Okay, so you probably all knew about this continuity announcement ages ago, but I’ve only just seen this for the first time.

Just watched the green dress episode of Mary Tyler Moore, and I am now desiccated.

The Dick Van Dyke Show, Season 5 (1965-66): Laura and Rob sleep in separate beds. Rhoda, Season 1 (1974-75): They've just done a vibrator joke.

UFO, "Ordeal". What, for the audience?

Seriously, though. Gabrielle Drake.

UFO, “The Dalotek Affair” starts off extremely promisingly, but the second half is nowhere near as intriguing as the first. It also ends on an extremely icky moment where Paul hits on a woman who he induced amnesia to by using information about her she doesn’t know he has, and like, come on now.

🟦 CLEAN FEED | Preswatch | And this evening, we have a second ident, featuring the mid-80s Central TV ident soundtrack and alternative visuals.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Barry Norman tails a Film 95 report on anti-video piracy advertising with an alarming final thought.

UFO, "A Question of Priorities": Fucking hell.

I think this sketch might be the one I’ve seen the most, and I never get bored of it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny7n...

Season 1 of Rhoda continues to be a delight, although the archive status of it seems to be VERY spotty. The warning at the beginning of each DVD states it was created from the best materials available. Were they shoved in a bin for 40 years?

I have been GREATLY enjoying the opening titles to Phyllis. www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4_g...

No - I think that dense, multi-stranded approach tends to come from team writing. Seinfeld also developed a specific, baroque take on reality that you don't even see in other US sitcoms - Linehan & Mathews have come closest in the UK, but even their angle is different.

Someone - or something - has just emailed me and called As Time Goes By “the English Seinfeld”, and I do not think I have read a worse comedy opinion in my entire life.

“this TV mess” is really odd phrasing, no?

God, do I have some brilliant opinions which I am absolutely not in any way allowed to have publicly, so can we all just pretend that I've stated them, and you've all changed your minds and realised I'm brilliant?

A love letter to the past - full kudos to ITV Creative for this beauty. (Can neither confirm nor deny there’ll be some full outings later)

Just watched the first episode of Curry & Chips. At one point Kevin O'Grady calls Arthur Blenkinsop "Mr Sykes". Clearly this is the worst thing about the programme.

I am going up a tax bracket in a couple of months, and now I feel sympathy with Ronnie Barker.

I blogged about #FawltyTowers just after the death of Andrew Sachs. This is what I wrote. I also had some thoughts on that Ian Main memo. firstlastanything.co.uk/2016/12/05/t...

If you missed this from me a couple of days ago, it's some fun nonsense for a Sunday morning.

I always struggle with these kind of lists, but The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show have both entered somewhere near the top of my favourites this year.

We can all sneer at the results of this poll all we like, but what I take from it is that we should be making more audience sitcom, and that seems a rather good idea.

Watching UFO (in production order). "Flight Path" so much better than "Identified" and "Computer Affair" that it's almost ridiculous. It's like they suddenly figure out how to make the show. Hope it sticks.

Today's game: bot or moron?

New watch face. Thanks to @nmsni.co.uk for extracting the background from the GNAT original hardware. 😎

VISIT PEOPLE’S WEBSITES AND READ COOL STUFF

Evening repost for this!

Just seen Fawlty Towers referred to as a “BBC miniseries”, and now I want to die.

Brand new on Dirty Feed: to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Fawlty Towers, here's a look at all the various parodies of the show over the years. "Yes madam, I am frightfully tall." www.dirtyfeed.org/2025/09/herr...

Happy birthday to Fawlty Towers! 🎂🔥 #FawltyatFifty Photo taken by Brian Moody for @radiotimes.bsky.social

Brand new on Dirty Feed: to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Fawlty Towers, here's a look at all the various parodies of the show over the years. "Yes madam, I am frightfully tall." www.dirtyfeed.org/2025/09/herr...

...a wonderful piece of BBC history lives again. This unit was last used on-air in 2012 for DSO! (2/3)

Just saw Mario turned 40 this week and so, once again, I present to you: the first level of Super Mario but all the sound effects are farts.

This is a brilliant article about how the Rik Mayall Nintendo ads came about. www.timeextension.com/features/how...

Season 5 of Mary Tyler Moore is still great - in many ways as good as it ever was - but spinning off Rhoda has really damaged Mary's apartment scenes. They keep having to come up with excuses for people from the station to visit her at home, just so she has someone to talk to there.

To anyone who feels that kids these days are exposed to too much screen violence at a young age, this is an episode of Swap Shop that ended with John Craven dying and Noel Edmonds covering his corpse. #SwapShop

The only problem with the amazing Basil Fawlty Impersonator Chat sketch in The Peter Serafinowicz Show is that all the rest of the chatline sketches in the series were inevitably a disappointment.

A more timid production would have chickened out of this moment. Thank God they didn't.

Currently writing an article where I have to slag off some comedy - it’s built into the structure of the piece, I can’t avoid it - and I suddenly feel like I’m back in my 20s when I used to write that shit all the time.

This is good news. The TV Times is now included in the British Newspaper Archive. www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/tv-ti...

I wish I’d kept track of all the Richard Nixon jokes in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which was on air as the scandal unfolded.

By the way, in case anybody wondered why I'm watching old episodes of The Laughter Show, I'm currently working on a piece about Fawlty Towers parodies. Hopefully published this Friday to celebrate 50 years of FT, if I can get my shit together.

I watched an episode of Les & Dustin’s Laughter Show the other day, and I have to admit: it was definitely a show featuring Les Dennis and Dustin Gee, so they got it three-quarters right.

Star Trek Voyager: How do we show a woman in charge? Will she be too masculine? Oh shit, we’ve cast the wrong person. Change her hair! Reshoot that location sequence! What do we do? UFO: Just have Gabrielle Drake do her makeup in the commander’s chair, and then disrobe.

The Playbirds (1978) - Lots of fun, and the murders aren’t quite as unpleasant as they could have been. (By far the nastiest is the fire one at the end.)

They really should have put out the Assisted Dying advert to trail Mitchell & Webb first, rather than the airport security one. Far, far better.

Next up in my British sex films watch is The Playbirds, which promises to get me randy by being about *consults notes* a serial killer who preys on models.