TV preview by Steve Bennett

Tightened budgets are cutting deep at the BBC. They can’t even afford sets with walls for their season of Lost Sitcoms…

The sparse staging of these old scripts, whose original recordings have been wiped, is part of the theatrical presentation. They start in long shot – clearly showing we’re in a TV studio – and end with a curtain-call. The only contemporary sitcom to do that is Mrs Brown’s Boys.

It serves two purposes, I think. To show that the audience is real and so avoid accusations of a laugh track, and to make the comedy seem more like a play. If the scripts of Jonny Speight, who wrote this, and Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who wrote the similarly revisited Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe And Son weren’t theatrical enough already, the staging also stresses that these are period pieces.

This episode of Til Death Do Us Part, A Woman's Place Is In The Home, requires a world where the only phone is in the street, where you can’t buy food after 9pm – and where rampant sexism is part of the landscape. Here Alf Garnett is furious that wife Else hasn’t got food on the table waiting for him when he returns form work, as she went to the pictures instead. He rages that the fire’s gone out too, whinging that he couldn’t get it started as the wood was damp. Needless to say, Else has to get it going, and does without fuss or incident.

Through Garnett’s daughter Rita (Sydney Rae White) and and Scouse git son-in-law Mike (Carl Au), there’s already a sense that he world is changing at that Alf’s a dinosaur on the verge of extinction. Not that such information does anything to cool his jets.

There’s a lot of ferocity in his relationship with Else, and it’s initially rough on the modern ear as the bitter insults fly, although once the atmosphere simmers down, we can enjoy Garnett’s efforts to get a Fish Supper as a more straightforward farce.

Simon Day does a strong impression of Warren Mitchell in this iconic, satirical character, capturing the terse rhythms of this angry, frustrated man. Lizzie Roper also puts in a strong performance as long-suffering Else, deaf to Alf’s relentless putdowns.

While some episodes of the sitcom explored racism, this one, probably advisedly, sticks to sexism… and evan that can be brutal. When Alf calls a woman hogging the street’s only phone box a ‘saucy little bitch’, it really stings; you can feel the tension in the studio, even today where it’s not uncommon to hear a c-bomb dropped in a TV comedy. It’s testament to Speight’s writing that he can still provoke a reaction, 49 years on. 

• Til Death Do Us Part: A Woman’s Place is being screened as part of the Landmark Sitcom season on BBC Four at 9pm tonight.

Review date: 1 Sep 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett