Nancy Banks-Smith

Chairman Alf's Thoughts On The Media is, of course, Johnny Speight's great comic creation of the Sixties now on a life support system. In The Biggest Aspidistra In The World, Peter Black's biography of the BBC, he calls Alf immortal. Alas, alas. Paradoxically if Alf had been killed off, he would be immortal.

An Evening With Max Wall (C4) is the last gasp of the musical hall. He looks like a tragedian whose height was reduced when his legs were bent at the bottom into boots.

Grandad (Yorkshire) by Mike Stott was a comedy with dashes of desolation. Frank Middlemass as Grandad and another scene-stealing performance from Trevor Peacock as a gloriously bumbling doctor, something along the lines of Harry Worth. By the way, where is Harry Worth?

Comic Roots (BBC1) is a new short series about the background of comedians. As nobody knows what comedy is, you can only hope to pounce on it sideways when it isn't watching. Are you likelier to end up as a comedian, if you began life as a child in Collyhurst?

It is the sort of programme where, as self-evidently nothing is happening up front, you start noticing what they have on the mantelpiece. The cable-swathed, cuckoo-ridden Cole seems to live inside a sort of china teapot, all rosebuds and alcoves, niches and, I shouldn't wonder, ingle nooks. A set designer's bitter impression of just the sort of house an estate agent would choose.

Horace is a blank page who throws the other characters into the sharpest relief and they respond with some of the finest acting I have seen. Daphne Heard's Mrs Tiddy, malevolently gnashing her gums in the heaving sea of her big, brass bed as yet another favourite comes in forth, is a sort of senile Oliver to Horace's Laurel.

The characters in Minder belong to that Dickensian world of small-time grotesques which keeps solicitors fat and happy.

And as The Last Of The Summer Wine (BBC1) trickles tickling down our throats, we say farewell for now to Foggy, Clegg, Compo and to Nora Batty of the erotic wrinkled stockings, so late in life and so unexpectedly the sweetheart of the nation.

The lovers were the great success of this production. I have never seen them more delightfully done.

Revolting Women (BBC2) the first of five feminist comedy shows produced by women who are "sick at the stereotyped and sexist images of women portrayed in the typical TV comedy show" sounds pompous enough to be funny. There is, as Thurber said, only one thing wrong with it. It is kinda lousy.