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.

Carla Lane returns to roots with first show in 17 years

Carla Lane, the creator of Bread, Butterflies and The Liver Birds says her new sitcom will be set in Liverpool.

If Me and Mrs Jones, this crummy yummy mummy sitcom doesn't in itself herald the end of the universe, it does make you question what 14bn years of cosmic existence has achieved.

After the desperate opener, the humane hope was that, contrary to the second law of thermodynamics, things could only get better. But the second episode proved that hope to be vainer than Simon Cowell.

Character may not always be destiny in real life, but it is in real comedy. And like far too many British comedies, Me and Mrs Jones, a school gate farce, has no characters. Instead it has "types": the hapless single mother, the neighbourhood busybody, the humourless Nordic sex bomb.

To watch Sarah Alexander as Mrs Jones work herself into a mirthless fluster is to long to see Wendy Craig in a rerun of Carla Lane's 70s sitcom Butterflies, a yearning I have never previously felt in danger of experiencing. Yet say what you will about Craig's Ria, she was drawn from an active imagination rather than an exhausted comic trope.

The stock ciphers in Me and Mrs Jones possess no animating truth and therefore inspire no sympathy - the paradox of comedy being that you have to feel for people before you can laugh at them. Whatever pity was mustered went on the actors, whose lines were so limp that it seemed like a cruel and unusual punishment to leave them dangling without the protection of a laughter track.

In historical terms, the demise of the laughter track must be hailed as a positive development in British sitcom. For is there not something creepily controlling about being prompted to laugh? Apart from anything else, it denies us the basic human right of spontaneity.

But with the sort of sitcoms that British television churns out with mystifying regularity, the laughter track performs a vital practical role. It provides the only sign that these shows are comedies. Take that away and you're left with an extreme version of Brechtian alienation, only without the intellectual kudos.

When, for example, Inca the Nordic sex bomb said: "I am Swedish", you could detect immediately afterwards a ghostly appeal to a notional sense of humour - the empty beat where the laughter was supposed to go. Call it the silence of comic entropy, this was the haunted sound of a joke that had not just died but decomposed into absolute nothingness.

McDonald's 'M' appears on Carla Lane's chapel roof

The golden arches that mark out McDonald's restaurants across the world have appeared on top of an historic chapel on an uninhabited island in North Wales.

Mystery surrounds the appearance of the logo on top of the building on the isolated island of St Tudwal's East, near Abersoch. It is owned by TV comedy writer and animal rights activist Carla Lane.

Mrs Brown is no drag

If you liked Carla Lane's Bread and haven't yet discovered Mrs Brown's Boys, then don't miss tonight's episode, the second last in the series.

In what looks decidedly like a sod-it capitulation to the bigger networks, Channel 5 continues its retro repeats. First, that means Frank Spencer trying to pass his driving test. Rubbish in 1975, still rubbish now. Far better is Butterflies (9pm) from 1979, Carla Lane's bittersweet dissection of middle-class life, at its best like a Margaret Drabble novel played for laughs. Finally, there's an episode of Terry and June (9.45pm), nominally from 1982 but actually existing in its own timeless suburban realm of double entendres and cheesy gags. That's not a criticism, by the way.