A Comedy On This Day: Doctor In The House - If You Can Help Somebody... Don't! (29 May 1970)

 This episode must be about as downbeat as a Doctor episode could get. It has the sort of storyline about the limits of empathy more often seen in the early series of Angels. A malingering old woman in hospital doesn't want to be discharged. She persuades the naive young doctor to visit her at home. When he does visit, despite being fully fit she uses the doctor to do her housework and buy and pay for her shopping. The doctor is then surprised to discover that the old woman doesn't live on her own, but has her daughter with her, a spinster in her thirties trapped into doing her mother's bidding. Against his better judgement the doctor asks her out. When the daughter arrives at the medical student household, she's brought her cases and has left home for good...

 This episode doesn't quite have the courage of its convictions. It sets up a dramatic situation that shows the potential for a greater range of stories and approaches within this series, but is too rushed and cheerful to really explore the situation. Garden & Oddie are writers of great comic ability, but one thing that they really weren't was Galton & Simpson. Pathos wasn't ever their hallmark, so that when the episode ends with a Steptoe-type situation of the daughter returning back home it doesn't leave much emotional impression - which it really ought to do to fully work as a story - and certainly no more than the final shot of the young doctors larking about as per usual. The best comic moments are found in the set-up, showing the ruses that the old lady uses to get others to do her bidding, and reversing conventional expectations of powerlessness.

A Comedy On This Day: Rob Brydon's Annually Retentive - 1989 (28 May 2007)

 I would think that this show-within-a-show is the least popular or well-regarded series that Rob Brydon has made. The cynical tone and media setting isn't the sort of thing to attract a broad audience, while comedy fans and TV critics were bound to compare it unfavourably with The Larry Sanders Show.

 I liked it a lot myself - enough to have bought a DVD of the second series anyway! Its partly because its target - a lazily-conceived panel show - is precisely the sort of programme that I generally dislike but still find myself watching. The behind the scenes preparations very effectively skewer the moments in these sorts of shows that make me exclaim, "How on earth did that get in?" while my eyes roll - the particularly contrived questions and forced repartee.

 Casting is very strong in this series. Much of the comedy of the parts of Brydon's manager and producer comes from little nuances of their responses to the conceited star and wouldn't work nearly so well without Sharon Horgan or Russell Tovey to realise them. In particular, Tovey's reactions in a cringe scene (where a fascinated and disapproving Brydon continually presses him to explain various homosexual practices) manage to convey a whole spectrum of reactions; incredulity, discomfort, politely-disguised affront, teasing and at the emotional heart of the scene really quite liking the Brydon character even though he's an idiot.

A Comedy On This Day: People Like Us - The Mother (27 May 2001)

 The way this mockumentary programme is structured means that three types of comedy are always simultaneously in operation; the lives that the documentary is recording, the relationship between (unseen) presenter/ journalist Roy Mallard and his subjects at the time of recording, and Mallard's retrospective voiceover. The three forms, overlaid over each other like a palimpsest, provoke different types of response from the viewer.
 

 Personally, I find the voiceover less interesting and funny than the rest of it, because it's usually repetitive variants of the same lexical joke where a pontifical sentence will fall in on itself and become banal. It’s perhaps a holdover from the programme's radio origins, when this verbal humour didn't have to compete for the listener's attention with interesting visual stuff going on at the same time.

 The other two elements are great, though. The subjective style means that Roy Mallard's interaction with his subjects (in this episode, Tamsin Greig as a fatigued mother) creates a rare complicity between the character and the viewer, which can be quite muted and subtle. Most of the problematic actions in this story stem from Mallard noticing (at the same time as the viewer) a mistake that Jenny is making and momentarily hesitating out of tact, or what he says being slightly misunderstood and not getting an opportunity to correct himself. It feels lifelike to me, but in a way more often encountered in literature than comedy or drama.

 Maybe the cleverest moment is when Jenny is pushing her son's pram past a lake in which ducks are swimming. "Quack quack! Quack quack!" the mother says aloud, in a way that you only get given the leeway to do when a small child accompanies you. A dog, walked by a woman, passes by. "Woof woof" says Roy Mallard, less enthusiastically. "Fuck off!" snaps the woman. It took me a couple of seconds to register what the misunderstanding actually was...

 Something that's always under-represented on screen, even in domestic dramas and comedies, is the actual business of housework - its repetitive and relentless nature, and intermittent difficulty. So a cardinal virtue of this episode lies in one of its main plots. The mother overloads the washing machine, which then breaks down. Because the machine is under guarantee she arranges for someone to come and fix it in a few days. Her mother arrives in the afternoon to look after the baby, and is told by Jenny as she leaves the house in a hurry not to do anything about it because someone is already coming in a few days. When Jenny returns home she is infuriated to discover that her mother has got an unhelpful handyman to visit, who hasn't fixed the machine but has managed to flood the kitchen. A particular reason why Jenny is upset about this turn of events is because she didn't want her husband to know that she overloaded the machine in the first place. There's a causality to this storyline that rings particularly true to me, and which I don't think could have been achieved through a conventional sitcom form.

