ITV's Worst Sitcoms

It does, take for example the Patrick Troughton era of Doctor Who, he had 21 adventures during his three year reign & of those only six are complete, two are mostly complete, the majority have only one or two episodes remaining of a four-six part adventure & four are completely missing altogether.

Considering they were harmless fun that even today are very watchable, it's rather sad that so many stories are incomplete or missing from his era, yet something like Curry & Chips still exists in the archives.

Didn't Milligan & Sykes later say the regretted doing it, years later?

Southern's "Take A Letter Mr Jones" with John Inman and Rula Lenska was always said to be a bit terrible.

We're all set to find out in the coming couple of months though -- Film24 tell me that they are planning to show it soon.

Should be one to watch, for the right reasons or not. At least the Southern ident should be trotted out again...

what about John inman other ITV comedy "Odd Man Out" that really was dire

I watched all 6 episodes of "Take A Letter Mr Jones" for the first time recently and quite enjoyed it. The audience applaud when John Inman first appears on screen which I thought was weird for an early 80s British sitcom. I thought that was more the kind of thing you would hear in an American sitcom.

It does have a great theme tune though. Also, the logo for the fictional company (8-Star) in the programme reminds me of the 3 mobile logo.

That concludes my review.



There is a full episode on YouTube...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_jaB282pSg

As I said in the YouTube comments - When he said "I don't want to get my instrument grubby", I thought he was talking about his penis. When he says "Its pink, 4 inches long and its for keeping something warm", I thought he was talking about a penis. When he said "Her husband came along with a massive..." I thought he was going to say penis.

That probably gives you an idea of the kind of humour. I wouldn't call it dire though. Silly maybe.

It used to be shown on UK Gold, around 5/10 years ago.

I had forgotten about Curry and Chips. I have read about this series but hadn't seen any of the series until I watched part of an episode on YouTube last night - it is terrible - I am surprised that even in 1969 they could get away with it.

I vaguely remember the Mollie Sugden comedy My Husband and I, but I didn't know it is sometimes regarded as one of ITV's worst comedies.

has anyone said Don't Drink The Water, Inspector blackly spin off?

I've seen the first episode recently and it was really poor and I am an On the Buses fan (the first film is on ITV1 on Sunday BTW). Inspector Blake just doesn't work without Stan and Jack winding him up.

Sometimes you wonder how some series still exist in the archives & others don't?[/quote]

I can remember when Michael Parkinson retired, he said many of his early interviews had been lost: He explained that back then tape was very expensive, so it much was cheaper for the BBC to record over things. As you say, it is strange how some things are spared though.

I think the producer of a programme could request that something would be saved in the archive, if they felt it deserved to be preserved. A lot of stuff has been returned to the archives that was lost through copies sold to overseas countries. And I guess some things may just have been lucky, and somehow avoided being held next to a magnet.

I must admit while I agree with the expensive tape reason, I thought the main issue was space, else what was to stop them transferring to a film print/telerecording?(Apart from it existing in black & white only!)

Were blank 2inch VT more expensive to buy/store than your average 16/35mm film print, else the Beeb could've transferred the Parkys(along with every thing else!) onto film for long term storage.(Black & white probably being better than nothing!)

There was a story about 'Spearhead from Space'(the 1st Who colour story shot on film) having to be transferred to VT to stop it fading, plus the technical quality of 'colour' telerecordings not being up to scratch, which knocked that idea on the head.

However over the years, I noticed a couple of oddities, firstly when you used to see a clip of the early Brucie Gen Game title sequence from the 70's, the 'live' images shot on VT looked like they had been transferred to film & the quality looked OK to me, secondly was ATV material transferred to colour film, as I'm sure I saw a clip of Cilla's show on colour film(unless it was the title sequence which was presumbly shot on film?). I was too young to watch/remember, being under 5 at the time & probably saw the clips on other programmes years later.

Must admit the selective archive policy at the time was daft IMO. I gather BBC2 comedies had first & last episodes kept. If there wasn't a plot line running through the episodes, you could have got away with it up to a point.

Sometimes that didn't work!

There is the famous instance of Barry Letts asking for all 5 episodes of 'The Daemons' to be kept as an example of Dr Who of the time, but 4 VT episodes vanished, leaving Episode 4 on it's original VT plus film prints of all episodes too albeit in B & W. (Wasn't there a 90 min compilation held too?)

I think the Series 2 Dad's Army episodes disappeared due to David Croft being on holiday!(How did the 2 early It Ain't Half Hot Mum episodes end up getting wiped?)

Here's another question. Would a producer of the time, being aware of the various restrictions, space, cost, Equity rules etc, if he kept too much of his material, be penalised(for want of a better word) for unofficially breaking a rule? Did each producer have a set limit what could be kept in the archive of their material?