High Street Blues
A couple of years ago, Jimmy Perry admitted in a newspaper interview that he had penned, "High Street Blues" at a time when he was very short of money. He reckoned it to be the worst attempt at a sitcom that he knew of: "there was nothing the actors could do with it", he said. I had the displeasure of watching the first episode. It had TWO jokes in it: one was the title (a reference to American cop show, "Hill Street Blues") and the other was a woman mispronouncing 'the Bahamas' as 'the Bahoomas". It was so desperately unfunny that I watched two more episodes out of morbid curiosity to see if it the whole series could all be as embarrassingly dreadful as the first episode. The two other episodes that I sat through were every bit as dire. There were not many jokes in it and the few that occurred did not work. Perry may perhaps be forgiven for submitting such excruciating stuff on the grounds that he badly needed the money but the London Weekend Television executives who took the decision to commission the series on the strength of such pathetically unfunny scripts should have been sacked. They may have reasoned that anything from the co-writer of "Dad's Army" and "It Ain't Half Hot, Mum" must have something going for it. How wrong can you be? It is hard to believe that anyone would go to all the expense and trouble of filming rubbish like, "High Street Blues", let alone inflict it on television viewers. It was certainly the poorest comedy series that I have ever seen.
