Nancy Banks-Smith

I wonder if, by any chance, they have got the casting the wrong way round. Bill Bailey, who is very good indeed, is potentially the more terrifying of the two, while Dylan Moran can do endearing lying down. God knows where the girl-next-door is supposed to fit in. Good sitcoms are usually about lifers, shackled together by celibacy, poverty, family, necessity, history, somethingy. What chain gang are these three in?

Heartburn Hotel did not seem to endear itself to many as it did to me. The BBC's own continuity announcer still calls it Heartbreak Hotel. It is, however, co-written by John Sullivan, who also wrote Only Fools and Horses, so it is an egg worth incubating.

Chambers (BBC 1) is a very old-fashioned situation comedy by a barrister about barristers and, judging by the roaring audience, for barristers.

It took a while to get used to the minimal but enormous difference between the actors and the originals. In this sense, it was a bravura, extended edition of Stars In Their Eyes.

In age Foggy, always Foggy to me, Clegg and Compo reverted to the boys they had once been, though, strictly speaking, Compo had never verted in the first place. Ivy, who ran the cafe, said of him "You'd think every day was playtime." To become as little children is a holy thing or, of course, in Compo's case, holey.

Michael Barrymore as Bob seemed unusually subdued but Terry Wogan as, well, Wogan, made a meal of a media monster, shrouded in shadow and cigar smoke. It was as though Barrymore was determined not to be mistaken for himself. And so was Wogan.

The three scriptwriters of The Peter Principle (BBC 1) were ill advised to use lines like "Very amusing!" and "Ha, ha! Very amusing!" Even when it's true - and it wasn't - it isn't wise.

Dad, told her waters had broken, charged upstairs singing The Dambusters, but, as they sat on the floor beside the avocado bath, Ricky Tomlinson and Caroline Aherne went into one of those tender duets which make the humdrum heavenly.

It probably needs the daily momentum of a strip cartoon, which it resembles, but it is transmitted in rather disjointed chunks.

It is a poignant, lovely looking series which will make you howl out loud at least once like a scatter of buckshot in the buttocks. Guaranteed.