The Mistress

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.

This is the second series of The Mistress and one wonders just how long they can keep it up. It might as well be a Play School parody with its nursery prattle that makes no attempt to confront these highly adult issues with a grown-up comedy.

The Mistress (BBC2) began a month ago as a showcase for the wistful comic talents of Felicity Kendal and is now developing into one of the finest inventions to come from the pen of Carla Lane. It is a three-dimensional comedy of romantic adultery which is simultaneously funny, sentimental and viciously truthful.

Both his wife and his girl-friend are fed up with Luke this week. They were last week come to that in this new Carla Lane comedy serial which opened very twee, obvious and thin, covering familiar Lane territory, and less adult than adultery should be.

You can quite see why Felicity Kendal was chosen to take the curse off The Mistress (BBC2), a new comedy series by Carla Lane. It's the wholesomeness, she can't help it. Buttons could take her course in cuteness. She is all bubble-and-squeak or, as Cole Porter remarked appreciatively, Mickey Mouse.