The Liver Birds
- TV sitcom
- BBC One
- 1969 - 1996
- 86 episodes (10 series)
Sitcom exploring the lives and loves of two young, single females sharing a flat together in Liverpool. Stars Nerys Hughes, Polly James, Elizabeth Estensen, Pauline Collins, Mollie Sugden and more.
Press clippings
BBC Four to repeat comedy classics
To link in with the celebrations of 100 years of the BBC, from Saturday 22nd October BBC Four will begin broadcasting classic episodes of sitcoms and sketch shows.
British Comedy Guide, 14th October 2022100 BBC TV gamechangers
The Sooty Show, Goodness Gracious Me and Hancock's Half Hour have been named amongst 23 comedy titles in a BFI list of the 100 most important television programmes from the BBC, as the broadcaster marks its 100th anniversary.
British Film Institute, 28th April 2022Legendary sitcom producer/director Sydney Lotterby dies
Producer and director Sydney Lotterby, whose credits include Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, Porridge, The Liver Birds and As Time Goes By, has died at the age of 93.
British Comedy Guide, 30th July 2020The Top 10 British sitcoms of the 60s
We all have favourite sitcoms that we love to watch and revisit. Something about the familiarity of the format that resets itself to zero for the start of each new episode makes for comforting viewing.
Greg Jameson, Entertainment Focus, 16th November 2018Comedies crowd top 100 missing TV shows list
A list of the top 100 missing TV shows has been revealed, with comedies including The Liver Birds, Dad's Army, At Last The 1948 Show and The Frost Report making the list.
British Comedy Guide, 24th April 2018Carla'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.
Aaron Brown, BBC, 4th May 2016The new edition seems better than the original. It has more shape and the dialogue by Carla Lane and Myra Taylor has a much sharper and fresher wit.
James Thomas, The Daily Express, 19th March 1971After four instalments, the BBC1 comedy series "The Liver Birds" is coming off because Polly James, who plays Beryl, one of the two bright Liverpool dollies, has been advised by her doctor not to continue with both her stage work and the series.
Liverpool Echo, 7th August 1969There is no series quite as new being promoted in "The Liver Birds," the delightfully dotty new comedy series on BBC1, with Pauline Collins and Polly James as the "birds." There are the occasional banal lines - no scriptwriter can be funny all the time - but on the whole this is a refreshingly funny and uncontrived series
Jessie Palmer, The Scotsman, 2nd August 1969It was accurate enough, but it had to be funny too. Pauline Collins and Polly James are the birds, one slightly superior and the other dead common, and they started off in what I keep thinking of as the first episode with a little too much Liverpudlian bounce, trying too hard to be sharp and witty in the way we expect from that over-publicised city.
Ann Purser, The Stage, 17th April 1969