Porridge (1973)

But if you want to hear how the use of language can be the making of a series, the re-run of Porridge (BBC2) is the show to watch. Those scripts by Clement and le Frenais were gold in every molecule. 'Her flat fell through.' 'Fell through to the flat beneath, I expect.' When you recover from laughing at the way Ronnie Barker delivers it, you realise that a lot depends on how the writers wrote it: the word 'beneath', in particular, is perfectly chosen and placed. Years from now, when all those semi-documentary, semi-improvised, semi-truthful epics about working-class rebellion have dated hopelessly, the work of Galton and Simpson and Clement and le Frenais will still be there to testify that there really was such a thing as common speech with a rhythm of its own.

By relative standards, shows like Dad's Army and Porridge are miracles of observation, and even by absolute ones they are astonishingly good: the best of each (and both are getting repeats now on BBC1, thereby providing a feast of viewing) will never look entirely like period pieces, but will always retain their capacity to surprise. Compare the floundering abstractness of 'The Grove Family' to the subtleties of social nuance in 'Dad's Army': it's a clear advance.

The special Yuletide edition of Porridge (BBC1) was probably the funniest thing on the air. There is no denying that Ronnie Barker is good in 'Porridge.' There is plenty of denying that he is good in many of those other things he does [...] but in Porridge Barker is delivering the lines of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, and is obliged to raise his game.

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.

A rock solid script, by Clement and La Frenais. Good comic writing depends on a regular supply of real-life speech patterns - the main reason why success tends to interfere with talent, since it separates the writer from his sources.