TV season

Series 1

1973-03-25

Episodes

Episode 1

Open All Hours

1973-03-25 • 30 min

Stammering shopkeep Albert Arkwright runs a tight little corner shop in a Doncaster suburb. Certainly he's tight when it comes to cost-saving and his put-upon nephew Granville, whose mother apparently gave birth to him after a fling with a Hungarian, bears the brunt of Arkwright's doomed money-making schemes. The lad has to ride a delivery bike when he'd rather impress the girl at the garage with a van. Meanwhile, Arkwright lusts after district nurse Gladys Emmanuel. Open All Hours received a full programme order, and had a successful four series run on BBC2 and BBC1.

Episode 2

Prisoner and Escort

1973-04-01 • 30 min

Norman Stanley Fletcher is being escorted to Slade Prison for a five-year sentence. Mr Barrowclough and Mr Mackay make the journey with him on New Year's Eve. Prisoner and Escort was developed into a programme and became Porridge (1974–1977), which led to a spin-off Going Straight (1978), a feature film adaptation (1979), and a sequel programme (2016–2017).

Episode 3

My Old Man

1973-04-08 • 30 min

Sam Cobbett is a cantankerous, retired railwayman whose house is demolished by the council, forcing him to live in a tower block with his daughter Doris and her husband, whom he sees as posh and with whom there is mutual antagonism. My Old Man was further developed into a 1974–75 sitcom of the same name, produced by Yorkshire Television and broadcast on ITV. However, Barker was uninvolved, and featured an entirely new cast led by Clive Dunn.

Episode 4

Spanner's Eleven

1973-04-15 • 30 min

The tale of ailing football team Ashfield Athletic and its trainer, local cabbie/hot-dog salesman/chauffeur Norman Spanner.

Episode 5

Another Fine Mess

1973-04-22 • 30 min

Ronnie Barker and Roy Castle as two Laurel and Hardy impersonators who become their characters as an evening's farcical events escalate around them.

Episode 6

One Man's Meat

1973-04-29 • 30 min

Alan Joyce is a slovenly, greedy man whose wife devises a plan to keep him off food for a day. She goes out and takes not only all the food from the house but Alan's clothes. He rings the police to no great avail. He rings a Chinese takeaway but they have stopped delivering.

Episode 7

I'll Fly You for a Quid

1973-05-06 • 30 min

A Welsh family, the Owens, who bet on absolutely everything and anything, discover that their grandfather backed a winner on the day he died — but where is the betting slip? I'll Fly You for a Quid was Barker's favourite, and he initially chose to do as a series. However, the BBC convinced him that it would be harder to do a full series of scripts about Evan Owen in a Welsh gambling community compared to the prison setting of Prisoner and Escort. Barker adapted the idea into The Magnificent Evans (1984).