The late great Caroline Aherne may ultimately have regretted Mrs Merton & Malcolm as a spin-off to her wildly successful talk show. The programme may have come out a little darker and more offbeat than the team's original intent, but that certainly didn't mean it wasn't a great piece of comedy, bleak or otherwise.
Just what made Channel 4 comedy Nightingales, about a trio of security guards working an office block's graveyard shift, a fondly-remembered cult hit? Dark surrealism by the bucket-load, more than twenty years before many other comedies followed suit.
Long before Gordon Ramsay was insulting cooks from across the globe for the purposes of televisual entertainment, Lenny Henry played the role of the acerbic but brilliant French cuisine maestro Gareth Blackstock in this early 90s BBC sitcom.
You'd better believe it: as all 42 full episodes of One Foot In The Grave make their way to BBC iPlayer, we look at what made this dark, delicious sitcom classic.
1987. Margaret Thatcher had just won her third General Election and two writers by the names of Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran were about to team up with the pan-global phenomenon that was Rik Mayall, in order to create one of the most outrageous satires Britain had ever seen...
