Carla Lane

Series of half-hour monologues.

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It is Christmas Eve. Bruce and Renee speak to us from the appropriate corners of their home and we discover that, after 23 years of marriage, they know absolutely nothing about each other.

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Bread is a British television sitcom, written by Carla Lane, produced by the BBC and screened on BBC1 from 1 May 1986 to 3 November 1991. The series focused on the devoutly-Catholic and extended Boswell family of Liverpool, in the district of Dingle, led by its matriarch Nellie through a number of ups and downs as they tried to make their way through life in Thatcher's Britain with no visible means of support. The street shown at the start of each programme is Elswick Street. A family called Boswell had also featured in Lane's earlier sitcom The Liver Birds and Lane admitted in interviews that the two families were probably related. Nellie's feckless and estranged husband, Freddie, left her for another woman known as 'Lilo Lill'. Her children Joey, Jack, Adrian, Aveline and Billy continued to live in the family home in Kelsall Street and contributed money to the central family fund, largely through benefit fraud and the sale of stolen goods.

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Martha and Daniel have got used to things being nice - their house, their kids, their life — so when they decide to part, naturally it will be nicely.

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Skits from: "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin"; "The Les Dawson Show"; "Yes Minister"; "Only Fools and Horses"; "Three of a Kind"; "Last of the Summer Wine"; "Sorry!"; "Butterflies"; "Smith and Jones"; and "Open All Hours".

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Gemma Palmer is 30 years old, and fed up with being betrayed and taken for granted. She's just found out her boyfriend, Danny, has been having sex with her friend, Gloria, and this is the last straw. She throws Danny out, tells Gloria to go jump in a lake, tells off all the people who have been treating her like a doormat, and quits her boring job at an estate agent's. From now on, she's going solo. At least, that is her firm intention.

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Events in the lives of the Parkinsons, a middle-class American family: Rea, a very attractive 40-year-old housewife and mother who worries about growing old and being a drudge; Ben, her candid and indifferent husband, a dentist who collects butterflies; and her grown sons, Adam and Russell. Based on the British TV series of the same title.

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Ria Parkinson is a bored housewife and mother. She spends her time daydreaming, and meets regularly with wealthy businessman Leonard to relieve the monotony. Husband Ben, a dentist and avid butterfly collector is oblivious to it all, and her unemployed grown up sons, who both live at home also have other things on their minds, especially girlfriends.

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Bless this house is a British sitcom starring Sid James and Diana Coupland that aired on ITV from the 2nd February 1971 to the 22nd April 1976. It was written by Derek Collyer, David Comming, B.C. Cummins, Harry Driver, George Evans, Dave Freeman, Carla Lane, Brian Platt, Vince Powell, Adele Rose, Mike Sharland, Bernie Sharp, Myra Taylor, Jon Watkins and Lawrie Wyman. It was made for the ITV network by Thames Television. In 2004, Bless this house came 67th in Britain's best sitcom.

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The Liver Birds is a British sitcom set in the city of Liverpool, in the north-west of England, which aired on BBC1 from 1969 to 1978, and again in 1996. It was created by Carla Lane and Myra Taylor. These two Liverpudlian writers had met at a local writers club and decided to pool their talents. Having been invited to London by Michael Mills and asked to write about two young women sharing a flat, Mills brought in sitcom expert Sydney Lotterby to work with the writing team. Lotterby had previously worked with Eric Sykes, Sheila Hancock and on The Likely Lads. Carla Lane in fact wrote most of the episodes, Taylor co-writing only the first two series. The pilot was shown as an episode of Comedy Playhouse, the BBC's breeding ground for sitcoms, in April 1969.

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Comedy Playhouse is a long-running British anthology series of one-off unrelated sitcoms that aired for 120 episodes from 1961 to 1975. Many episodes later graduated to their own series, including Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part, All Gas and Gaiters, The Liver Birds, Are You Being Served? and Last of the Summer Wine, which is the world's longest running sitcom, having run from January 1973 to August 2010.

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