Nancy Banks-Smith

Our Day Out (BBC2) was a gloriously funny and touching play by Willy Russell about a coachload of backward kids going to the seaside. "Christ, they're all bloody backward round here," says the lollypop man, somewhat soured by constant contact with youth.

I quite enjoyed Citizen Smith but I should mention that he too is an import. Woolfie is the Fonzie of Tooting.

Table Manners, the first in Alan Ayckbourn's three-part sequence Norman Conquests, is dedicated to family food and feuds, each meal taking off where the last one collapses insensate. Theoretically about bed, it is in practice and exuberantly about breakfast.

John Alderton showed unusual character in not making Upchat a good lad at heart. Robert Reed's wit kept Waterhouse's top humming merrily and, talking of humming, Mike Batt has written a catchy signature tune, too.

TW3 was still, after 14 years, nice and warm like fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. It was always a newspaper baby, from the Director General who protected it, to the journalists, often critics, who wrote for it.

The House That Jack Built (BBC1), a six-part serial by Shelagh Delaney, was remarkably like The Likely Lads. Better, for by making one of the lads a woman the partnership gained greatly in edge and tenderness.

Middlemen (BBC1) was more an imitation Morecambe and Wise. Francis Matthews's pace and grimaces were Morecambeish; Frank Windsor's easily led lamb, Wise-ish. Both seemed eager to prove they could do a lot of funny accents.

The Sykes show had a fine cast, music and production and a quite exceptional script by Sykes himself with a steady, strong note of Lewis Carroll logic about it.

The first episode in a new six-part comedy series, Don't Forget to Write (BBC2) by Charles Wood, was about a scriptwriter's difficulty at first in sitting down, and second in getting down anything on paper which might pass for human speech.

Variations On A Theme was the worst of the Galton and Simpson plays I have seen. And I think I have already described the second as the worst in the world.