Nancy Banks-Smith

You can quite see why Felicity Kendal was chosen to take the curse off The Mistress (BBC2), a new comedy series by Carla Lane. It's the wholesomeness, she can't help it. Buttons could take her course in cuteness. She is all bubble-and-squeak or, as Cole Porter remarked appreciatively, Mickey Mouse.

Charters and Caldicott did one thing which took my breath away. When they found a body in the bedroom they did not, as is the norm, take it surreptitiously round to the squire's library or embalm it as a paperweight, they called the police. A stroke of amazing originality this. I hold out, however, no great hopes for the success of the serial. They might have been better advised to call the undertaker.

For one thing Comrade Dad is not particularly funny and for another politicians often are.

The best thing about Fairly Secret Army was the trailer, a not uncommon state of affairs. In this Truscott (Geoffrey Palmer) listed his natural enemies, and the language turned into a cascading stream of consciousness, all spume and spary and the occasional lunatic salmon leaping joyously

Blue Money is the first thing London Weekend have produced to justify their recent surprising claims to be entertaining. It is perhaps 10 minutes too long. But everything in life is 10 minutes too long. Including life.

Chance In A Million stretches ahead, warm and inviting as a red carpet. You know that for six weeks anyway you'll be all right.

When Thames announced their 1984 programmes everyone else was given both names and, here or there, a title, but between Jim Davidson and Windsor Davies and Bruce Forsyth and Greta Garbo, they just said Eric and Ernie. It is a sign of extraordinary intimacy, of adoption almost. I can't think of anyone else known instantly by their first name except that other time-proof double act, Tom and Jerry.

It is, however, the sort of passionate cry that people in Brass (Granada) cry passionately. It is a poor Brass actor who does not insist on his quota of passionate cries per page.

Fainthearted Feminist developed from Jill Tweedie's letters, had something to say and Lynn Redgrave to say it in that daughter-of-a-dozen-brigadiers voice so like her mother's.

It is a curious thing that when their Dirty Movie (C4) began my house was empty but by the time it finished people were sitting on the floor because all the chairs were taken or were standing on one leg as if they had been bewitched in the act of passing the TV set. And the only two I recognised were the dog and my daughter.