Nancy Banks-Smith

Johnny Speight is bootleg liquor. He scalds through your intestines and explodes your toes. What was unmistakeable about For Richer... For Poorer (BBC1) was the proof of it.

Still, it is a cheap and melancholy show and it points out tricks of the trade like TV announcers always dropping their eyes after their announcement, presumably to a monitor. Perhaps to the floor manager on the floor again. And I did and still do like Neil Innes' songs very much.

I do believe I like the songs on Rutland Weekend Television best and there's an odd thing, for, in general, I feel the chief function of a comic is to stop the soprano singing twice. I particularly enjoyed Neil Innes as Stoop Solo, the awful pop idol.

The twenties craze for crosswords and the consequent tendency of George and his beloved to talk in strings of synonyms would been better, I think, left on paper. As Wodehouse goes, the Mulliner stories are second eleven stuff, which means they can knock the spats and spots off yarns 40 years younger.

Norman and Sadie might be Rosenthal's Lovers 25 years on but there was something about it that felt faintly false. Like the implication that Russell Harty's show is transmitted a day after Hughie Green's.

The Good Life (BBC1) is a civilised new comedy series with considerable charm and Richard Briers. There is a lot of bad meat sold in the comedy market, but I can recommend this as very fresh and pleasant.

One word contrariwise, The Wackers, a new comedy series, is like something you step in if you don't look where you're going.

Porridge is not particularly about prison, and if it were it might be distasteful or intolerable. It is about Barker, in shape and content an all-round bad egg, resisting to the last wriggle and wangel and back answer, the pressure of the system. So instinctively awkward that he lies about his height merely to deceive the doctor.

The Life of Riley, Granada's new comedy series, is cheap and cheerful, neat and effective. The formula is the upside-down one of live-it-up-father and a stay-at-home son. H. V. Kershaw, who wrote it, must be a follower, as what thinking man is not, of the Berman-Newhart school of telephoning Two scenes were telephone turns by Bill Maynard, and good ones. When his son arrives all unpolluted in Piccadilly (Manchester, not London), a little Welsh baa-lamb, Maynard makes every endeavour to return him to the land of his grandfathers.

"Second Time Around" (BBC1), last night's new series, was potentially full of pain. A divorced man of 50 falling in love with a girl his daughter's age. But in comes Waring and wallops them with his little wand and these bloody situations all turn into bottles of milk.