A Comedy On This Day: Vic Reeves Big Night Out (10 April 1991)

 This is one series that does seriously benefit from being watched sequentially. Much of what I found funny about it at the time was the pleasure of close viewing, recognising an idea or character from a previous show, and seeing how it gets inverted or developed. Its something that gets a bit lost when you watch an edition cold.

 Watching this again in middle age, it’s exhausting just how shouty they were at this stage, something I had a higher tolerance for when I was young.

 This week's opening song is 'The Grand Old Duke Of York', performed with a mini brass band. I'd forgotten how grim the travails of the Man with the Stick become in the second series, once he loans out his children to Reeves. This week he gets momentary access, when a cage containing three children in miniature paper helmets is wheeled out, before Reeves sends them back for "shark testing".

 I've always liked cockney Labrador Greg Mitchell, who this week appears three times, sharing his enthusiasm for Mike Harding, Max Boyce and Barbara Dickson, before each time regretting his confidence. You can also see him behind the desk, dancing to 'Oh Mr Songwriter' at the end, a counterpoint of puppet canine fragile cheerfulness against the monster egotism of Britain's top light entertainer and singer.

A Comedy On This Day: May To December - Fools Rush In (9 April 1989)

 The second episode, and this series is running on (considerable) promise, rather than achieving much in the way of actual laughs at this stage. One problem is that its less interesting to see how this pair get together than it becomes watching how other people respond to them once they become a couple.

 It’s full of funny ideas that aren't quite followed through. There's a scene in which the daughter of the Anton Rodgers character invites him to Sunday lunch and tries to set him up with a dressy widow, played by Rosemary Leach. These are surely the optimum conditions to set up an amusing scene, but somewhere along the line it hasn't been thought to give the widow an actual character or any sustained dialogue. The gap between intention and realisation is disappointing.

 The bimbo receptionist in the solicitors office, who's sole purpose being to misunderstand everything that other characters say in an airheaded fashion, is a trying character. That said, her presence provides the one moment that really made me laugh, when Clive Francis' suave middle-aged roué tells her, "My wife doesn't understand me"...

A Comedy On This Day: Spitting Image (8 April 1984)

 Episode 5 and I wouldn't say that this programme had found its feet yet... This one attempts a unified format (a day in the life of the Royal Family), rather than a sequence of quick-fire sketches. It means that it does goes on a bit and keeps on having to return to the same place, and even at the best of times Spitting Image jokes about the Royal Family worked better in small doses. The House of Windsor is also weirdly incomplete at this early stage, with no Anne, Edward or Queen Mother. Oddly, Prince William's baby puppet looks much like he does today.

 It never worked very well when they put a performer in a mask because they needed a puppet to do something with their legs. This week they want to have the Queen crossing her legs in one sequence, and the programme's sense of scale feels magnified and wrong when it happens.

A Comedy On This Day: Going Straight - Going Off The Rails (7 April 1978)

 The final episode. You might have thought that setting a series in prison would have been depressing, but I actually find watching Fletcher eking out a living in a shabby 1978 London to be a glummer experience than his small victories against the system at H.M.P. Slade ever were.

 With his daughter getting married to Godber, hard-pressed Fletcher would like some funds and is tempted when local villain Danny Piper presents him with a criminal opportunity... You can tell that Alfred Lynch's Piper is a bad 'un immediately because he's wearing the familiar gangster's uniform of a white tie over a dark shirt and a camel hair coat. The situation has more immediately obvious dramatic possibilities than comic ones, and each scene has funny lines moment-by-moment but without the lift of any very surprising reversals of expectation.

 The scene that works best as an inherently comical situation is the initial one that brings the two men into contact. Ex-con Fletcher taking his place in a police identity parade is freighted with ironies, which are played lightly. Its the little intimations of the lasting effects of prison that create the best moments, culminating in an ambitious filmed sequence of Fletcher in a pet shop, where a montage of caged birds is mixed in with a soundtrack of slamming prison doors and nightmare visions of Fletcher's face behind bars.

