Myra Taylor

Carla's decades of comedy

It's a little more than 30 years since Liverpool's most well-known comedy jewel first came to our screens.

It followed the working class Boswell family struggling through the city's high unemployment and poor prospects in the late 1980s, painting a bleak yet concurrently warm and hopeful picture of life in one of Britain's major cities.

Anna Keaveney has bags of charm and gives as good as she gets. But, frankly, I would suggest she goes to the Citizens Advice Bureau, finds herself a good lawyer, and leaves Bert and this series, pronto.

The new edition seems better than the original. It has more shape and the dialogue by Carla Lane and Myra Taylor has a much sharper and fresher wit.

There is no series quite as new being promoted in "The Liver Birds," the delightfully dotty new comedy series on BBC1, with Pauline Collins and Polly James as the "birds." There are the occasional banal lines - no scriptwriter can be funny all the time - but on the whole this is a refreshingly funny and uncontrived series

It was accurate enough, but it had to be funny too. Pauline Collins and Polly James are the birds, one slightly superior and the other dead common, and they started off in what I keep thinking of as the first episode with a little too much Liverpudlian bounce, trying too hard to be sharp and witty in the way we expect from that over-publicised city.

Perhaps the accents didn't always ring too true but the cheeky line in bedsitter belt backchat did and the dialogue had a distinct flavour that could be the making of these female equivalents of The Likely Lads.

Miss Collins and Miss James were splendid. The script was not. I don't think the B.B.C. will pull a national success out of this one. But thank heaven they tried new faces and new writers.

Comedy Playhouse returned last night to BBC1 with "The Liver Birds," not so much a play perhaps as a chirpy dialogue in the variety programme manner. But although the Liver Birds may have had little body, they twittered amusingly enough to make one quite happy to stay with them for half an hour.