![]() He remembered that sitcoms should be about laughs. Allen’s script occasionally made reference to Frank’s rather sad childhood, but not often. But Frank emerged as the lead, an odd but lovable manchild. When he started writing, the star was meant to be Michele Dotrice (as Betty), because executives had asked for a sitcom that appealed to women. Download the app now: On Android On iOS With F1TV, you’re in the driver’s seat. Writer Raymond Allen had spent 16 years trying to get a TV commission, and finally struck gold with this show after travelling from his home on the Isle of Wight to hand-deliver the script to BBC Television Centre. With our brand new F1TV mobile and tablet apps, watch F1 on the go and get closer to the action than ever. Some of them were insightful, but do we really need to hear from a celebrity psychologist that Frank had “issues around trust and identity”? This meant that a lot of time was taken up by talking heads. The weakness of the documentary, though, was that it was unofficial – as the voiceover and titles kept telling us, presumably at the behest of a twitchy lawyer. It was entertaining to watch the clips, to learn about how the show and its characters were created, and to hear from actors who had made guest appearances in it. All of this bears repeating because Crawford’s performance has been distilled over the years into the beret and the raincoat, the impersonators and the catchphrases, which rather takes away from the genius of his performance. Some of the studio-based stunts had to be executed in just one take, in front of a studio audience, because they involved breaking scenery and props that would have to be painstakingly rebuilt if the first take wasn’t perfect. Health and safety wasn’t what it is now, and some of these stunts were genuinely dangerous: dangling from a window-cleaning cradle while 200 feet up the side of a tower block, Crawford glanced down to see the cameraman practising panning to the ground, preparing for the possibility of the actor plunging to his death. A collection of clips scattered throughout this retrospective treated us to moments from the most famous: clinging on to a car teetering on the edge of a cliff, or hanging onto the back of a bus on his roller-skates before whizzing under an articulated lorry. But what set him apart was his ability to do his own, spectacular stunts. In Frank Spencer, Michael Crawford created one of TV’s great comic characters. Then along came S ome Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em: 50 Years of Laughs (Channel 5) to remind us that the 1970s were a golden age for television comedy. The other day I was complaining about sitcoms that don’t feel the need to be funny.
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