Screaming

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.

Top comedy writer Carla Lane has had to scrap her latest sitcom Screaming because one of the show's stars refused to act in front of a studio audience. Carla, creator of hit shows Bread, Butterflies and The Liver Birds, said that actress Penelope Wilton's decision to quit had left her "devastated".

Experienced telly watchers are well aware that what we see on the box is usually unrelated to real life. But this series, in which three mature and apparently sensible women are so easily reduced to quivering mounds of emotional jelly by the same no-good creep, stretched the imagination to breaking point.

If Carla's man-mad whiners were out scouring the streets for the randy rotter waving castrating shears, I might understand them. But no, they just drivelled on about how unfair it all is. About the only reason to catch a moment more is to see if Ralph comes back to bonk. And whom? And where he's been meanwhile. With Ma Boswell? Or perhaps Wendy Craig.