Come Back Mrs Noah
A sci-fi sitcom from the BBC featuring many of the actors who
had appeared, or would later appear, in other productions from the
Jeremy Lloyd/Jimmy Perry/David Croft theatre of comedy.
 These
included Mollie Sugden (Are You Being Served?), Ian
Lavender (Dad's Army), Donald Hewlett and Michael Knowles
(whose characters were based on their It Ain't Half Hot Mum
personae) and Gorden Kaye ('Allo 'Allo!) .
Like Dad's Army and It Ain't Half Hot Mum, Come
Back Mrs Noah was another period piece, but this time the
period was the future - the year 2050.
Mollie Sugden played Mrs Noah, a housewife who won a cookery
competition where the prize was to be shown around Britain's new
Space Exploration Vehicle, the space station Britannia Seven.
In the pilot episode, a series of mishaps result in the craft
accidentally blasting off, with Mrs Noah and the station's
skeleton crew catapulted into outer space. The full series
followed the attempts to bring Mrs Noah and the errant craft back
to Earth.
Not without good reason, Come Back Mrs Noah has been
cited in some quarters as one of the worst British sitcoms of all
time, but there were some funny lines.
 Especially
good were the Earth news bulletins (read by Gorden Kaye) which
reported on a future where Britain's North Sea oil revenues had
re-established it as the most prosperous and successful nation on
the planet, with once powerful economies like Germany and the USA
struggling to survive and turning to the UK for assistance.
Overall though, the series fared pretty badly, failing to take
off with an audience who found the quantum leap of fantasy
required to accept Mollie Sugden as an astronaut light-years
beyond their capabilities.
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