Silly moos, ignorant pigs and the randy Scouse git — yes, Alf is back

That is typical of yer bleedin’ Labour government, as alf would say. a comedy masterclass, every joke slotting smoothly into an intricate pattern, honed by a peerless craftsman, writer Johnny Speight, was no sooner broadcast in 1967 than it was wiped by the BBC.

It’s like taking an elegantly turned chair from the Chippendale workshop and slinging it in a skip.

thank heaven for the outstandingly funny Simon Day and Lizzie Roper, who starred as alf and Elsie Garnett in a remake of this lost episode of Till Death Us Do Part (BBC4). they performed a loving reconstruction, almost 50 years after the first screening.

One-time Fast Show comic Day paid homage to Warren Mitchell, who played alf for 25 years, by evoking his mannerisms without impersonating him. From the first instant we saw him, cursing the damp embers of his living room fire, this was unmistakeably the ‘miserable old git’ himself.

But Mitchell’s alf was more sly, with a streak of nasty cunning that ran through his self-pity. Day made him clumsier, dimmer, too stupid and lazy to help himself.

Dandy Nichols played his wife from the series beginning in 1966 to her death two decades later — by which time till Death had evolved into a more melancholy sitcom called In Sickness and In health.

her part was often overlooked, because Mitchell was such a scene-stealer.

But Lizzie Roper, best known in hollyoaks, reminded us who was really in charge in the Garnett household. In this episode, she’d been to the pictures and left alf’s dinner under the grill to be burned black.

this updated Elsie made no bones about it: her purpose was to torment her ignorant pig of a husband, and she did it with silent relish.

Director Ben Gosling Fuller chose to shoot it in front of a live audience. that was clever because we were constantly reminded this was a respectful reconstruction, not an attempt to out-do the original.

It also let us know the laughter was real, not canned. and it was the catchphrases that earned the biggest roars. Every time alf sneered ‘silly moo’ at his wife, the audience howled, and the shout of ‘randy Scouse git’, aimed at his daughter’s boyfriend, won a cheer.

But when alf threatened a teenage girl in a phonebox who was giving him lip and snarled ‘saucy little bitch’ at her, there was a disapproving gasp from the stalls. the old slob really can’t get away with his bullying these days.

though this episode would have made sense on its own, even to view- ers who had never seen the original, Speight never intended it to be a one-off. to do it justice, and show it in context, the BBC should remake at least a dozen till Deaths.

Sometimes the secret to timeless television is simply having a camera in the right place at the right moment. Documentary cameras were already tracking the detectives of Lancashire police when a sensational investigation began. The Murder Of Sadie Hartley (ITV) showed us the moment that the businesswoman’s body was found in her home in helmshore, with more than 40 stab wounds.

We watched the 3am arrest, a day later, of her killer, Sarah Williams, who was filmed sitting up bewildered in bed. We sat in on the morning conferences and witnessed the moment Williams’s accomplice, Katrina Walsh, led officers to the field where she had buried the murder weapons.

It was every bit as dramatic and engrossing as the best crime serial, a mixture of the bizarre and the mundane.

Walsh was frighteningly odd — feigning memory lapses, lying loudly, faking a limp, collapsing on the floor in sobs. She appeared to be a fantasist and extreme attention seeker, while Williams was empty and without remorse for her pointless crime.

More analysis, and some sort of psychological explanation, would have been helpful. But perhaps there is none, beyond saying that both women were mad.