Jack Rosenthal

When ITV finally showed the play - quietly, belatedly and late at night - Jack Rosenthal was dead. If he's listening, I found it full of wonderful things, as Howard Carter said, peering into Tutankhamen's tomb and seeing bygone glory.

I have a vague memory, and I am glad it is not clearer, of being on a Bafta jury when The Knowledge (C4) was up for an award. It lost. I wouldn't recommend jury service to anyone. The programmes are all right. It's the jurors who are impossible.

Otherwise And A Nightingale Sang is a sentimental situation comedy that doesn't know when to stop. Almost everything on television is half an hour too long, even things that are only half an hour to start with.

Some of the acting was nearly as unsubtle as some of the writing but the thing worked.

The peculiar delight of a Rosenthal script is the glancing illogic, the surreal squiffiness of the dialogue, which makes his conversations feel like an act with a cross-eyed trapeze artist. Just when you think you are home and dry, your grip slips.

It's damn depressing plays for one thing. Barmitzvah Boy, the first of a new Play for the Day series, was so entertaining that we might stay awake this series. Please God. Maybe. As the Green family would say.

Norman and Sadie might be Rosenthal's Lovers 25 years on but there was something about it that felt faintly false. Like the implication that Russell Harty's show is transmitted a day after Hughie Green's.

I am very fond of Granada's "The Lovers," though it is a difficult addiction to justify as the jokes tend to fade on paper. The conversation of Geoffrey and Beryl is a series of near-squeaks. Their comments never exactly connect but whizz past each other's ears like fists in a film saloon fight.

Granada's excellent series "The Lovers" is remarkable for its ping-ponging, tangential dialogue, which ricochets and hits your funny bone.

The fun is in Lovers and I don't think I'll give you a "for-instance" because its ping-pong comedy is only apparent when spoken.