Leaving

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.

Much as we loved Ria in Butterflies, she hadn't a job, couldn't cook, couldn't clean her own floor and couldn't have an affair. But with Susan's Martha, it's worse. She dents the car, gives up on her children, takes sleeping pills and demands divorce because hubby wears his jimjams inside out. Dear God, why did she marry him? For the way he stirred his tea?

Carla Lane's new comedy Leaving had some very funny lines when it wasn't straining for wry, clever-dick laughs. But the characters were so enormously dull that I couldn't care less whether they got divorced or fell into the nearest canal.

As often with Carla Lane, the funny lines mask an underlying sadness.