Dishing up the Seventies

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Robin's Nest, Paramount

Nostalgia can be a painful business ( as the "algia" suffix implies) , so although television only likes to show us celebrities when they're at their peak, we shouldn't forget their subsequent sad but inevitable decline.

Dudley is no Moore, Hughie is now Green, while Quentin is Crisp, and the famous dog trainer Barbara "sit" Woodhouse finally perfected her canine impersonation in 1988, by going "woof" at her local crematorium.

Best remembered nowadays for blowing up horses' noses (a bizarre practice for which she was, apparently, never prosecuted), Ms Woodhouse had spent a lifetime working with undisciplined and neurotic animals, so it was only natural that she went on to work with television producers.

But tragically, after telling her viewers how important it was for dogs to have an occasional stroke, she succumbed to one herself in 1981, making it impossible for her to go "walkies", although she could still sit.

The last I heard of sexagenarian Richard O'Sullivan, he too had succumbed to a stroke, and was said to be "poorly" in a nursing home.

But the Seventies sitcom star remains forever perky on the televisual paternoster that is The Paramount Channel, starring in daily re-runs of Robin's Nest, alongside the forever nubile Tessa Wyatt (whose 57-year-old body must, in reality, surely have surrendered to gravity by now).

Unlike the BBC, which celebrates its most popular Seventies sitcoms by giving them regular terrestrial screenings, ITV's comedy archive can mostly only be seen nowadays on digital channels, and after tuning into last Friday's episode (to avoid the violent assaults on women that C4's Big Brother was transmitting in the name of light entertainment), I realised why.

Despite a certain undeniable period charm, there's precious little to celebrate in either the writing or the acting, so the viewing experience contained far too little "nost" and far too much "algia" for my liking.

Set in a Fulham bistro, this spin-off from Man About the House broke new ground back in the mid-Seventies, by making Robin (O'Sullivan) and Vicki (Wyatt) not man and wife, but partners in a common-law marriage.

Permission for such a scandalous premise had to be sought from the Independent Broadcasting Authority, and consequently Robin found himself cohabiting with two sleeping partners, because the main investor in the restaurant was Vicki's father James (played by Tony Britton at a volume usually associated with a 1950s repertory production of Dry Rot).

David Kelly appeared as a stereotypically dumb yet endearing Irishman (although casting him as a one-armed washer-upper was a faintly original touch), while Wyatt was required to act as a stereotypical dumb blonde, when in reality she was anything but dumb.

Well, she was certainly smart enough to dump Tony Blackburn (her real-life husband when the show began), an event which caused the hair-hatted DJ to break down and sob openly throughout his Radio 1 show the next day. Which, coincidentally, is precisely what I used to do, every time I heard his show.

Friday's episode saw Robin and Vicki debating whether or not to get spliced, even though neither of them could think of a single married couple that seemed to be genuinely happy, and even though Vicki's own parents had just got divorced.

"I used to call your mother Wonder Woman," James bellowed at her, "because I sometimes used to wonder if she was a woman," and with repartee like that flying around chez Nicholls, it's hardly surprising that Marion (Honor Blackman) had left him before the series had even begun.

Inevitably, the young lovers decided at the last minute that it would be wiser to postpone their wedding than to destroy their sitcom's sole distinctive feature, and my concentration moved from the predictable plot to the far funnier ephemera in the background: the green GPO telephone, Robin's flared trousers, and the "trendy" menu offering such exotic continental delights as French onion soup and coq au vin.

They were even serving spaghetti that didn't come out of a tin (doused in olive oil that hadn't come out of a tiny bottle in the medicine cabinet marked "for external use only"), and the sight suddenly inspired me to think of a new diet that could knock Atkins off the best-seller list. You simply order equal amounts of pasta and antipasta, and no matter how much you eat, they'll cancel each other out.

Like George and Mildred (another Man About the House offshoot), Robin's Nest is a charming but unremarkable relic of all that was best and worst about the Seventies. The closing credits reminded me that O'Sullivan composed the synthesiser theme tune (so his PRS royalties should be just about sufficient to keep him in incontinence pants for the rest of his days), but they also confirmed that the prolific writing partnership of Johnnie Mortimer and Brian Cooke were never more than competent work horses, and certainly not a patch on Galton and Simpson.

Nearly 30 years on, it may seem quaint that the IBA seriously considered banning such an innocuous series on moral grounds, but are we really better off now, when the toothless regulator Ofcom impotently allows the likes of the fearsomely heterosexual Peter Bazalgette to fill our screens with displays of reallife GBH?

The man claims to have reinvented television, by the way, although Big Brother (along with most of his other shows) isn't even his concept. No, like his illustrious ancestor Joseph (who invented the modern sewage system), he just takes the ordure in, processes it, then pumps it out again.

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