Peter Kay's Car Share (2015)

 

The Royle Family (1998)

 

Early Doors (2003)

 

Phoenix Nights (2001/02)

 

Scully (1984)

 

Shelley (1982)

 

Blogger's Note:

The still is from the "A Drop of the Pink Stuff" (25 February 1982), which was the second episode of the fourth season. Easily the funniest episode of Shelley that I've ever seen. You could just tell that they were all enjoying themselves. James Grout was especially wonderful.

The Good Life (1975/6)

 

The Good Life (1975)

Shelley (1980)

 

Shelley (1979/80)

 

A Fine Romance (1981)

 

Gavin & Stacey (2007)

 

GameFace (2017)

 

The Office (2001)

 

The Cleaner (2021)

 

Gavin & Stacey (2007)

 

Porridge by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais and Ian Marshall (British Broadcasting Corporation 1975)

‘Would you like to read my Angling Times?' said Mr Barrowclough. He was the other screw.

Now that was an opening I couldn't refuse. I could see the headlines screaming at me from the front page. ‘And now -The 2p Lugworm!’ Full of full-frontal salmons and the price of cod inside no doubt. I reached across to take the magazine. As I did the Scottish nurk snatched it out of my hand.

‘God Almighty,' he says. 'Molly-coddling him already. You seem, Mr Barrowclough, to forget what prison is for. He’s got a debt to pay to society, and that debt doesn’t include reading informative magazines.'

With that he settles back into his seat with a last jerk of his neck. Yes, just like a turkey.

The other screw looked just as surprised as I did. I fell silent for a minute or two and gazed out of the window at North London’s back gardens. Then I thought of the long journey ahead with no reading material or television and I thought, Well, we have got to do something to pass the time, haven’t we? I looked at MacKay out of the comer of my eye and said very casually, ‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with C.' Now for some unknown reason he took that very personal. Leaning across and wagging a finger he said, ‘Watch it, Fletcher, watch it,' he says.

‘It was cuffs, handcuffs I had in mind, Mr MacKay. Oh, sorry, I should have said HC, that would have been more fair.'

Don’t come the old soldier with me,’ he says.

‘Wouldn’t dream of it, I says.’

‘Any more trouble with you and I'll . . .'

‘Let me guess,’ I says. ‘You’ll wait till we pick up speed at, say, Hemel Hempstead and chuck me out of the window. Then put it down to attempting to escape.'

This offended the other one's sense of fairness. *Oh, he wouldn't do that,’ he says.

‘I suppose you’re right,’ I says. 'Couldn’t spell Hemel Hempstead. He’d wait till we got to Rugby.'

I felt sure that MacKay and I were going to have a right old game with each other in the months to come. I could tell by the look he was giving me that I was going to be one of his favourite targets.

‘Look,’ said Barrowclough. ‘There’s a long journey ahead, let us not conduct it in a feeling of hostility and aggression. Why don’t we all have a nice cup of tea?’

‘Oh yes,1 I says. 'A cup of tea solves all nasty expertiences as my old Mother used to say. And I’ll have one of those individual fruit pies if they’ve got any.'

Rob Roy gave me a hard look, he wasn’t sure whether I was in fact having a go at him or not. Anyway, he decided that it is a good idea and off he strutted leaving us alone in our first-class compartment with the blinds pulled down so as not to offend the eyes of the gentry with a glimpse of a convicted felon.

I thought, this should give me an opportunity to find out some valuable information about old misery-guts. The number one priority in dealing with two screws is to inject a little bit of bother between them. Divide and rule. So nodding towards the door I says, ‘He's a laugh, ain’t he? Sort of casual like. He plays it careful, won’t be drawn.’

‘I expect it's with him being a Scotsman and having to miss Hogmanay,’ he says.

‘Scot is he? I’d never have guessed,’ I replied. But the sarcasm goes right over his head.

'Oh yes, and they do take it very seriously, the Scots.' 

Yeah, well they’d take any excuse for drinking seriously, wouldn’t they? Nothing social about their drinking habits, is there? With them, it’s like a religion. They don’t enjoy a few glasses of the old vino, oh, no, they drink to get drunk. And, whereas other people having reached that state get a little warm and sentimental, or as in my case, randy, your Scot, all he wants is to fight and smash a glass in someone’s boat-race. Only one thing worse than a drunken Scot and that’s a sober one, an' we’ve just seen one of them, haven’t we?’

