Remade from the original Johnny Speight script, with the original telecast having been lost in the bowels of the BBC archives, "A Woman's Place is in the Home" showed just what has been lost from the art of sitcom writing over the last half a century or so.
The story was a straightforward one: Alf (Simon Day) returns home from work late to find that his dinner has been spoiled in the oven. He berates Elsie (Lizzie Roper) and daughter Rita (Sydney Rae White) for their neglect of his material comforts, but is buoyed up when he discovers that son-in-law Mike (Carl Au) has gone to the chippie to buy fish and chip suppers for the whole family. Needless to say things do not run smooth, and Alf is left hungry and embittered by the whole experience.
In terms of attitude, Speight's script is redolent of mid-Sixties attitudes, when women were expected to remain homemakers and look after their spouses. The setting - Wapping High Street - evoked a long- gone world of red telephone boxes, tightly-knit terraced houses and a largely white population. In that sense this episode was a period-piece.
Yet what lifted it above the ordinary was the quality of the writing. The actors had the chance to take pauses in between their lines, so that the audience could discover the true relationships between them - despite his surface bombast, it was clear that Alf had no real control over his spouse, and the knowledge of that fact made him even angrier. Rita remained largely silent, but her occasional interjections made it clear how much she loved her father. The Garnetts were always a close-knit family, despite their struggles.
Alf also had great fun with an anonymous telephone caller (Victoria Bainaves), who was continually exchanging words of love with her unseen boyfriend in the phone box, thereby preventing Alf from ordering his supper. Although powerless to intervene, the sheer colorfulness of Alf's rhetoric was a wonder to listen to.
Filmed in front of a live studio audience, in a deliberate pastiche of how sitcoms were once made, Ben Gosling Fuller's production proved how the greatest sitcoms can stand the test of time. I do hope the BBC commissioning editors go ahead and remake some more of these episodes; they are definitely worth watching.