Nancy Banks-Smith

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

Yorkshire have done Lancashire-between-the-wars proud with black lead grates, Fair Isle sweaters, cobbles and canals, and Dick Sharples has written the script with great vivacity and fidelity.

Coward, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine in black pyjamas and silver evening dress are gracefully entwined on what Coward prudently ordered should be an enormous sofa. In the BBC production this twining is a tangled knot, writing. It is like looking into a whirlpool. The end, as Coward said, is what you choose to make it. The BBC made it black or twentieth-century blue.

The trouble about doing comedy is that you don't know if you are funny for five months. If then. I have seen Chalk and Cheese (Thames), Alex Shearer's new comedy series twice, coming at it a second time out of the sun when it didn't expect me and I stil l don't know if it's funny.

It is a sad comment on comedy that as much as I enjoy and admire Stanley Baxter the funniest item was knowing that this show was postponed because he broke his pelvis in two places when a large quantity of porridge fell on him, thus proving that Scot's porridge beats the living daylights out of you.

Agony is luckily a wide-awake, wise-cracking comedy with a cracking good comedienne Maureen Lipman, something in the Stritch style.

Compared to the mellow Summer Wine, Potter is bitter. He celebrates his retirement with chateau-bottled vinegar while his wife makes spirited inroads on a bottle of vodka. It is a scene remarkable for its silences, like an eternal breakfast. Potter is, you might say, no laughing matter.

This series of Shakespeare has disheartened me deeply by being quite nice. Measure for Measure is a notch below the best yet, As You Like It, having like that a fine leading actress in Kate Nelligan. Seen suddenly, standing in a doorway, she shines like candlelight. The lighting of the play is, throughout, important and impressive.

The BBC's version was charming with that element of strangeness about it which gives beauty its thorns. One felt there was more to the princesses' nightly dancing than was ever explained. Their dances had a shiver of witchery about them, stepping in slow motion among the stars or whirling in a mad night light.

Me! I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the first of six plays by Alan Bennett to be produced by LWT was very funny indeed with all the sadness that the very word gay suggests.