A Comedy On This Day: Two Of A Kind (13 July 1963)

  The (particularly feeble) main sketch this week feels curious to a viewer primed by seeing Morecambe and Wise's later performances. Eric has spent sixteen years building a scale model of the Battle of Waterloo, which he earnestly explains to the audience, which a mischievous Ernie then smashes up during their re-enactment. Eh? Shouldn't that have been cast the other way around? 

 We also have a rare sight of Ernie Wise in drag in this edition, in the big physical number with M & W as a pair of ballroom dancers, surrounded by three real dancing couples. This is much more of a pleasure to watch. Putting the comics in identical costumes to the real dancers means that they can momentarily blend in, before inevitably disrupting the order of things.

 Janie Marden sings I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm in a shoo-be-be-doobee scat jazz style, shaking her arms, raising her eyebrows and tilting her head. It's certainly a committed performance, but magnified by the camera looks more unhinged than enticing.

 

A Comedy On This Day: Steptoe & Son - The Holiday (12 July 1962)

 The first (but certainly not the last) time that Harold tries to get away on holiday on his own, and the primary emphasis is on the drama of the situation, rather than any silly bits of fun that might be found in it. Although that fun does include one of Galton & Simpson's greatest exchanges, when Albert leafs through Harold's holiday brochures:

ALBERT: Hey, look at it! It's all falling to bits!

HAROLD: That happens to be the Acropolis.

ALBERT: The what?

HAROLD: The Acropo... Ain't you never 'eard of it? That's famous, that is. The four horsemen of the Acropolis! Legendary. 

 But its largely tragedy, watching Albert block Harold's fortnight in Saint-Tropez through guilt (feebly - "I'll see you in the morning... God willing") and deception, reaching a comic peak with his martyred rejection of Harold's generous gift of £15 to go on a coach holiday - "Don't waste your money on me, Son. Spend it on your new friends".

  Speaking about Comedy Playhouse: The Offer, Ray Galton said, “I think we have written a little piece of Pinter here and we couldn’t possibly repeat it”. Happily they did repeat it - watching this alongside of Pinter's 1960 Armchair Theatre play A Night Out shows that there's nothing hubristic about the connection. Both use the intimacy and closeness of studio television to show the oppressiveness of living with an overbearing parent. In the same way that the viewer sees a huge close-up of Tom Bell's exhausted, fuming, face but hears a continual stream of complaints from Madge Ryan in A Night Out, in The Holiday the viewer stays in the room with Harold, posing in front of a mirror in holiday clothes with him, but having to listen to Albert's cries and moans from upstairs. Both sons even consider violence with whatever object comes to hand, be that a clock or - in Harold's case - a harpoon gun.

  This is the last episode of the first series, and Harold gets given his starkest moment of self-knowledge yet, when Colin Douglas' doctor tells him that the old man isn't to be upset and that he'll have to go to Bognor with Albert once again this summer:

HAROLD: So I'm trapped, that's what it amounts to, don't it? I'm trapped... I'm doomed to be a nursemaid to him all my life.

DOCTOR: I wouldn't put it like that... after all, we're all trapped by something or other. We all have responsibilities... one day you'll be old yourself.

HAROLD: Yeah, but I've been looking after him all my life. I ain't had time to get married and have kids to look after me... (shocked)... I WILL be on my own.

  Happy summer holidays, viewers!

A Comedy On This Day: Rob Brydon's Annually Retentive - 1997 (11 July 2006)

 This sharp and specific media satire is beginning to require historical footnotes. This especially struck me when Sharon Horgan's P.A. tries to justify booking Richard Bacon for the show to Brydon - "He's actually better known now for insulting those fat people on Top Of The Pops" I wonder what a fifteen year-old comedy fan of today - who likes The Trip say, and wants to investigate more of Rob Brydon's work - would make of this programme?

 The other three guests on the first edition of the terrible panel show are Lucy Porter, Gail Porter and David Mitchell. All come with baggage and stipulations:

BRYDON: So we've got a bald woman who doesn't want people to mention that she's bald, we've got an unknown woman who would like us not to mention that she's unknown, we've got a man who's primarily known for voicing the thoughts in his head who wouldn't like us to mention voicing the thoughts in his head. Are we allowed to say that Jane Moore works for the gutter press? Would she rather we didn't mention that? Is Dave Gorman asking us not to mention that he looks like a lecturer or goes on the Internet a lot? Is everybody using this show as a chance to make a fresh start and go in a new direction?

 This is a hard show to warm to in some ways, with the hero being vain, disagreeable and unfriendly. His one saving grace is that he's always right about the shoddiness of much British broadcasting of his time... Whether that was enough for viewers, I'm not sure.

A Comedy On This Day: Saxondale - Cockroaches (10 July 2006)

 I'd completely forgotten that Tommy Saxondale had a daughter, an important detail that seems to go unmentioned in other episodes. Including her and her boyfriend isn't an entirely happy fit with how the series normally works. Tommy's young assistant Raymond (always a funny part of the programme) gets relegated to only a few minutes' appearance, as his presence would crowd a storyline about Saxondale trying to understand young people.

