Carla Lane

It 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.

Perhaps the accents didn't always ring too true but the cheeky line in bedsitter belt backchat did and the dialogue had a distinct flavour that could be the making of these female equivalents of The Likely Lads.

Miss Collins and Miss James were splendid. The script was not. I don't think the B.B.C. will pull a national success out of this one. But thank heaven they tried new faces and new writers.

Comedy Playhouse returned last night to BBC1 with "The Liver Birds," not so much a play perhaps as a chirpy dialogue in the variety programme manner. But although the Liver Birds may have had little body, they twittered amusingly enough to make one quite happy to stay with them for half an hour.