I Woke Up One Morning

Carla's decades of comedy

It's a little more than 30 years since Liverpool's most well-known comedy jewel first came to our screens.

It followed the working class Boswell family struggling through the city's high unemployment and poor prospects in the late 1980s, painting a bleak yet concurrently warm and hopeful picture of life in one of Britain's major cities.

Normally, Carla Lane's characters come alive partly, if not wholly, because there are grains of her own experience in what they say and do. This time, the teetotal lady seems to have written about being sloshed after too much herbal tea.

The most brilliant conversation on television at the moment is in a new series I Woke Up One Morning (BBC1) by Carla Lane, the story of four drinking men drying out in a hospital. And a fifth who sits under a blanket and never utters like a dust covered chair. I held my breath for half an hour waiting for his first words. I hope he says something soon. I could die that way.

Yet another Carla Lane series, with drink replacing adultery as the main theme and marriage as usual taking a beating. Frederick Jaeger has most of the good lines but this is a rather flat, colourless, opening episode.