Glums, The

1 9 7 9 (UK)
17 x 30 minute episodes

The Jimmy Edwards family comedy The Glums, originally on BBC radio in the 1950s and revived as a segment of Bruce’s Big Night, became an ITV series in its own right in 1979.

Edwards reprised his role as the beer-swilling father with Ian Lavender as accident-prone Ron and Patrica Brake as Eth.

The situations were trivial and their outcomes highly predictable, but what made this ghost from radio’s heyday still one of the funniest shows in broadcasting was the loyal, indeed loving treatment that its stars gave to scripts by Frank Muir and Denis Norden first produced when those two irrepressibles were young, fancy-free and – best of all – working together.

Jimmy Edwards took the occasional liberty with scripts that otherwise appeared to have survived the years almost intact (nobody called the CID “the filth” in the early 50s) but the hard task fell to Lavender and Brake – to “create” characters already firmly established in the ears and the memories of half the audience and yet unknown except for hearsay to the other half.

They achieved this without imitating the originals (Dick Bentley and June Whitfield) but with sufficient approximation to the original voices to deceive those who remembered and by the use of visual mannerisms that could have had no part in the original radio version, thereby pleasing two generations of viewers.

Dad
Jimmy Edwards
Ron
Ian Lavender
Eth
Patricia Brake
Ted the landlord
Michael Stainton