Dennis Potter

Cosy comedy of this kind is acceptable enough if completely unforced or mildly satirical. But I feel that a busted cucumber at the harvest festival is not the kind of joke which will even begin to measure against the splendid guffaws produced by clergymen on seaside comic postcards.

The show is built round the gangling, jaw-quivering personality of the affable Canadian comedian Alan Young. His gentle humour is so placid as to be hardly noticeable, and comes mostly in the determinedly old-fashioned revue sketches of almost interminable length.

Michael Bentine had some very funny moments in his It's A Square World series which started on BBC TV last night. Pity is that they were interspersed with other ideas that did not come off.

Eric's new comedy series on BBC is settling down into its comfortable old stride - not exactly a laugh a minute, but consistently entertaining. Last night Eric and his formidable "sister," the formidable but totally charming Hattie Jacques, went camping in the pouring rain. Needless to say everything went wrong.

Indeed, scriptwriters Galton and Simpson have gone further. They have tried to introduce characterisations and subtleties of relationship between the Steptoes which would not be out-of-place in so-called serious drama. But the old rituals of comedy have not been abandoned, thank goodness.

But he [Tony Hancock] is squandering his strongest point in this current series. Instead of subtle characterisation and inspired soliloquy he is giving us an almost second-hand characterisation from a decidedly second-rate script.

First, on BBC, it was a rollicking welcome back to Steptoe and Son. The two quarrelling scrap merchants were in peak form. With delightful surges of rhetoric, evil flashes of animal cunning, and the ever-developing like-hate relationship between father and son, this episode confirmed yet again that the junk-yard family is the best thing that has happened to TV comedy in years.

This time there were fewer verbal pyrotechnics, but more visual humour. It is too early yet to say whether this current series was wise to accept this new format. But the important thing is that he still makes us laugh.

Any TV critic optimistic enough to look for something spectacularly good every night would end up chewing his fingers to the elbow. It would be a poor prospect indeed if we were not prepared to settle for things like the Dickie Henderson Show.

A great deal of hard work and ingenuity has gone into Raise Your Glasses, and constantly one was left hoping the professionalism so evident on the surface shine of the show would break through into the performances. But it didn't happen. And it would be wrong to be charitable to the biscuit-mash we saw.