395 Shelley

First  viewed  : Uncertain

This  is  another  one  that  I  only  occasionally  dipped  into  with  little idea  of  when  that  was.

It  seems  strange  that,  so  soon  after  the  disaster  that  was  Chalk  and  Cheese ,  ITV  would launch  another  sitcom  with  a  similar  premise. Shelley  ( Hywel  Bennett  with  the  character's surname  perhaps  a  jokey  reference  to  his  appearance  in  the  Percy  films )  is  a  layabout   who can't  find  a  use  for  his  geography  PhD  and  so  sits  around  taking  apart  his  friends'  lifestyles with  his  sarcastic  wit  and  remedying  the  world's  problems  from  his  armchair.

In  reality  of  course,  such  a  person  would  have  no  friends  at  all  and  be  a  shabby  figure  in the  corner  of  a  library  somewhere  but  scriptwriter  Peter  Tilbury  and  his  successors  kept  it  going  for  five  years  until  1984   then,  after  a  sabbatical,  for  another  four  years  up  to  1992.