What At Terror Street And Agony Way Actually Was
It was a British sitcom that ran on BBC2 from 1976 to 1981. Jimmy Tarbuck played himself, running a male strip club called The Copper Kettle with his partner Sid (Denise Black). The humor came from the absurd situations the characters got into, mostly involving romantic complications and the general chaos of running an adult entertainment venue in 1970s Manchester. Most people remember it as a risqué comedy for its time, which it was. But what made it decent television rather than just cheap thrills was the actual writing. Richard Roxbee Cox created it, and he understood that the funniest moments came from characters who took ridiculous situations completely seriously.
Where to Find At Terror Street And Agony Way Today
The show isn't easily available for streaming anywhere. I spent considerable time looking into this before writing this, because it's a pattern with older British shows. The BBC hasn't released it on DVD or made it available on iPlayer, which is frustrating given how influential it was. Your best bet is the BBC's official website. They occasionally put classic episodes up for limited viewing through their archive section. I found three episodes there last year after searching for about twenty minutes. Third Time Lucky had some footage uploaded around 2019, and you can sometimes find clips on YouTube fromBBC archives. Not everything is there, but what is available is legitimate footage rather than bootleg recordings. There are also fan communities on Reddit and various British television forums where people share what they've managed to record. These aren't official sources, but they're often the only way to watch full episodes if you're patient enough to piece them together from whatever's circulating.
Why This Show Matters More Than You'd Expect
At Terror Street And Agony Way represented something fairly unusual for mid-seventies British television: a comedy centered around a working-class man running an adult venue without treating it as some moral lesson waiting to happen. Other shows at the time would have used the setting as a setup for embarrassment or a "this is wrong" message by the final scene. This one just let it be. The show tackled things like censorship battles, the changing attitudes toward sexuality in Britain, and the relationship between entertainment and morality. It did this through comedy, which made it palatable for BBC audiences who might otherwise have switched channels. That approach actually worked. Ratings were solid for the period, and the show ran for five series. Jimmy Tarbuck was already famous as a celebrity impersonator and stage performer before this. Bringing that persona into a scripted comedy format was a smart move, but the writers gave him room to actually act rather than just be himself. That distinction matters when you look back at what survived from that era of television.
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Common Questions People Ask
I see this come up regularly on forums, so here are the answers I give most often. How many episodes exist? Five series were produced, totaling around forty-eight episodes. That's a reasonable amount for a show from that period, though not a huge library by modern standards. Are there DVDs available? No official DVD releases exist in the UK. Some third-party sellers on eBay and Amazon list bootleg copies, but the quality is poor and the legality is questionable. Don't bother with those.
Why hasn't the BBC released it officially? The BBC has been selective about releasing older sitcoms from the seventies and eighties. Rights issues sometimes complicate things, particularly with music used in episodes. Without knowing the specific legal situation for this show, it's hard to say definitively, but it's a common reason for delay. Is there a similar show I could watch instead? If you want something with the same tone and era, The Liver Birds or Porridge are solid alternatives from the same period. They don't have the same risqué angle, but they share that BBC2 sensibility of smart writing with working-class characters.
A Few Things I Wish I'd Known Before Diving In
The show's humour doesn't translate well if you approach it with modern expectations. What felt shocking or forward-thinking in 1976 reads as quite tame now. That's not a criticism of the show, it's just a factual observation about how cultural norms shifted over the decades. The jokes land differently today, and that's worth understanding before you start watching. Also, the accent work and regional references assume you're comfortable with Northern English humour. If you're not used to that style of comedy, some of the wordplay goes over your head. I noticed this when I first watched it and assumed I was missing something. I wasn't. The pacing and delivery are just different from what mainstream British comedy tends to produce now. One thing I learned the hard way: don't expect complete episode runtimes to match what you might find listed online. Broadcast times varied, and some episodes run shorter or longer than standard. The differences are usually small, but they add up if you're trying to organize a proper watch-through.
There's no official companion book or behind-the-scenes material published for this show. If you want deeper information, you're looking at fan forums and occasionally articles in older television magazines. The information exists, but it's scattered across multiple sources, which makes research slower than it should be.
