John Williams (VIII)

Romany Jones is no Yus, My Dear because it does have redeeming features. James Beck is likeable (if one-note), as Bert Jones, but by far the best performer is Jo Rowbottom as Betty. Bert and Betty are the Jonathan and Jennifer Hart of the caravan site. Barely a moment goes by where they're not at it like knives and the performances and chemistry are good enough to make this believable.

But despite his lunacy, we take Dudley for granted, and that's a testament to the skills of Robert Gillespie. In the 1970s, he memorably played a small supporting role in just one episode of both The Good Life and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, and more than held his own against the like of Bolam, Bewes and Briers. So he certainly deserved a lead role, but the scripts of Keep it in the Family aren't really up to much. Sitcom cliches that were clapped out even by 1980 are shamelessly reused.

Unfortunately, Sirens sets back the cause of Channel 4 comedy/drama by several decades. It's so bad that it makes No Angels look like The Kingdom. I like Rhys Thomas, but he's horribly miscast here, and for the first few minutes it's impossible to avoid feeling that you've stumbled upon a deleted scene from Bellamy's People where Gary accompanies a team of paramedics around a hamfisted portrait of Broken Britain.

It's hard for me to be impartial about Psychoville. Shearsmith and Pemberton are about my age and seem to share almost exactly the same frame of cultural reference [...] Ultimately if you don't like this, then there's plenty of other comedy shows on television, although I can guarantee that only one of them will feature an homage to Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle, and it won't be Life of Riley.

The opening credits are the best thing about it, as long as you can get through the pain of Mullard singing. One credit reads: "Created and devised by Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney". Created and devised? How are we supposed to unpack the dense meanings residing in that? "Right Ron, now we've created it, we have to get through the difficult process of devising it" "Oh dear, I hate the devising part, it's always tough". Perpetrated would be a better word than either. But astonishingly Yus was in the top ten for at least five weeks in 1976, and allegedly hit the top of the ratings in the London region for one week, pipping Coronation Street.