Nancy Banks-Smith

I do believe I like the songs on Rutland Weekend Television best and there's an odd thing, for, in general, I feel the chief function of a comic is to stop the soprano singing twice. I particularly enjoyed Neil Innes as Stoop Solo, the awful pop idol.

The twenties craze for crosswords and the consequent tendency of George and his beloved to talk in strings of synonyms would been better, I think, left on paper. As Wodehouse goes, the Mulliner stories are second eleven stuff, which means they can knock the spats and spots off yarns 40 years younger.

Norman and Sadie might be Rosenthal's Lovers 25 years on but there was something about it that felt faintly false. Like the implication that Russell Harty's show is transmitted a day after Hughie Green's.

The Good Life (BBC1) is a civilised new comedy series with considerable charm and Richard Briers. There is a lot of bad meat sold in the comedy market, but I can recommend this as very fresh and pleasant.

One word contrariwise, The Wackers, a new comedy series, is like something you step in if you don't look where you're going.

Porridge is not particularly about prison, and if it were it might be distasteful or intolerable. It is about Barker, in shape and content an all-round bad egg, resisting to the last wriggle and wangel and back answer, the pressure of the system. So instinctively awkward that he lies about his height merely to deceive the doctor.

The Life of Riley, Granada's new comedy series, is cheap and cheerful, neat and effective. The formula is the upside-down one of live-it-up-father and a stay-at-home son. H. V. Kershaw, who wrote it, must be a follower, as what thinking man is not, of the Berman-Newhart school of telephoning Two scenes were telephone turns by Bill Maynard, and good ones. When his son arrives all unpolluted in Piccadilly (Manchester, not London), a little Welsh baa-lamb, Maynard makes every endeavour to return him to the land of his grandfathers.

"Second Time Around" (BBC1), last night's new series, was potentially full of pain. A divorced man of 50 falling in love with a girl his daughter's age. But in comes Waring and wallops them with his little wand and these bloody situations all turn into bottles of milk.

They have been reconstituted in a new series like powdered eggs. And they seem strange and remote like something from another time or place. If it were a space series the air would sort of shiver and these survivors from some other world would materialise together looking lost.

Yorkshire's other offering, Badger's Set, about a critic getting his comeuppance, was probably the best of this recent rather lumpy lot of comedies. I don't know what goes wrong with them but damp seems to get in and they come out heavy. Perhaps it's the audience which dearly loves a simple joke, a woman in trousers bending down, a man wearing a pink bow tie and a comic char in a funny hat.