I settled back in my seat feeling the power of having got that off my chest. He sat there blinking through his spectacles, sucking his teeth before saying unhappily, I'm Scots on my mother’s side.'

"Rising Damp": A Celebration by Richard Webber (Boxtree 2001)

Eric Chappell's storytelling skills were honed in the playground through necessity. 'I started telling stories at school as a way of avoiding being bullied,' he says. 'The school I attended in Grantham was tough and if you aren't popular for something people tended to pick on you. I was quick with my tongue so kept out of trouble by being entertaining.’

Born in the Lincolnshire town of Grantham in 1933, Eric grew up in an environment not particularly conducive to budding writers. ‘I come from a working-class background and my mother didn’t really approve of writing; she thought it unwise to put something on paper in case it was held against you at a later date,’ explains Eric. ‘Being a discreet lady, my wanting to write worried her a bit.’

However lacking the household was in terms of literature, Eric had a happy and caring upbringing and adopted his father’s enthusiasm for sport ‘Dad was sports-mad and that’s where he got his drama from — he didn’t need books.’ It was Eric’s teacher back in the 1940s who helped him explore and develop his interest in story writing. ‘We had to stand up in class and tell stories, and the first time I did it I spoke for an hour — I couldn’t stop; all these words just poured out of me. I based my story on all the different books I’d borrowed from the library, although I added some ideas of my own. All the other kids enjoyed my stories so much I was asked to do it on a weekly basis.’

As the school years passed and Eric moved on to secondary education, other interests took priority. ‘Sport took over as time went on,’ he admits, 'and we did little serious English at secondary school, so any thought of writing took a back seat for awhile.’ It wasn’t until Eric had left school and started working for the East Midlands Electricity Board that he returned to his stories. 'I was in my mid-twenties and studying accountancy, which was pretty soul destroying. I wasn't a good bookkeeper. I was fine with the essays on law and economics, things like that, but struggled with my maths and accountancy. I got very depressed and failed my finals, so I thought, "Sod this! I'll do what I want to do with my life." '

'Some of us still swear by that Lenin and Dick Francis joke'

If you're not on Jimmy's long list I think you're on the wrong blog:

"I thought support might be difficult." Wonderful.

Hat tip to Andy over at Ghost of a Ne'er do Well blog for bringing this brilliant clip to my attention.

Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s by Alwyn Turner (Aurum Press 2008)

When the Ropers were given their own series, George and Mildred, they moved out of their Earl's Court home (compulsorily purchased by the council) and bought a new house in the distinctly middle class Hampton Wick, despite George’s misgivings about suburbia: 'All BBC2 and musical toilet rolls.' A new element was added to the existing mix in the form of naked class war between Roper and his next-door Tory neighbour, Jeffrey Fourmile (Norman Eshley). 'I’m working-class and and bloody proud of it,' declares George and the resultant tension between his determination to cling to his class roots and his wife's desperation to escape hers provided many of the series' sharpest lines. When Mildred tries to persuade him to join the Conservative association - in the hope of getting a cheap holiday - she insists that the Tories are essentially a social organisation who just organize events, at which he spits, 'Yeah, whist drives in aid of the death penalty.' Meanwhile the estate agent Fourmile was sitcom's first overt Thatcherite; 'Socialism: The Way Ahead,' he says, reading the spine of a book as he sorts out a stall at a jumble sale. 'Hmm. put that with the fiction, I think.'

Despite his protestations, it's not hard to see Roper secretly putting his cross on the ballot paper for Thatcher, nor to see him joined in the polling booth by Garnett, Fawlty, Rigsby and even perhaps Eddie Booth. Alongside them would have been not only Fourmile, but also Margo in The Good Life and from Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? - Bob Ferris, an aspirant member of the middle class who might have voted Liberal in 1974, but would surely have opted for Thatcher in 1979. Against these massed ranks, British sitcoms in the '70s could offer few genuinely left-wing characters, possibly Wolfie, the parody of a revolutionary in Citizen Smith, certainly Mike in Till Death Us Do Part, who would ostentatiously read copies of the Morning Star, Milltant and Workers Press in front of Alf Garnett, but there were very few others.