Carla Lane

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.

You can quite see why Felicity Kendal was chosen to take the curse off The Mistress (BBC2), a new comedy series by Carla Lane. It's the wholesomeness, she can't help it. Buttons could take her course in cuteness. She is all bubble-and-squeak or, as Cole Porter remarked appreciatively, Mickey Mouse.

Much as we loved Ria in Butterflies, she hadn't a job, couldn't cook, couldn't clean her own floor and couldn't have an affair. But with Susan's Martha, it's worse. She dents the car, gives up on her children, takes sleeping pills and demands divorce because hubby wears his jimjams inside out. Dear God, why did she marry him? For the way he stirred his tea?

Carla Lane's new comedy Leaving had some very funny lines when it wasn't straining for wry, clever-dick laughs. But the characters were so enormously dull that I couldn't care less whether they got divorced or fell into the nearest canal.

As often with Carla Lane, the funny lines mask an underlying sadness.