A Comedy On This Day: The Smell Of Reeves & Mortimer - Hang-Dry Clothes (26 May 1995)

 For me, The Smell is probably the peak of Reeves & Mortimer's comedy. The humour of Shooting Stars was much easier for a wider audience to assimilate, but its thrown-together charms have often worn thin as they've milked it over the years.

 It’s probably their most crafted series, and it certainly had more resources put into it than Big Night Out ever did (filmed inserts! great big sets!). You can see the value of this investment in this episode's opening musical number, a medley of 'Never Let Her Slip Away', 'Without You' and 'I've Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts' (the song selection funny in itself), a sequence of clever visual perspectival jokes given the same care and craft as a big 'shiny floor' Light Entertainment spectacular musical routine.

 There's an acute choice of supporting guest artistes, always adding something distinctive without taking anything away from the leads. As well as Paul Whitehouse and Mark Williams in Slade in Residence, this week's grotesque parody (Masterchef with Reeves as Lloyd Grossman with huge bulbous head levitating around the studio) is elevated by a very early appearance of Matt Lucas (as toff cannibal chef Quentin Mint) and - especially - a terrifying Morwenna Banks as Christian martyr Joan Baptiste serving her own severed ears to complete a portrait of Christ in food.

 Peculiar Wikipedia fact: "As a result of his appearances, Paul McCartney became a fan and invited Charlie Chuck to perform at one of his birthday parties". I saw his act at the time and it was quite intimidating ("Charlie, Charlie, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck went to bed with five young ducks. One DIED! Charlie CRIED!", attacks drum kit and repeat with four ducks, etc). I'd have played safe with a conjurer, I think...

A Comedy on This Day: Vic Reeves Big Night Out (25 May 1990)

Its Spandau Ballet, and they're laughing at an orphan who's fallen off his bicycle

 And this is where it begins... Watching this is funnier now than it seemed at the time. The strain of having to establish a raft of characters, situations, rituals - and an unfamiliar ramshackle comic idiom - made it quite an effortful 25 minutes to view. In retrospect, now that I know how each episode was structured, I can pick up on the amusing ideas and variations without the initial "What is this and how does it work?" reaction.

 The audience reaction is fascinating, especially as we get to see them several times, including some hostile and bewildered faces amongst the crowd. Although some have come from the old New Cross Albany Empire audience and are primed to know what to expect, a lot of them don't know what they've let themselves in for. There's a quality of hesitancy and not knowing where the jokes are to their collective responses, and you can sense a greater uncertainty in Reeves' performance because of this. This went after the first few episodes, after which presumably everyone who went to the recordings had already seen them on television. I think that I actually prefer this to the response to what happens by the second series, when the audience seems full of Wonder Stuff fans, cheering every catchphrase and encouraging rather shouty performances from the stars.

A Comedy On This Day: The Gaffer: The Blackleg (24 May 1983)

 When Graham White puts a simile or an inverted phrase in four or five consecutive lines, watching The Gaffer is like trying to do the cryptic crossword at speed. Bill Maynard will say something like, "Concession is bad for the soul", and I find myself having to work out what that means, where it comes from/ what it should be and what it means in terms of the plot while still listening out for the next line which will require the same amount of mental effort.

 This week, the Gaffer manages to manipulate his secretary going on strike to his advantage, as it prevents him from paying bonuses to other workers. The blackleg of the title is a shrewish temporary secretary, whose character is conveyed in broad outlines by getting the actress to wear a pair of heavy-rimmed glasses and scowl. This is in contrast to Pat Ashton as Betty, who gets given an existential moment this week ("There must be more to life than this" she suggests, looking around the grim office) and a sadly unflattering new hairdo that adds some ringlets to the front. This new secretary even tidies the gaffer's desk away and cleans the floor, although the office still looks so drab and flyblown that it doesn't have much of a transformative effect.

A Comedy On This Day: Citizen Smith - Bigger Than Guy Fawkes (23 May 1980)

 This first episode of the fourth and final series doesn't auger very well for the rest of it. Its an ambitious rise-and-fall narrative; Wolfie is presented with the opportunity to become a star by a showbiz impresario; then learns that he's trapped in a gilded cage, miming to other people's songs and speaking scripted lines to promote a ghost-written autobiography; rebels by speaking with his own voice, exposing his idiocy to the world; gets dropped, back into the Tooting gutter.

 Unfortunately, this sort of story really needs the opened-out form of a film (or the scatter-gun off-the wall Goodies approach) to work that well. As it is, what we get are a succession of scenes of Wolfie and his acolytes discussing their situation, while the interesting stuff happens almost entirely off-screen. These sequences (in an open prison cell and a - rather tatty-looking - luxury hotel suite) have an oddly temporary feel to them, with the sitcom not having a permanent base at this point. One short scene in a little corner of TVC of Wolfie being interviewed by Valerie Singleton on a Nationwide-type programme is as much as we see of his brief stardom.