Nancy Banks-Smith

In Minder (Thames) Terry was doing 18 moons in the shovel. This was a distinctly sombre story about Richard Briers wanting to take over the world, or some convenient piece of it. Luckily for us, he was the sort of man who brought bullet-proof vests from Arthur Daley.

In Only Fools And Horses (BBC1) Del, the course of whose love-life is littered with sleeping policemen or just policemen, was arrested while about to plight his troth to a strippergram.

There are three women whom I feel inclined to rise up and call blessed. Vanya Kewley for courage and compassion, Lucinda Lambton (40 Minutes, BBC2) for joie de vivre and rollicking pottiness, and Emma Thompson for her new series, Thompson (BBC1), which she wrote. The sketches are not only neurotically funny in an Eleanor Bron-ish way but quite beautifully acted.

The Return of Shelley (Thames) by Andy Hamilton offers some real writing, Hywel Bennett and charmingly curly and inconsequential conjectures on answering machines, selling grandmothers and why wildebeest keep swimming across rivers and drowning instead of taking over all the jobs and forming long queues at the post office. It also offers an excellent supply of off-the-peg ammunition to use on tiny, daily tyrants.

Spitting Image - the Ronnie and Nancy Show (ITV) was made for the Americans and will have left many of the British staring at each other with a wild surmise.

A fascinatingly recurrent phenomenon, newspaper proprietors: when you think they are extinct they appear again like Gorgosaurus with extra knobs on. The jolliest item of the weekend was the return of Hot Metal (LWT) by Marshall and Renwick.

This attempt to translate him into television was far too long and not half funny enough. It may be like trying to televise Punch and Judy. There is something poltergeist in Punch which fights against it.

Immediately following this was the comforting Red Dwarf (BBC2), a space fantasy in which the spaceship's computer is not only visibly human but in a steady state of gloom, terror and self-doubt: "I can't do it. I can't cope. Me bottle's gone. I fort I could navigate at the light speed but I just can't wrap me 'ead around it. Gordon Bennett, that was a close one."

Another thing you are not supposed to do on your own is laugh. That is the excuse for studio audiences, to gee-up the mumchance viewer. So I was quite disconcerted to find myself laughing heartily at Singles (Yorks) by Eric Chappell and Jean Warr. The ground is well todden, being on the route from Only Fools And Horses to Just Good Friends, but the writing is fresh and the cast very fancy.

It is my considered advice never to get on a boat. As Dr. Johnson virtually said the company is commonly better in prison and it is easier to escape. I would draw your attention to The Bounty and Alan Ayckbourn's Way Upstream (BBC1) in which passengers ignored this simple rule.