Birds Of A Feather (1989)

Returning sitcom Birds of a Feather will soon have another female enter the ranks in the form of former TOWIE star Amy Childs.

Now that Sharon has given up work, Tracey is the only one in the house bringing in a wage, and it's not nearly enough to pay the bills, so Dorien kindly offers to dip into her savings to help out.

However, when man-eating Dor calls the bank it emerges every penny she had has been spent on legal fees.

In desperation, the sisters take their old friend to a car boot sale and sell her beloved collection of designer clothes, right down to the shoes on her feet.

That's when Essex beauty Amy Childs will make her cameo.

Playing herself, Amy wants some of Dorien's cast-offs only it's much to the nosey neighbour's disgust.

Sharon soon finds that looking after Dorien's every wish is a full time job and with money tight, the odd bit of cash from Amy is not enough - Dorien will have to start earning too.

Last week Birds of a Feather pulled in an average of 7.8 million viewers as the Essex-based sitcom returned to TV screens after 16 years.

Having got Tracey, Sharon and Dorien back under the same roof in the first episode, it's necessary to shake up the dynamic a bit now. So realising she's broke, Dorien is forced to sell her designer wardrobe at - shock horror - an Essex car boot sale (where, it looks like, TOWIE's Amy Childs shops) and then - even more shock horror - get a proper job.

The gags and their delivery are as subtle as a mallet to the head, but what's even more blatant is the number of product references: every other sentence name-checks a supermarket, a clothes shop, a high-street chemist, fashion designers, a department store or cleaning products.

Unlike the recent attempt at rebooting Open All Hours, Birds of a Feather seems like it has been updated for the 21st century. Most of the updates make sense, such as Dorien's new career as an erotic author and Sharon's new job at pound shop 'World of Quid'. Birds of a Feather also survives because of the chemistry between the three lead actresses, all of whom have impeccable comedy timing. While I do concede that the humour isn't exactly cutting edge, the frequency of the jokes is so high that even if one didn't make me laugh there was one a couple of seconds after that.

Ultimately this is a traditional sitcom that doesn't have to resort to bad language to make me laugh, and one that has updated its humour just enough to make it relevant while at the same time maintaining the themes that made it so popular the first time around.

It was a little discombobulating to see Birds Of A Feather back on our screens after 15 years, albeit transposed from the BBC to ITV. Essex sisters Sharon (Pauline Quirke) and Tracey (Linda Robson) were initially estranged, while maneater Dorien (Lesley Joseph) had hit the big time by writing a 50 Shades-style bonkbuster under the nom de plume "Foxy Cohen". After a series of unfortunate events, they were all reunited under the same roof by the end of the first episode, a housing situation complicated by Sharon's teenage son Travis (played, rather confusingly, by Pauline Quirke's real-life offspring Charlie Quirke) and the late arrival of another sibling, Garth (former Busted heartthrob Matt Willis), with his new Aussie partner and a kid in tow.

Stuffing all these bodies into one Chigwell house is a smart sitcom move, although past masters Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran didn't need proximity and antagonism to craft gags, firing them out willy-nilly from the off. With pointed jabs at Cameron and Osborne, it made me wonder: did the show used to be so politically minded? In performance terms, Robson, Quirke and Joseph had the benefit of a recent theatre tour warm-up, so it seemed very much like busybody-ness as usual. As yet, there have been no references to The Only Way Is Essex, but surely it's only a matter of time.

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Birds Of A Feather (ITV), which began in 1989, has been away from our screens for 15 years. The trio of smashing actresses who carry the show - Linda Robson, Pauline Quirke and Lesley Joseph - must have been preserved in aspic, because none of them looks any older than they did in the Nineties.

The big change here is that Birds was always a BBC comedy. After the sitcom's West End stage success, writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran approached the corporation and were told, implausibly, that Auntie's policy is never to do revivals.

That makes little sense, when you consider that the BBC's most popular drama, Doctor Who, lay dormant for more than a decade before being revived.

Anyway, it's the Beeb's loss, because Birds was as funny and edgy as ever. Sex-mad Dorian had reinvented herself as an erotic author called Foxey Cohen, Tracy was a single mum again and Sharon was still boiling with working-class indignation.

'Mr Cameron says we're all in this together,' she grumbled, 'so how come I never bump into him down by the bins?'

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