"Director: Len Lurcuck"

• Rising Damp: The Works | DVD | (14/06/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £29.99

  Featuring all the episodes from Series 1 to 4 including: 'Rooksby' 'Black Magic' 'Charisma' 'Night Out' 'All Our Yesterdays' 'The Prowler' 'Permissive Society' 'Food Glorious Food' 'A Body Like Mine' 'The Perfect Gentleman' 'The Last Of The Big Spenders' 'Things That Go Bump In The Night' and 'Moonlight And Roses'. Includes the unreleased episode 'Stand Up And Be Counted'.

• Rising Damp - The Complete 1st Series | DVD | (07/05/2001) from £10.46   |  Saving you £4.53 (43.31%)   |  RRP £14.99

  First broadcast in 1974, the ITV bedsitland sitcom Rising Damp was an instant and enduring success. It starred Leonard Rossiter as the miserly and lovelorn landlord Rigsby who is constantly needling young lodger Alan (Richard Beckinsale), a science student whose long hair and earrings are symptomatic to Rigsby of the parlous effeminacy of the modern age. He's also in love with Frances De La Tour's dowdy spinster Miss Jones, though his tentative advances are forever rebuffed. She in turn carries a torch for Philip (Don Warrington), the elegant son of an African chief who also resides at Rigsby Towers. Some aspects of Rising Damp have not aged well, principally Rigsby's stream of racist jibes at Philip. Although these were doubtless well-meant and supposed to illustrate Rigsby's foolish bigotry, you suspect that that was a convenient cover for audiences in the 1970s to enjoy racist humour. However, Rossiter's Rigsby--stuttering, stammering, bent perpetually over backwards--remains a great comic creation, embodying all the festering prejudices, small-mindedness and self-delusion of the lower middle class Little Englander. --David Stubbs

• Hello Cheeky | DVD | (19/07/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Hello Cheeky fearlessly brought Radio Two's long-running 1970s comedy show to television featuring the legendary talents of Goodies star Tim Brooke-Taylor fellow I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue stalwart and comedy writer Barry Cryer and writer and actor John Junkin; composer Denis King provided musical accompaniment (and frequently became the object of ridicule for the other three). The half-hour shows were pre-recorded in front of a live audience and replicated the original series' trademark mix of preposterous sketches appalling jokes raillery and general silliness. Improvisation abounded with the occasional blunder retained in an irreverent approach summed up by Cryer as 'Laugh-In without the gloss only desperation and rot'. A typical show might feature advice on looking after an armadillo teaching your dog to samba or making your very own space rocket from a yard of lint an operation on a false moustache or even a gala dinner with the officers and crew of the Nancie Celeste... This first-time release on DVD contains all 12 existing episodes from 1976. Unfortunately episode 10 no longer exists in the archive. Parts of Tim John and Barry appear by permission of the Official Receiver. Other parts are played by people with the exception of Denis King who appears by arrangement with the Natural History Museum.