Carla Lane

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.

Carla Lane's The Last Song (BBC2) is a bitter-sweet confection reporting wryly from no-man's-land in the battle of the sexes. It's a sort of marital 'Yes, Minister' in which 50-year-old Leo is the punch-bag for the wife he is leaving and the girl half his age he has shacked up with. So far in the series the women have been shown as terrifyingly predatory and the men as terribly wet. What sustains it is the performance of Geoffrey Palmer. His rumpled, lugubrious countenance is wonderfully expressive, and he speaks his lines with such conviction that it is only when the other actors are hamming it up that one realises how weak much of the dialogue is.

The Liver Birds has outlasted a whole giggle of girls-together comedy series. I can't quite think why. Well, they keep putting it back on, of course, but apart from that. It is much like watching a couple of budgies, all cheek and chirp and bounce. And in Polly James it has a woebegone clown child of real promise. A Mersey budgie.

The new edition seems better than the original. It has more shape and the dialogue by Carla Lane and Myra Taylor has a much sharper and fresher wit.

There is no series quite as new being promoted in "The Liver Birds," the delightfully dotty new comedy series on BBC1, with Pauline Collins and Polly James as the "birds." There are the occasional banal lines - no scriptwriter can be funny all the time - but on the whole this is a refreshingly funny and uncontrived series