Carla Lane

But somehow with Carla Lane's skill and wit, it all hung together. I found myself worrying about Dad's bad heart and feeling sorry for the deflated Lilo Lil in Sunday's super wedding episode.

Finally, a plea to writer Carla Lane from all Peter Howitt fans: can't you give him something to do? At the moment, all his lines seem to consist of "settle down ma'am" when she calls Lilo Lil a tart, and keeping his brothers in order. Lots of romance and storylines for Joey, please. He's far too good to waste.

It's funny. At the same time Miss Lane has never lost her ability to catch you at the back of the throat when you least expect it.

This is the second series of The Mistress and one wonders just how long they can keep it up. It might as well be a Play School parody with its nursery prattle that makes no attempt to confront these highly adult issues with a grown-up comedy.

There was also canned laughter on BBC1 with Carla Lane's Bread], about a Liverpool family deserted by their father. In attempting to be more serious than perhaps she is capable, Carla Lane bastes an ordinary sitcom with the watery sauce of Catholicism and social concern.

Normally, Carla Lane's characters come alive partly, if not wholly, because there are grains of her own experience in what they say and do. This time, the teetotal lady seems to have written about being sloshed after too much herbal tea.

The most brilliant conversation on television at the moment is in a new series I Woke Up One Morning (BBC1) by Carla Lane, the story of four drinking men drying out in a hospital. And a fifth who sits under a blanket and never utters like a dust covered chair. I held my breath for half an hour waiting for his first words. I hope he says something soon. I could die that way.

Yet another Carla Lane series, with drink replacing adultery as the main theme and marriage as usual taking a beating. Frederick Jaeger has most of the good lines but this is a rather flat, colourless, opening episode.

The Mistress (BBC2) began a month ago as a showcase for the wistful comic talents of Felicity Kendal and is now developing into one of the finest inventions to come from the pen of Carla Lane. It is a three-dimensional comedy of romantic adultery which is simultaneously funny, sentimental and viciously truthful.

Both his wife and his girl-friend are fed up with Luke this week. They were last week come to that in this new Carla Lane comedy serial which opened very twee, obvious and thin, covering familiar Lane territory, and less adult than adultery should be.