The Irish R.M.

He's gentle, old-fashioned, decent, and nice even when he's drunk. But these qualities only earn Detective Constable "Dangerous" Davies the scorn of his fellow detectives in a small London police station. His boss tells him straight out that he's the last detective he would assign to a major crime-solving mission. Unlucky in love, rumpled, and accident-prone, Dangerous muddles on and, with help from his eccentric friend Mod, he proves the merits of his dogged, unglamorous method. He likes being a detective, and occasionally he gets to do some good.

Paul Slippery (Hugh Laurie), a forty-something doctor, lives with his wife Estelle and three sex-obsessed sons Rory, Daniel, and Edwin in the west London suburb of Putney. On top of coping with family pressures and a mid-life crisis, Paul discovers his unusual ability to hear other peoples' inner thoughts.

In the fictional town of New Burbage, legendary theatrical madman Geoffrey Tennant returns to the New Burbage Theatre Festival, the site of his greatest triumph and most humiliating failure, to assume the artistic directorship after the sudden death of his mentor, Oliver Welles. When Geoffrey arrives he finds that Oliver is still there, in spirit anyway, and with his guidance (and often in spite of it) Geoffrey attempts to reconcile with his past while wrestling the festival back from the marketing department. Despite a bitter leading lady, a clueless leading man, and a scheming general manager, he manages to stage a remarkable production of Hamlet -- the play that drove him mad.

This series was set in a fictional Yorkshire town and based on the books by David Nobbs, the creator of Reginald Perrin and Henry Pratt. Each episode took place at a different social function (a "do") and followed the changing lives of two families, the working-class Simcocks and the middle-class Rodenhursts, together with their respective friends, Rodney and Betty Sillitoe, and Neville Badger.

This show is a collection of tales that make for "ripping good" television. Sir Michael Palin played a different lead character in each yarn.