Esmonde & Larbey

Ever Decreasing Circles (Christmas special): The loudest laugh you'll ever hear in a BBC sitcom turns up in this, when Richard Briers wakes up on Boxing Day to discover lying next to him in bed is ... Well, you can guess. It's a hysterical, touching, slightly surreal and avowedly inspiring episode that avoids all cloying sentimentality and goes instead for clumsy, authentic emotion.

The Other One (BBC1) is an enjoyable comedy series about British innocents abroad. Richard Briers is the chump with delusions of adequacy ('I keep on slipping into Spanish without realising it') and Michael Gambon is his boring friend. Lightweight stuff, but at least palatable, which puts it in sharp contrast with Are You Being Served?, still pursuing its innuendo-strewn course.

The Good Life (BBC1) is by now clearly established as the best Nice Couple sitcom on the screen, partly because Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal are a genuinely Nice Couple, but mainly because of the inspired interference from their snotty neighbour, Margo. [...] A meticulously groomed, flint-profiled ballbreaker with a taste for leopard-skin prints, Margo is the repository of every known prejudice common among the landless landed gentry - as bigoted as Alf Garnett but without his flexibility.