seeing how well Ronnie Barker acquits himself playing Welsh, especially as an authentic supporting cast (including Emrys James, Margaret John and the inevitable Talfryn Thomas) risks exposing any shortcomings. He sounds alright to me, although I did notice that on a couple of occasions when his character gets a worldly-wise punchline intended to deflate floridity and pretention, he sounds like Fletcher for two or three words before correcting himself mid-sentence.

A Comedy On This Day: The Liver Birds - Liverpool Or Everton? (5 May 1972)

  "Whilst Beryl is a die-hard Everton football fan, Sandra's newest boy-friend Joe supports Liverpool so the battle lines are drawn." A moderate amount of fun in hindsight can be derived from the Everton-rubbishing Joe being played by (future Toffees Chairman) Bill Kenwright, but I'm clutching at straws with this episode.

 Another non-Carla Lane episode by David Pursall and Jack Seddon, its fair to describe this as a problematic text. Their idea of representing women's experience in this episode is to set up a 'battle of the sexes' works football match, with much sport made from - tee hee! - these ditzy girls being able to run or kick a ball. The script isn't helped by only two of these women footballers being given lines, and the match ends with the uncomfortable image of goalkeeper Nerys Hughes weeping into her net (played entirely for laughs and not for pathos, which at least could be dramatically interesting).

 The only person who comes out of this well is Ronnie Hazlehurst, who contributes two suites of incidental music that are worth listening out for. The hapless team's training is underscored by a woodwind arrangement incorporating motifs from 'We Shall Not Be Moved' and 'Nice One Cyril'. The match itself is even better, with a fanfare medley of 'Glory Glory', 'We Are The Champions', 'Match Of The Day' and 'Blue Is The Colour' followed by some Hazlehurst tropicália for the game, incorporating LE approximations of a funk bassline and salsa rhythms.

A Comedy On This Day: And Mother Makes Three... - Birthday Bike (4 May 1971)

 One of the particular strengths of this programme is its surefooted confidence in presenting the viewer with continual procession of things that are interesting to look at. Much of these stem from Wendy Craig's clowning abilities, so in this episode we get to see Mrs Harrison; try on her vetenarian boss's white coat and stethoscope and interact with a (life-size, charity) model dog and (anatomical) model cat; pay for a bicycle with jars of pennies; attempt to mount then ride the bicycle while simultaneously carrying her shopping; and then hide the bicycle from her son by wheeling it in and out of various rooms while her son innocuously wanders about the house.

 It doesn't stint on visually arresting properties and actions for other performers, either; a pair of dirty football shorts for the younger son to retrieve from the washing and turn back-to-front; a large grey angora rabbit that a customer brings into the surgery; a boy's shirt that gets it's sleeve torn off at the rowdy birthday party; and getting snooty shop assistant Frank Thornton to climb up a ladder to remove a bicycle from a wall display.

 On top of all this, there are occasional flashes of tangential historical visual interest that come through this being almost fifty years old; the Harrisons' buying their cornflakes from Sainsbury's (at the height of theirmodernist packaging design); the elder son handling a new album of McCartney; and the authenticly jumbled and unbranded feel and layout of an independent department store of 1971. The accumulation of all of these diverting and pleasurable details make this something that's enjoyable to watch more than once.

A Comedy On This Day: For The Love Of Ada - The Mortgage (3 April 1971)

 Now that their children's baby is due, Walter and Ada need to find a place of their own. The plotting of this episode is absolutely minimal, with Powell and Driver barely bothering to craft any of the reversals of expectation that any comedy scene requires to some extent. The fortune that the couple require to get their flat turns up through Ada just finding an old savings books. The subsequent disappointing reversal happens off-screen, when Walter goes to the bank - there wasn't any money in it after all, he reports.

 Strangely enough, this rudimentary plotting doesn't harm the show. Indeed, it’s actively preferable to the contrivances, coincidences and implausibilities that mar many comedies of this period. Because the programme's great strength lies in the characterisation of Walter and Ada, as realised through Irene Handl and Wilfred Pickles' unforced-feeling performances. They do feel genuinely like a actual couple, in a way that's quite rare. It doesn't really matter that the savings book story is so flimsy, because it’s how the couple respond to the disappointment that encourages viewer empathy. Really, you're happy to just watch them being themselves - the opening credits are superimposed over a studio shot of the pair on a bench reading a local newspaper together, and even without any dialogue its touching to observe them.

 Their costumes, and the way that Walter and Ada respond to each other remind me of my own (paternal) grandparents when I was a boy. They lived in Chiswick, so absolute Thames Television West London heartland... When did you stop seeing old people like them in London? That generation became thinner on the ground in the 1980s and had disappeared by the end of the century.

 Slightly disconcerting to see William Maxwell as a kindly vicar, when he went on to become Terry Sullivan's father in Brookside for many years.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor At Large - Upton Sells Out? (2 May 1971)

 There's an interesting overlaying of two comedic forms in this Garden & Oddie script, both of which stem from the same initial catalysing situation of Upton having to be at an interview for a well-paid Harley Street job at very short notice.

 One strand is classic farce, where humiliating circumstances take characters out of their control, eventually reducing them to a helpless state. Having three doctors needing to share two suits between them (Collier borrows Upton's for a date an an exclusive restaurant, Upton borrows Stuart Clarke's for the Harley Street interview) works well as a funny mechanism, because as long as it goes on it means that one of them will always going to have to be at a disadvantage, while another will be in ill-fitting clothes.

 There's also an interesting dialectical strain not always apparent in these shows, with the Harley Street work (which pays £60 a week) leading characters to ask questions about the meaning and value of work as a doctor. The expensive practice is shown to be something of a sham, a place where rich hypochondriacs go to be indulged, experience butler service and pay a fortune for the experience.

 Dr Whiteland (the head of this practice) is set up as a haughty battle-axe, but something isn't quite right about the way that she's played for that. Initially I thought that it was because the role had been rather ambitiously over-cast (played by Fabia Drake, b. 1904, and who had certainly enjoyed a remarkable career). But eventually it becomes clear in the final scene that Fabia Drake's considerable charm and dignity is deliberate, as Dr Whiteland takes the jejune Upton to her office and gently explains how she uses the private practice to fund her NHS work with the genuinely needy. Its a relatively long and articulate speech for such a programme, and when combined with the circumstances that have brought her to explain herself (Collier gate-crashing the practice by disguising himself as a tramp and bringing along a scrofulous family in need of consultation with him) it shows how prevalent the influence of George Bernard Shaw remained for generations of writers - even on production-line ITV sitcoms - providing a workable template for how to investigate power in dramatic form.