Random Crap 1970s UK TV

Recently I've watched Dr Who, Happy Ever After (the prequel to Terry and June, and even less amusing) and the Australian version of Are You Being Served? The latter is quite surreal, with different actors playing all the parts (except for John Inman). Oddest of all, the woman cast as the Australian equivalent of Mrs Slocombe wasn't an actress at all: she was a world-famous opera singer who asked if she could be in the show as the British version was her all-time favourite comedy.

Agreed entirely on Robin's Nest – it's very dull, mainly as there's no antagonist and no dramatic tension (just like Happy Ever After). George and Mildred was by far the better spin-off from Man About the House – not so much for the scripts but for the wonderful casting and superb acting.

As for "nicely racist", I watched a few episodes of Love Thy Neighbour, which sums up the paradigm you mention – the central character is a hardline socialist and a hardline racist. I think its notoriety has given it a cachet it really doesn't deserve, as it's based around a one-note joke: a dim, scruffy, unkempt middle-aged man imagining himself superior to his more eloquent, elegant neighbour purely because of the colour of his skin. You could make a good remake of it, though, with the white character as a David Brent-style poseur attempting to ingratiate himself through adopting a superficial interest in black culture, whilst his black neighbour openly disdains such things.

I am very surprised to hear that Love Thy Neighbour is still being aired on the telly. I would have thought all known copies had been taken out and burnt years ago. Absolute embarrassing crap.

Never heard of the Australian version of Are You Being Served, but I did see John Inman doing a one-man show in Sydney. Who plays Mrs Slocombe? Dame Joan Sullivan? No, I looked it up, June Bronhill

Not sure about crap 70's telly, but to get a decent night's kip I usually use a pair of industrial safety (foam) earplugs to stack zzz's up. If I read for 30 minutes before turning out he light, I find I can get some quality sleep, and generally sleep through til the morning. Agreed with zeo, above^^, I take Magnesium supplements which help a lot too.

There is a lot of owls taken up residence where we live, and they are noisy fat little bastards but are busy decimating the pigeon population, which is great!

Nowhere quite so exotic – they're all on YouTube.

I think It Ain't Half Hot Mum is unlucky to get lumped in with Love Thy Neighbour, as it contains little, if any, racist content. The main controversy was that it featured Michael Bates in brownface playing an Indian. However, as Bates himself pointed out, he was the only Indian-born member of the cast – the Asian actors playing the other Indians were actually Pakistanis.

The Sergeant-Major does have a tendency to call his troops "poofs", but I think it's the brownface rather than any latent homophobia that's kept IAHHM off our screens – a pity, as whilst the scripts weren't up to much, Windsor Davies's superb acting lifted it to another level. As for it being a commentary on Britain's military prowess, I think you might be reading too much into it – 'Allo 'Allo, for instance, might depict Nazis and the Gestapo as being comical, but nobody in France was laughing during the country's occupation.