Hello everyone! 🙂

Welcome to ‘Bradley’s Basement’ blog and I’m Tim Bradley!

Ideally, a BBC TV sitcom series set in the future and produced by David Croft (who co-created ‘Dad’s Army’, ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’, ‘Allo ‘Allo’, ‘Hi-De-Hi’ and ‘You Rang M’Lord’) should be amazing, right? 😐 It’s something that should’ve had plenty of potential.

So, how come this series ‘Come Back Mrs. Noah’ didn’t become the success it could’ve been? It’s regarded as one of the worst British sitcoms ever made. Why didn’t it work? Well, it might down to certain things, especially in how the series is set up in its approach.

‘Come Back Mrs. Noah’ takes place in the year 2050. It stars Mollie Sugden as Mrs. Noah, a British housewife who wins a cookery competition and is awarded a tour of the UK’s new Space Exploration Vehicle – Britannia Seen. I always assumed it was a space station, frankly.

The craft is accidentally sent blasting off into space with a crew consisting only of Mrs. Noah, Ian Lavender as BBC reporter Clive Cunliffe, Donald Hewlett as proton physicist Carstairs, Michael Knowles as the neutron physicist Fanshaw and Joe Black as Garstang.

Garstang is the space craft’s lightbulb-changer. The series itself focuses on the efforts of planet Earth to bring our heroes back to Earth. Very often, these attempts fail for some reason in every episode, and we see our heroes struggling to live normally in outer space.

It’s clear from seeing this series in all its six episodes that Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft struggled to keep the situation as funny as it could’ve been, which is a shame. The idea of a group of people stranded aboard a space vehicle in Earth’s orbit can be very funny. 🙂

I think it’s evident that David Croft is comfortable doing historical settings for sitcom series like ‘Dad’s Army’, ‘Allo, ‘Allo’, etc. This is a rare occasion where you find David Croft attempting to do something different by doing an outer-space sitcom series in the future.

It’s a brave attempt and I appreciate David Croft doing it with Jeremy Lloyd as his co-writer. But I think this series needed to be more dynamic than it could’ve been as having your characters stuck on a space vehicle in Earth’s orbit is limiting when thinking about it.

Heck, the series ends on a note where our characters go out of Earth’s orbit and make their way to the outer limits of the Solar System. Had a second season been made, we could’ve explored more possibilities of our characters trapped aboard the space vehicle.

Sadly, it wasn’t to be. 😦 Maybe if this series was more ‘Dad’s Army’-like by having a group of characters dealing with alien menaces that threatened the planet Earth, that might have worked. As a kid, I did my outer-space version of ‘Dad’s Army’ called ‘The Space Six’.

It’s also a shame the series didn’t work, as the cast is quite stellar with familiar names from other David Croft productions. Mollie Sugden played Mrs. Fox in the ‘Dad’s Army’ radio series and she’s very well-known for playing Mrs. Slocombe in the sitcom ‘Are You Being Served?’.

Ian Lavender is a name I know so well, as he played Private Pike in ‘Dad’s Army’. Donald Hewlitt has been in a few David Croft productions, including ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ and ‘You Rang M’Lord’ and he’s been in the classic ‘Doctor Who’ TV story ‘The Claws of Axos’.

Michael Knowles is often a familiar face in David Croft productions like ‘Dad’s Army’, ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ and ‘You Rang M’Lord’. In fact, he’s often opposite Donald Hewlitt in ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ and ‘You Rang M’Lord’, as he is here in this certain sitcom series. 😀

The series also features Gorden Kaye (well-known for playing René Artois in ‘Allo, ‘Allo’) as a TV presenter for the futuristic news programme ‘Far and Wide’ (which is a parody of ‘Nationwide’, a news programme that was shown on BBC TV during the 1970s and 1980s).

There’s also Tim Barrett (who I’ve seen in ‘Terry and June’) as Garfield Hawk, Ann Michelle as Scarth Dare and Jennifer Lonsdale as a Technician. There are guest stars like Robert Gillespie, Harold Bennett, Christopher Mitchell, Vicki Michelle and Kenneth MacDonald.

It’s a shame ‘Come Back Mrs. Noah’ didn’t become the success it could’ve been, as I’ve enjoyed checking out the series on DVD recently. It’s not great and I wish the picture quality for the episodes on the DVD I got is better, but I found it a fascinating series to watch.

The series includes a pilot episode that was shown in 1977, followed by five episodes shown in 1978, and that’s it. I think if more thought had been put into the series to make it dynamic about a group of characters trapped in a space vehicle in the future, it could’ve worked well.

Incidentally, in the sixth episode of ‘Come Back Mrs. Noah’, there’s a scene where our main characters play golf in the space vehicle and it’s in a holographic simulation. Could this be where ‘Star Trek’ got the idea to do the holodeck in the spin-off shows. It must be!

Thanks for reading!

Bye for now!

Tim 🙂