Nancy Banks-Smith

A Very Peculiar Practice, a seven part story by Andrew Davies, is already much funnier than most TV comedy and promises to get better as things get worse.

There is nothing wrong with the new series Karen Kay (BBC2) that would not be improved by throwing the whole production team to the audience, who sound hungry.

The more you watch Yes, Prime Minister (BBC2), the more the pigs look like men and the men like pigs.

In Sickness and in Health (BBC1), the hazardous attempt to bring the old monster back, swearing and ranting, seems to have worked surprisingly well.

It will be impossible to read the book again without hearing the swoop of Geraldine McEwan's voice and the sound of eyelids being narrowed. She has, as great performers do, laid waste the part for those who follow.

Are You Being Served? was usually spoken of in the same breezy breath as Donald McGill, the saucy postcard man. How easy it is to imagine them all on a staff outing to a seaside, wearing bathing drawers of antique cut. Except, of course, Mr Rumbold's secretary, who was always built on the lines of a roller-coaster and with very much the same effect on the heart.

The most brilliant conversation on television at the moment is in a new series I Woke Up One Morning (BBC1) by Carla Lane, the story of four drinking men drying out in a hospital. And a fifth who sits under a blanket and never utters like a dust covered chair. I held my breath for half an hour waiting for his first words. I hope he says something soon. I could die that way.

Blott, as the front titles and rude music attest, was intended to be a seaside postcard. It is extraordinary that rational people could have worked on this serial for months without feeling a frightful sense of premonition. The same sensation that swept Oates when he first clapped eyes on his spavined ponies.

I want you all to watch Inside Out by Simon Moore (BBC2), a new comedy-drama which seems to call for adjectives I wouldn't normally dream of using like quirky, kooky, zany, whacky. And stylish and clever and excellent. Now don't argue about it, just do it.

The temptation to set off sideways like this suggests that I don't much fancy the way ahead. Blott on the Landscape is a brisk whisking of sex and violence, say Lady Chatterley's Lover and World War II, into heartless farce. I rather wonder if black farce is at home on television. The audience is, which may be the trouble.