A Comedy On This Day: Get Some In! (6 April 1978)

 The first episode of the fifth and final series, and this programme is starting to show signs of exhaustion. This suffers from the laborious nature of many first episodes, taking a lot of time to set up a regular situation (the four National Servicemen are posted to the hospital of a new base - R.A.F. Druidswater - where they are appalled to discover that they are to minister to the invalided Corporal Marsh, who is now being hailed as a military hero).

 Having to cover a lot of ground to get to this point, the episode is probably more interesting dramatically than comically, with the young men reflecting on their peripatetic situation as they get quickly reposted from a cushy billet in Malta and the cunning Marsh explaining to his wife how they can best exploit his new status through a strategy of false modesty. The studio audience have enough invested in these characters emotionally to go along with this, although its noticeable that they respond best to the simplest pleasures that the story has to offer - the boys' appalled reactions to being faced by a stripper in a Maltese dive bar at the start and the reassuringly familiar sight of Marsh yet again shouting at them at the end.

 Marsh's arrival to a Guard of Honour at R.A.F. Druidswater (shot on O.B. on a horribly overcast day) is achieved with considerable visual flair, with the drill shown from below and at a tilted angle.

A Comedy On This Day: Three Piece Suite (5 April 1977)

 From the classy BBC2 Diana Rigg portmanteau sketch series...

 Come in No. 1 (Carla Lane). Rigg plays the attendant at the Ladies’ Powder Room at the Savoy Hotel. Four distressed guests lock themselves in to cubicles and, in an exercise in closed-off group counselling, the attendant mediates between them. This sort of demonstration of versatility will always please audiences who have come to admire a star, but I’d much rather have seen a Cockney char played by a better-suited actress. Also, a sketch about a woman talking to four locked doors proves visually problematic to realise, with a sequence of multi-camera close-ups of four cubicle number plates in lieu of talking heads.

 This Situation appears to have been Tina Brown’s only produced screenplay. On this evidence she was wise to concentrate on the journalism. Rigg plays George Baker’s mistress, appalled to discover that when he leaves his wife he immediately moves all of his baggage in, both physical and emotional (in the form of his mother, son and son’s ‘punk rocker’ daughter Toyah Wilcox). This very shouty sketch unwisely starts off at a hysterical pitch, and then escalates the situation far too fast, without any quieter moments of counterpoint.

 Charlotte Bingham and Terence Brady’s All In The Mind is a bit more like it, although the two preceding sketches hadn’t done much to engender a sense of goodwill in this viewer. Freddie Jones and Diana Rigg are a psychiatrist and his patient, each a rather shady character with something to hide. Hearing them expose their neuroses is funny line-by-line, although the sketch as a whole leads up to a punch line reversal of expectations that comes as no great surprise.

 The episode as a whole isn’t much of a showcase for Diana Rigg’s comic talents. She comes across as a broad and showy star performer, although none of the sketches do much to encourage a subtler reading.

A Comedy On This Day: Are You Being Served? - Camping In (4 April 1973)

 This week's convenient occurrence that gets all of the staff together in silly costumes is a transport strike, meaning that they have to stay on the shop floor overnight, making use of tents stocked by Grace Brothers' Camping Department.

 To bring home just how old this 46 year-old programme now is, their captivity brings out the staff's Blitz spirit, and after a chorus of 'Keep The Home Fires Burning' the company start to reminisce about the War (then only 28 years ago). We learn that Captain Peacock was a desert rat (contested in later episodes), Mr Rumbold was in the Catering Corps, Mrs Slocombe was in ARP ("I was merely a slip of a girl") and, most intriguingly, Mr Grainger was in ENSA ("I used to do impersonations. I called myself Whimsical Willie. I did impersonations of Hitler and Goering and Goebbels and Von Ribbentrop and Lord Haw Haw.") It’s a curious little bit of character background in a generally broad piece.