Your most underrated TV shows

Five classics that never got the kudos they deserved, according to our readers. Includes Money Dust, Nathan Barley, Early Doors and Families at War.

Early Doors is easily the best thing on telly tonight. It's the first episode of Craig Cash's sublime pub-based sitcom. From the moment that Ken starts up singing 'The Greatest Love Of All', while swearing at cigarette butts in the urinals, it feels classic. From Eddie's boring stories about temporary traffic lights ("Better go and get that door, it might be Michael Aspel for you") to the policemen complaining about the curtains, it's all so beautifully observed it feels like art.

Writers Craig Cash and Phil Mealey had a hit with the comedy drama Sunshine last year. But this 2003 sitcom is finer and more satisfying: the jokes are earthier and less obvious, and the pathos is subtle rather than being sentimentally spooned on. It all takes place in a Manchester pub.

Another chance to catch the under-the-radar 2003 sitcom from Phil Mealey and long-term Caroline Aherne collaborator Craig Cash, which centred around the comings and goings of a Manchester pub. Naturalistically played, subtle and well worth sticking with.

It never got the recognition accorded to The Royle Family or The Office but Early Doors was every bit the equal of those two benchmark comedies. Written by Phil Mealey and Craig Cash (Cash also co-wrote The Royle Family), the bittersweet tale of a pub landlord and his ragged regulars mixed laughter and tears into an addictively warm-hearted brew.

Early Doors is a step brother of The Royle Family, having the same father, Craig Cash, but not the same mother, Caroline Aherne. It is such a slow-burning comedy that you only start to smile during the next programme. Which happens to be Newsnight. This is a bonus as it sweetens the news and, indeed, Kirsty Wark whom, on any normal night, you would watch from behind the sofa.

BBC call to end ratings obsession

Programmes that score low in the ratings often do well in the Barb audience appreciation indices (AIs). Early Doors, a comedy by Craig Cash averaged only 1.7 million viewers in its first outing, but scored particularly highly on the AIs. Ms Root decided to commission a second series, partly because such a high proportion of viewers enjoyed it.

The new sitcom Early Doors is a sort of kid of The Royle Family, but now being raised by the father alone. The series was being written by that show's co-creators, Craig Cash and Caroline Aherne, until, we may guess, she decided that a show set in a pub was not the perfect subject for her at the moment. She left and Cash co-opted a new dialogue buddy, Phil Mealey.

Cash has said that the plan had been for Aherne to play a landlady but that they had difficulty imagining the character. But Cash's admission raises the project's main problem, which is that pubs are as familiar a part of television as televisions are of pubs.

In fact, one of the reasons that The Royle Family was so daring was that experience of the medium led you to expect that they must eventually get off their arses and go to the pub, but they never did. Early Doors aims for the same claustrophobia by trapping the characters on one set, but people stuck on alehouse benches don't have the same visual shock as a whole family beached on a settee.

Shot in dirty light without a laughter-track, the show begins with landlord Ken (John Henshaw) in his empty empire, decanting cheap brandy into a posher bottle and diverting the charity box into the till.

The regulars arrive and exchange banalities ("temporary traffic lights over at Samuel Street"), inanities ("Joe's having a shit"), incomprehensible in-jokes and semi-derelict slang ("Keep your hand on your halfpenny"). Future plot possibilities are laid down: Ken's daughter isn't actually his and there's also doubt about the father of her own child. Many scenes take place in the gents, the soundtrack featuring the meticulous drip of piss and plop of shit.

In the modern style - The Office, Phoenix Nights - it's the kind of comedy that should come with a bottle of paracetamol or a length of rubber tubing for the car. The theme could be described as the loneliness of company. It's potentially brilliant, but the pisser is that viewers have spent so much time in pubs. Though in Aherne's absence they've sensibly dispensed with a landlady, Ken keeps tripping over Al Murray's pub landlord.