Jack Rosenthal

When ITV finally showed the play - quietly, belatedly and late at night - Jack Rosenthal was dead. If he's listening, I found it full of wonderful things, as Howard Carter said, peering into Tutankhamen's tomb and seeing bygone glory.

Eskimo Day, directed by Piers Haggard and produced by Ann Scott, was a special treat, like the chocolate pudding with chocolate sauce and cream served in the Cambridge cafe. It is a sign of the times that the girl, so urgently applying for the job of waitress there, had a top second in Medieval French from Magdalene.

I have a vague memory, and I am glad it is not clearer, of being on a Bafta jury when The Knowledge (C4) was up for an award. It lost. I wouldn't recommend jury service to anyone. The programmes are all right. It's the jurors who are impossible.

Otherwise And A Nightingale Sang is a sentimental situation comedy that doesn't know when to stop. Almost everything on television is half an hour too long, even things that are only half an hour to start with.

Some of the acting was nearly as unsubtle as some of the writing but the thing worked.

The peculiar delight of a Rosenthal script is the glancing illogic, the surreal squiffiness of the dialogue, which makes his conversations feel like an act with a cross-eyed trapeze artist. Just when you think you are home and dry, your grip slips.

Jack Rosenthal's back-to-the-roots play Bar Mitzvah Boy (BBC1) was likewise far from dull, although finally it didn't have the wild suggestiveness of some other Rosenthal inventions. The English Jewish family couldn't help being like a Philip Roth Jewish family, because Jewish culture is international. But [...] you couldn't help feeling you had seen some of this before.

It's damn depressing plays for one thing. Barmitzvah Boy, the first of a new Play for the Day series, was so entertaining that we might stay awake this series. Please God. Maybe. As the Green family would say.

Ready When You Are, Mr. McGill (Granada), by Jack Rosenthal, was a very funny play about an extra with delusions of competence who was given a line to say and muffed it. As McGill, Joe Black had the unrewarding job of being an invincibly boring little man. He did it well, but perforce yielded the centre of attention to Jack Shepherd, who played the harried film-director. Shepherd's drained anguish has by now become one of the most sought-after acting styles on television - nobody else can do it.

Sadie, It's Cold Outside (Thames) is a clumsily named new sitcom starring Bernard Hepton as a telly addict and Rosemary Leach as his long-suffering wife. It is Miss Leach's fate to play long-suffering wives, because she has the knack of making long-suffering look charming. The show is written by Jack Rosenthal and could prove amusing.