Comedy Classics: Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em review

Hurrah for comedy that doesn't forget to be funny.

Michael Crawford says he nearly died in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em sand stunt

Michael, who devised and performed all of hapless character Frank Spencer's stunts himself, was almost suffocated by a pile of sand - just a few seconds longer and he would have been a goner, he admits.

What a calamity! Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em turned a bit of trouble into comic bliss

As the hapless Frank Spencer, Michael Crawford brought a light touch to the classic 70s sitcom but the stage version with a game Joe Pasquale feels creakier.

BBC rejected David Jason for Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em

When he was suggested to play the lead role of Frank Spencer in the series executives said the actor possessed "no star quality".

Praise of the pratfall: why slapstick can be high art

Any surprise at Buster Keaton's painstaking preparation hints, I think, at a widespread misconception. Namely, that physical comedy - despite having its roots in the 16th-century Commedia dell'arte and being, at its best, the finest and funniest kind of comedy full stop - is somehow inherently inferior to the more obviously "clever" verbal kind; that it is, as the Edinburgh Fringe favourite Adam Riches suggests, someone "just pratting about and being a fool".

Raymond Allen interview

As a special episode of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em is filmed, the show's creator reveals why Norman Wisdom turned down the lead and the story behind that famous raincoat.

"So, uh, we've got a young cullah'd fellah coming on next. I don't think it's fair to laugh at the afflicted, but... you know the reason their palms are all pink? It's the way they stack 'em before spraying..." For most of us it took about 10 seconds of watching Danny and the Human Zoo, though I'll accept 20 if you're from outwith the M25, or a full 40 minutes if you happen to live in Sunningdale or Midwich, to suss that this was not an utterly valid depiction of Britain today.

And we'd have been right. Early 70s. Early 70s Dudley, in fact, and Mark Benton playing, albeit terrifically, a sweatily odious nimrod (as they said in the 70s). Here he was playing to the woeful gallery (near-empty, chain-smoking, and the beer were as flat as the stomachs weren't) and introducing a 15-year-old Danny Fearon to the stage. Danny was, as some may know, a lightly fictionalised Lenny Henry.

Mr Henry, Sir Lenworth Henry as now is, has been a stout heart in the business they call show for as long now as the stalwarts - Tommy Cooper, Michael Crawford - he first set out (aged 14) to impersonate. As with those troupers, his act has not always satisfied all humours. In fact, there are some (me) who say he might have sideswiped the comedy altogether and gone straight to straight acting, apparently his natural metier, according to the many garlands for his Othello; and earlier this telly year, as Godfrey in The Syndicate, he waltzed off with the show.

But that wasn't going to be an option, was it, for the lad from Dudley. Rada would have been as closed to him as would running through the Garrick naked. His only way ahead, other than dying a daily death in the British Leyland shop, was to refine and sculpt a natural gift for mimicry, and (at least as portrayed here by Kascion Franklin, avowedly another big star in the finding), a graceful mix of ebullient anger. And then get on dirty stages in trodden towns - as one teen pal says, "I'm white, and even I'm scared for yow" - and then get gothically shafted by sleazy managers and agents, and sleazy white girlfriends, all in it for the goldbricking. And then, as happened back then, sell out: Danny's/Lenny's minstrel show segments made for incredibly queasy viewing, not least for their portrayal of the all-white audiences ponying along to blacked-up ruffed-up chintzery. In my, in your, lifetime.

Written by Lenny Henry himself, this was a beautiful and a valuable programme, which is to make it sound less fun than the huge fun it was. (And not least because of the soundtracking: ironies wholly lost on Dudley, they were still dancing then to James Brown, Stevie W, Curtis Mayfield, Shirley & Co.) Many scenes, particularly those between young Danny and his father - "What do you know about happiness? You never laugh..." - resonated with bittersweet pith. It may have been hard for the real Henry, here portraying Danny's (ie his own) father, to bear, given the story's arc of a mother's infidelity and a compromised marriage, but bear it he did, acting with style and two grumpy smiles throughout. I will never again underestimate Mr Henry. I retain the right to find him a glowing actor and a less than funny comedian. But nor, after this programme, will I gaze with my old demeanour upon those who excuse 70s racism as "accidental". We were all culpable.