Maurice Gran

TV preview: Goodnight Sweetheart, BBC1

Is it possible for a sitcom to be terrible and very funny at the same time? That's the feat that this one-off revival of Goodnight Sweetheart as part of the Landmark Sitcom Season seems to have pulled off. This time travel comedy always was an odd idea and the internal logic problems of the original run, which ended 17 years ago, still haven't been resolved. On the other hand there are plenty of laughs.

Why Goodnight Sweetheart is the most subversive sitcom

There aren't many sitcoms about a grown man pretending to be a spy who wrote The Beatles' back catalogue. Who also befriends Noel Coward, saves Clement Attlee's life, and meets George VI, the Kray twins and Winston Churchill. Then again, time-travelling oddity Goodnight Sweetheart was no ordinary sitcom.

Hello Sweetheart

We're sorry that we've hardly blogged this year, but there is a very good reason: we've been trapped in 1962. It all started when we went on this innocent walk down an alleyway in East London and...What do you mean you don't believe us?

Event news: Tribute to comedy writers Marks & Gran

The British Comedy Society is to honour the TV comedy scriptwriters Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, who this year celebrate 35 years as professional TV comedy writers, with their prestigious Living Legend Award.

Watford Palace Theatre to stage Marks & Gran play

Watford Palace Theare's autumn season will include a new play from Goodnight Sweetheart and Birds of a Feather creators Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran.

Last seen 16 years ago on BBC One, things are much the same in this Laurence Marks-Maurice Gran sitcom. Times are hard, and space is at a premium in the Chigwell house: Dorien has moved in, not to mention Tracey's son Garth and his partner Marcie. So in this week's instalment, Sharon beds down for the night in the attic, and makes a surprising discovery. Meanwhile, Dorien's revamp of the World Of Quid staff rotas has brought her to the attention of founder Barry Quid. Surely nothing can go wrong?

It was a little discombobulating to see Birds Of A Feather back on our screens after 15 years, albeit transposed from the BBC to ITV. Essex sisters Sharon (Pauline Quirke) and Tracey (Linda Robson) were initially estranged, while maneater Dorien (Lesley Joseph) had hit the big time by writing a 50 Shades-style bonkbuster under the nom de plume "Foxy Cohen". After a series of unfortunate events, they were all reunited under the same roof by the end of the first episode, a housing situation complicated by Sharon's teenage son Travis (played, rather confusingly, by Pauline Quirke's real-life offspring Charlie Quirke) and the late arrival of another sibling, Garth (former Busted heartthrob Matt Willis), with his new Aussie partner and a kid in tow.

Stuffing all these bodies into one Chigwell house is a smart sitcom move, although past masters Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran didn't need proximity and antagonism to craft gags, firing them out willy-nilly from the off. With pointed jabs at Cameron and Osborne, it made me wonder: did the show used to be so politically minded? In performance terms, Robson, Quirke and Joseph had the benefit of a recent theatre tour warm-up, so it seemed very much like busybody-ness as usual. As yet, there have been no references to The Only Way Is Essex, but surely it's only a matter of time.

Birds Of A Feather (ITV), which began in 1989, has been away from our screens for 15 years. The trio of smashing actresses who carry the show - Linda Robson, Pauline Quirke and Lesley Joseph - must have been preserved in aspic, because none of them looks any older than they did in the Nineties.

The big change here is that Birds was always a BBC comedy. After the sitcom's West End stage success, writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran approached the corporation and were told, implausibly, that Auntie's policy is never to do revivals.

That makes little sense, when you consider that the BBC's most popular drama, Doctor Who, lay dormant for more than a decade before being revived.

Anyway, it's the Beeb's loss, because Birds was as funny and edgy as ever. Sex-mad Dorian had reinvented herself as an erotic author called Foxey Cohen, Tracy was a single mum again and Sharon was still boiling with working-class indignation.

'Mr Cameron says we're all in this together,' she grumbled, 'so how come I never bump into him down by the bins?'