 The storyline about Tommy misjudging his daughter's boyfriend (James Lance, who played Ben, the cocky young man working at the Linton Travel Tavern, in I'm Alan Partridge) has some unsatisfactory aspects to it. The emphasis is on telling a 'lesson learned' story about Tommy discovering some empathy with his daughter through seeing the boyfriend through her eyes. This comes across as a bit sentimental, and works against what definitely would be funny, Saxondale becoming angered by a silly youth with an incomprehensible young person's manner. Also, the scene of Tommy's great misunderstanding of the boyfriend (he thinks that he keeps going to the lavatory to take drugs, when he really just has irritable bowel syndrome) isn't very well set up. You think, there must be a longer edit of this episode somewhere which makes more of this situation.

 From time to time when watching this series I've found myself thinking, "Who is it that I know who Saxondale - just occasionally - reminds me of?" I've now realised... When Tommy Saxondale puts his glasses on, he fleetingly reminds me of leading television researcher Andrew Pixley. Not that Andrew has any of Saxondale's personality disorders or unwittingly threatening qualities, though!

A Comedy On This Day: Brass (9 July 1984)

 Curiously, the more Brass that I see the less of a handle I have on it. It’s the sheer scale of the enterprise that's peculiar. The general joke about an inappropriately glossy treatment of a cloth-cap-and-cobbles story would have found it's obvious fit in a few minutes in a sketch show. If you wanted to do more with this, a one-hour special would be the natural form to open out the idea into a more special, sustained narrative making the most of the actors and the production values. But a thirteen part sitcom serial? Followed the next year by another 13 episodes? That certainly shows a confidence in the idea. Its more screen time than many real Granada drama serials got.

 Is it as funny as it is impressive? I think that when I like Brass best is when I hear inventive phrasing in the dialogue, be that in the form of quaint metaphors -

HARDACRE (to his daughter on her wedding day): It is a proud and joyous day for me, and yet there is a pang in your daddy's heart. The first of my fledgling brood to fly the nest. I know now how a daddy frog must feel when he sees his tadpole growing little legs.

 Or when it takes an argument and turns it in on itself so it comes to convey something quite strange, such as a young woman's dismissal of a presumptuous rascal of a suitor:

Married? When I marry it will be to a real man! A man confident enough to be unsure of himself. A man dominant enough to be submissive. A man masculine enough to be unafraid of his own essential femininity!

A Comedy On This Day: Q9 (8 July 1980)

 This series always perks up when you get to the filmed bits, which tend to be well-constructed visual jokes told in an orchestrated sequence, such as the sports day for prisoners in this episode. Back in the studio, though, its taken up with the usual three or four sketches that drag aimlessly on, with the cast stood in a line in their wacky costumes sharing puns and the star laughing at his own jokes... I know which person in the studio audience most accurately reflects my response to this.

 This week, Ed Welch sings a moving ballad in the Clifford T. Ward style, accompanied by a string quartet. Called 'Eleanor', it must be a tribute to his daughter, illustrated by a lot of still pictures of babies. In the context of this programme, it's very earnest sincerity is incongruous.

A Comedy On This Day: Doctor At Sea - Murder! He Said (7 July 1974)

 You can see why this was the most expensive Doctor series, with the money spent on the on deck Canary Islands location filming being put upfront onscreen. These location bits always seem to be subsidiary to the farcical operation of the main plot, which again involves dashing about from set to set inside the ship. And very good sets they are, too - and more of them than found in most sitcoms!

 This week, Doctor Waring has been brawling and feuding with the ship's purser, exclaiming, "I'll murder you" in public earshot - words which then rebound on him when the purser goes missing. Something that strikes me is how, although you think of Robin Nedwell as being a gangling and amiable performer, he's surprisingly convincing at being tough and menacing.

 And then I remember something that I hadn't thought about for decades. Did I see him act onstage? Yes, he had a season at the RSC - 1996, so maybe even his last job before he died a couple of years later (of a heart attack in a doctors' surgery, ironically enough). The thing that sticks in the mind is a starry production of Ben Jonson's Jacobean city comedy The Devil Is An Ass. The two leads were John Nettles as Merecraft the confidence trickster and David Troughton as Fitzdottrel the foolish gentleman. Digs out old programme... but also Sheila Steafal as Lady Tailbush, a young Damian Lewis as the young gallant Wittipol and - Robin Nedwell as Gilthead the goldsmith!

 Read the script, and I can just see and hear him - "We live by finding fools out to be trusted" - a bit thicker and greyer and playing a father, but still using those same comic skills to good effect. That was one of those really good ensembles, when you can sense that the actors are happy to be there, sharing the process with the audience. Its a happy thought that his last performances were in the company of his peers, doing good work and being recognised for doing it.