BBC Television
1954
Starring Avril Angers, Naomi Chance, Jack Melford, Robert Dickens

Signed photo of Avril Angers as Dotty

Dear Dotty starring Avril Angers, produced by Bill Ward and written by Sid Colin and Talbot Rothwell, followed closely on from sitcom Friends and Neighbours just three months later from July 1954.

This third British sitcom is notable for being the first sitcom built around a solo comedienne's talents as lead, where the previous sitcom Friends and Neighbours, had been built around two couples. At this point there hadn't even been a sketch series built around a comedienne although there had been variety shows star billed by female comic stars such as Gracie Fields with other acts supporting. But Avril Angers got to be our first proper female TV sitcom lead, subsequently bring compared with America's Lucille Ball for I Lovy Lucy.

The BBC had been very happy with the four leads in Friends and Neighbours even if there was some criticism of the show itself. Avril Angers had been particularly popular in it and was building up quite a reputation for being very funny on TV and radio ever since the 40s when she was dubbed radio's Cheerful Chatterbox appearing on Variety Bandbox and Navy Mixture. As part of Terry-Thomas's television sketch series How Do You View? she had gained a following as the regular character Rosie Lee, the tea lady, similar to Dorothy Summers' Mrs Mopp on radio in I.T.M.A.  The BBC saw her as star material and were keen to give her a chance at standing on her own two feet following Friends and Neighbours so immediately offered her her own series, again produced by Bill Ward and written by Sid Colin and Talbot Rothwell, as per Friends & Neighbours. 

The series they came up with was Dear Dotty, in which Avril starred as Dotty Binns, her usual unsophisticated, naive, ditzy featherbrained but well meaning characterisation, here as a lowly employee of women's magazine Lady Fare, pillar of the local debating society, who has an insignificant role as the Personal Problem column girl at the magazine but yearns to become a fully fledged reporter for them. Her counterpart at the magazine that she aspires to be like is the glamorous sophisticated reporter Margot Fairfax (Naomi Chance). Other regulars throughout include the boss, magazine editor Mr Tibbet (Jack Melford) who the staff affectionately call Tibby, and the young dopey office boy William (Robert Dickens).

Following complaints of the loud studio laughter in Friends and Neighbours the BBC decided to forego a studio audience for Dear Dotty and broadcast without one, but they quickly became a staple of most future sitcoms. The series also avoided song and dance typical of the time including the earlier sitcoms which disrupted the flow of the comedy but was usual in television and radio comedy at the time. 

The series ran on BBC Television as follows;

1.1 Cardinal Puff Puff Rides Again - 13/07/1954*

Reporter Margo Fairfax is unable to get the information she wants from two RAF officers but Dotty is capable of holding her own in drinking contests and plays their game of Cardinal Puff Puff at the bar.

1.2 She Says Murder She Says - 27/07/1954*

1.3 Knit One, Drop One - 10/08/1954*

1.4 A Dream of a Man - 08/09/1954*

1.5 The Food of Love - 22/09/1954*

1.6 The New Broom - 06/10/1954*

A new editor has been brought in who runs the office with a conveyor-belt mentality and the staff soon want their old boss Tibby back. When the big boss comes to inspect how things are going under the new editor the staff put on a show to suggest how badly things are now run. 

* As with Friends and Neighbours and much else of this era, the programmes went out live without recording and was not telerecorded so has never existed in the archives.

Also as with Friends and Neighbours this series garnered mixed reviews, some positive and many negative. A lot of complaints as with the previous series was that the humour was often juvenile and dated slapstick. The problem here, I think, is that television was still a new medium trying to find its feet, work out what did and didn't work for the small screen. Most of the critics coming at this were doing so from experience of being radio comedy listeners where the accent was on the words and characterisation and they wanted the same on TV with added visuals. But many of the early television writers and producers were putting the focus on the visual element that TV was offering as it's USP, so the mindset was an emphasis on knockabout slapstick out of the Music-Halls and don't appear to have invested in realistic and believable characters as radio was increasingly doing. Radio and later TV were moving towards Tony Hancock, down to earth real people with humour gleaned from believable situations and character not exaggerated Music-Hall and variety cartoonish shenanigans. Sid Colin and Talbot Rothwell would both build on these early television experiences to craft great blends of visual and character comedy but at this point they're not there. That said some still enjoyed Avril Angers and some moments gained praise. 

Only the first and last episode reviews provided any glimpse as to plots, as noted above. But that first episode in particular caused something of a flurry of (pointless) complaints. The story saw Avril's Dotty meet two whizzo RAF officers; Flight Lieutenant Clanger McGregor (Geoffrey Sumner later of The Army Game) and "Butch" (Paul Whitsun-Jones) at a bar and get involved in their game of the old military favourite drinking game Cardinal Puff Puff (as also later done by Captain Mainwaring in the Dad's Army episode Fallen Idol) with Dotty getting ever drunker, which some saw as the highlight of the episode but other pearl-clutchers seemed to see as the end of civilisation as we know it! The BBC received many complaints from the Temperance Society and questions were even asked about it in the House of Commons! Op. eds. opined that at a time when figures for drunkenness from young women had significantly increased it was irresponsible to make light of such things and show them as socially acceptable on screen. The shows' producer, Bill Ward, pointing out that the BBC didn't allow real drink and that it was just blackcurrant squash in reality didn't stop the complainers and there was talk of setting up groups to monitor what television was putting out, 11 years before Mary Whitehouse set up her National Viewers' and Listeners' Association in 1965!