Johnny Speight

TV preview: Till Death Us Do Part, BBC4

Are you ready for a cross between Festen and Mrs Brown's Boys? This is the weirdest contribution to the Landmark Sitcom Season yet. BBC4 has recreated a lost episode of the 1960s Alf Garnett sitcom Till Death Us Do Part using Johnny Speight's surviving script. And as they say on the internet, when you watch it your jaw will hit the floor.

Preview: Till Death Us Do Part

Unfortunately, this outdated set-up works against the production, reminding audiences how much our day to day lives have changed in 40 years - and not just with the advent of mobile phones and, dare we say it, Just Eat and Deliveroo.

While some comedians are lionised after they've stopped appearing on TV, others are quietly forgotten. Nicholas Parsons spends more than Just a Minute with Paul Merton recalling his partnership with one of the latter - Arthur Haynes. Viewers of a certain age will recall the partnership that pulled huge audiences to ITV in the 1950s and 60s. It's the comedy of a simpler, slower age; Parsons remembers how depicting a vicar in a sketch was considered disrespectful. There's nostalgia and curiosity value, not least with a priceless archive interview with writer Johnny Speight. Plus, rewarding glimpses of Wendy Richard, Patricia Hayes, Michael Caine and the Rolling Stones.

Written by Alf Garnett creator Johnny Speight, ITV's notorious, short-lived 1969 sitcom centred around the workers of a factory named Lillicrap Ltd. It starred a blacked-up Spike Milligan as an Asian immigrant named Kevin O'Grady (his workmates dubbed him 'P*ki P*ddy'). Speight maintains that he was challenging racism, but some felt the programme reinforced it.

In Sickness and in Health (BBC1), the hazardous attempt to bring the old monster back, swearing and ranting, seems to have worked surprisingly well.

Chairman Alf's Thoughts On The Media is, of course, Johnny Speight's great comic creation of the Sixties now on a life support system. In The Biggest Aspidistra In The World, Peter Black's biography of the BBC, he calls Alf immortal. Alas, alas. Paradoxically if Alf had been killed off, he would be immortal.

ATV, whose record for comedy, intentional comedy that is, is not encouraging, also launch a new series of Till Death, shown in London on Fridays. Apart from the new, improved title (I was never certain if it was Us Do or Do Us) I'm uneasy about reviving a 15-year-old joke in a decade so different from the Sixties.

Spooner's Patch is not great comedy but to be funny on a Monday in midsummer - that is a little miracle.

Johnny Speight is bootleg liquor. He scalds through your intestines and explodes your toes. What was unmistakeable about For Richer... For Poorer (BBC1) was the proof of it.