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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