A Comedy On This Day: Doctor In The House - Hot Off The Presses (5 June 1970)

 This Garden & Oddie episode has particularly close affinities to The Goodies; the Doctors taking on a job assigned to them (revitalising the hospital magazine); a lot of choric reactions from the other Doctors to the one speaking; a filmed sequence of sight gags (the Doctors distributing their magazine on the streets); one character's changed circumstances immediately indicated by them returning to headquarters in a striking brand new costume.

 The depiction of female characters is particularly regrettable this week with only two women in the story - the one a dolly bird model for the Doctors to pursue and the other a plain spinster for them to avoid. Oddly, the spinster character, her status denoted by her short hair and ordinary clothes, now looks just like an ordinary woman to contemporary viewers.

A Comedy On This Day: Rob Brydon's Annually Retentive - 1984/ Who Do You Think You Are? (4 June 2007)

(Rob Brydon arrives in his car outside the Public Records Office in Cardiff.)

BRYDON (inside car to camera): (smugly) Here we go. They make a bit of a fuss of me in Wales.

(He leaves the car, which he - surely illegally - parks right in front of the building.)

INCREDULOUS PASSERBY: (in strong Welsh accent) WAN-KER!

 The series ends in a curious way - with the mock panel show perhaps having exhausted itself, we see Brydon appearing in (and behind the scenes of) a mock episode of Who Do You Think You Are? instead, skewering how some egotistical personalities seem to have little interest in family history in that programme.

 As you'd expect, it feels a bit different than before, partly because the parodied programme is of a higher quality, but also because there's rather less of a distinction between an obviously-performed programme like a panel show and the comedian's life offstage than there is in a biographical documentary.

 The distinction is quite subtle at its best moments, such as Brydon interacting awkwardly with his father - because the father is acting inappropriately for the camera in one scene, and then because that's how the two men are together in the next. It works well though, and was a good way to end it.

A Comedy On This Day: People Like Us - The Journalist (3 June 2001)

 Watching from a distance of seventeen years, I sense a particular note of unhappiness in this episode that the others don't have. It's because while, say, vicars or pilots are still with us the subject of this week's investigation - the Long Ashton Gazette, a local paper for a small East Midlands town with a staff of four - is an institution that wouldn't exist by now. Even though a lot of the comedy stems from the moribund nature of the paper, its a bit less funny watching something that's gone than it is watching something that hasn't got long to go at the time. The crumpled old editor is Tim Preece, the ambitious, thrusting (but sadly inept and desperate) unpleasant young journalist is Nicola Walker (amusingly described recently as "simultaneously luminous and miserable-looking" by Peter Hitchens in the Mail On Sunday).

 Even by the modest standards of tiny local papers, the Long Ashton Gazette is peculiarly terrible and the attentive viewer can have fun picking up the details of its low quality. I'm particularly taken by the front page story, "MIRACLE FOR JANICE - IT'S TWINS!" illustrated by a photo of a mother with only one baby.

A Comedy On This Day: The Smell Of Reeves & Mortimer - Muscles (2 June 1995)

MORTIMER: Hey, Vic! 'Footloose' - What a lovely song.

REEVES. Yes, it was a great pleasure to sing 'Footloose' but remember, ladies and gentlemen, loose feet are a very REAL problem and it does affect people in older age. And that's why us, as performers, donate all our money to the rectification of loose and missing feet.

 This one is a perhaps a little overbalanced by a special guest appearance from Sting. While its interesting to watch the very famous man corpse when asked personal question by Donald and Davey Stott, I think I'd prefer to have seen Charlie Higson or Matt Lucas in grotesque and outlandish prosthetics as 'Sting'.

 There's an infestation of singing owls in the studio this week. They pop up from under the desk and get squashed back, Whac-A-Mole style, during Reeves and Mortimer's hammer and frying pan Tom and Jerry scrap. This confusing new random element of pushing owls - on top of the rhythm of alternately giving and receiving blows - is clearly too much for Vic and Bob to follow, and provides an little moment of insight into just what a high-level performance skill comedy can be.

A Comedy On This Day: Sorry! - A Chief Inspector Calls (1 June 1987)

 Unfortunately this isn't one of those memorable episodes concerned with cruelly thwarting Timothy Lumsden's personal development. It’s a less interesting farce today, with an escaped prisoner hiding in the house while Timothy's parents entertain a senior policeman and his wife.

 For bang-on mid-to-late eighties period specificity, the Lumsdens have joined a Neighbourhood Watch scheme. This was a social development that comedy screenwriters quickly latched on to at the time, creating an uncontrived reason for policemen to socialise with characters in a domestic setting, and generating new opportunities for busybody characters to behave officiously and hilarious misunderstandings to occur. The episode of Ever Decreasing Circles is probably the best of these storylines, but there was even a whole series on the theme in 1988, Wyatt's Watchdogs.

 Another period-specific detail, but one that lasted throughout the seventies and eighties is a prisoner complaining that, "I thought you were Lord Longford coming to visit!"

A Comedy On This Day: You're Only Young Twice - And Cissie Makes Three (31 May 1979)

 This is a star vehicle where the stars' performance skills and personae do rather more of the comic work than the script. For no very good reason Peggy Mount's character starts the episode in a patriotic fervour, draped in a Union Jack and hanging a huge portrait of Churchill. Naturally, a funny foreigner (that regrettable sitcom staple) then visits the retirement home and Uncle Klaus from Dusseldorf causes disruption that manages to be simultaneously wholly predictable and largely inexplicable. Despite not having any discernable personality beyond comic mispronunciation, he's apparently a very eligible man and comes between Flora and Cissie's friendship (without much in the way of a scene to show why this might be).

 Its just as well that Peggy Mount is in this, as most of the humour derives from getting her to do things that might hopefully be funny, rather than organically arising from the character or situation - Let's dress Peggy in a WWII siren suit! Let's put her up a stepladder! Let's put her in a evening dress! As it happens, these moments do raise a smile, but only because of her and what the viewer has emotionally invested in the performer.

 To a modern eye, most of these women look about ten years too young to be in a retirement home.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor At Large - No Ill Feeling! (30 May 1971)

 The most historically significant episode of the Doctor series, in which Dr. Upton stays at a hotel and John Cleese's script tries out a few ideas that will get further developed in Fawlty Towers. Timothy Bateson's hotel manager shares some traits with Basil Fawlty - he's henpecked and exasperated with guests whenever they remotely put him out in any way - but he's an altogether more morose sort of character.

 He's actually second fiddle to guest star Roy Kinnear, who plays a self-styled funny man, Mr Davidson. With his jests and quips and insistence that everyone joins in, Davidson is a memorably awful personality. If this was an episode of Monty Python, he'd be played by Eric Idle in "Wink, wink, nudge, nudge" mode, and the importance that he places on being perceived as funny make him a kind of uncle to David Brent. The story shares features with a lot of Monty Python sketches, in particular the nightmare situation of being buttonholed by a monomaniac making presumptions about you ("No ill feeling! Eh, Doc?") and a collective taking up a group insanity - the episode makes very good choric use of the other guests in the dining room, all laughing uproariously when Mr Davidson makes fun of Dr. Upton and then responding in appalled silence when Upson is compelled to tell a joke.

 There's a surprising use of a handheld camera in the two filmed inserts in this episode, giving exterior scenes a strange verite-type feel. This works especially well when Dr Upton gets startled in the street by Mr Davidson calling out to him from an office window and causing Upton to walk into a lamppost. The shaky style gives the stressful scene a sense of real-life disorientation, rather than artificial comedy choreography.