First watched : 1974
The move to an early Monday evening slot finally gave me the chance to see Frank Spencer in action after innumerable Mike Yarwood and playground impersonations.
This fairly unique sitcom followed the adventures of accident-prone and socially inept Frank Spencer as he and long-suffering wife Betty negotiated the day-to-day challenges of life. Frank was played by Michael Crawford who looked set for film stardom in the sixties after appearing in Hello Dolly with Barbra Streisand but somehow let it slip. Michelle Dotrice in somewhat one-note performance was Betty.
Famously Crawford performed all his own stunts including the iconic and still utterly fantastic roller skating sequence , a marvel of athleticism and choreography. It's those moments that will always give the show an audience however creaky and dated the rest of it seems. The Health and Safety implications are one reason why we're unlikely to see its like again . Some recent critics have also suggested that Frank's difficulties indicate a mental disorder akin to autism and now find it distasteful.
Crawford seems to have realised early on that he'd created a monster and had to be coaxed back to do a third and final series, five years after the second one finished in 1973 ( though there were two Christmas specials in between ) , with the offer of a big hand in the writing. As he reinvented himself as a major theatre star in the eighties he doggedly avoided anything Spencer-related until 1998 when he appeared as Frank again in Noel's House Party and now seems at ease talking about his days as a comedy legend.
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