Comedy Connections - Season 1

From the moment it hit our screens, Porridge was hailed as a sitcom classic. But if the BBC had followed Ronnie Barker's instinct, they would have made a series called I'll Fly You for a Quid instead.

Interviews with Ronnie Barker, cast members, writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, and director/producer Sydney Lotterby uncover the inside story of how the series was conceived and commissioned.

Once the gates of Slade Prison are locked for the final time, this programme follows creators and stars of Porridge to Open All Hours, 'Allo, 'Allo, Eldorado, Fraggle Rock and all the way to Hollywood.

The Good Life made stars of Richard Briers, Penelope Keith, Felicity Kendall and Paul Eddington, and led to hit sitcoms such as Ever Decreasing Circles, To The Manor Born and Yes, Minister.

Would Are You Being Served? have been a global success if its creators, David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, had done as they were told?

Interviews with the Croft and Lloyd, Mollie Sugden, Frank Thornton, John Inman, Wendy Richard and other members of the cast tell the extraordinary story of how Joanna Lumley and a job at Simpson's of Piccadilly inspired a programme which is still much-loved all around the world.

And in unravelling the tangled tale of Grace Brothers, we travel through a whole era of David Croft-inspired comedy, from Hugh and I and Dad's Army in the sixties to 'Allo 'Allo! and Oh, Doctor Beeching! in the nineties.

The story of Men Behaving Badly, a show which changed the face of British sitcom.

Butterflies writer Carla Lane admits, for the first time, that the 1970s sitcom was autobiographical.

Only Fools and Horses is a national institution. But without some twists and turns worthy of Del Boy himself it could have disappeared without trace, or worse still never happened at all.

John Sullivan might never even have written Only Fools and Horses if the BBC had commissioned Over The Moon, the comedy Sullivan wrote after his first sitcom, Citizen Smith, came to an end. Extracts from the pilot of Over The Moon are screened for the first time ever. When the BBC turned it down, Sullivan needed a new idea fast - and the idea he came up with was Only Fools and Horses.

Famously, the first series failed to pull in the punters and the BBC wanted to abandon the show. Now, the man who gave Only Fools and Horses a second chance finally admits that he wasn't making a brave decision; he just didn't have another idea in his head.