In the USA this was called 'Good Neighbors' (note the US spelling of Neighbours). 

I like the way it developed, the friendship between the two households.  Of course, Margo Leadbetter was simply a pre-curosr to Hyacinth Bucket.

Its difficult to watch classic comedy on Gold,the adverts ruin enjoyment.The likes of Steptoe & Son,the Good life,Open all hours etc. were not made with breaks in and Gold's editing is poor to say the least!    

By a coincidence, i was talking about this in the pub last night, the poor editing and length of advertising breaks on the cable channels now. They really do mangle up the programmes trying to fit in longer and longer breaks into 30 minute shows.

LOL! I was gonna say ...
I know the Beeb gets stick from people who think the licence fee is a con but i gladly pay it just to have a channel without adverts!

Off-topic is so often the very life of discussion boards…

Once upon a time, in a little country strangely shaped as a high-heeled boot, there was ONE TV channel, managed by a benevolent government (I'm going to use some irony here and there in this piece, mind… )

Both TV and mass-advertising were in their infancy, then, in this neck of the woods, and folks in charge had the brilliant idea to put them together, creating a TV programme titled "Carosello", which is still remembered with great fondness by those who lived through those days, and is still probably, in comparison, the most successful programme ever in the history of TV in this country.

What it was, mostly, very short comedy sketches, played by the best actors and comedians in the country, sometimes cartoons for the kids, at the end of which a product was briefly shown, more often than not with no connection whatsoever to the sketch itself, and the whole show, 10 minutes, was perfectly wedged in a prominent slot between the evening news and the "prime time" show, when whole families would be gathered around the dinner table.

As I said, it was a roaring success, the "last frontier" of the day for kids, where the expression "in bed after Carosello" became the leitmotif of the age, and getting in a good mood for the adults, preparing for the rest of the evening, which would probably have been quite boring… I don't really know, I was among the ones who had to go to bed…

Ah, just a piece of trivia, Richard Lester was the director of some of those sketches...

Well, the downside of this system became soon apparent, everybody knew the sketches and the characters, very few remembered the products…

"Carosello" was soon to be joined, in the '70s, by more "modern", product-based ads, still in their specific slots inbetween programmes, the law still forbid interruptions, but then it became evident that people wouldn't watch those at all, they weren't funny, they were in fact downright stupid… and soon the first commercial channels started popping up, along with the "national" ones, which had become 3 in the meantime, and the time for ad-breaks had finally matured, unfortunately, and we're now force-fed ads we don't want to watch at all times, which are useless, because there's so many we still don't remember the bloody products anyway, and my wondering is, why on earth aren't we out in the streets with torches and pitchforks marching towards the castles of the vampires?

The grass is greener and all that, but when I hear complaints about the BBC asking for a quite decent fee in order to maintain a teensy-weensy bit of commercial independence, I cringe…

Let me tell you just this, football fans will understand, only weeks ago, during the live broadcast of an Italian National Team match, the national channel RAI 1, the local equivalent of BBC 1, managed to miss a goal because they were running an ad… can you just imagine that happening with England? Ad-breaks in the middle of football matches? The government would be overthrown, probably… not a big deal here, just the sports papers complained a little, and this is a country where football is a damn religion, that's how numb we've become…

And, mind you, we DO pay a fee, too, ON TOP of the ad-breaks… PLUS, as the only alternative, a premium for satellite, where ad-breaks are ripe as well, and how unfair is that, at some 50 quid per MONTH?

But that's just what comes out of a country where TV is dominated by two main competitors answering the names of Silvio Berlusconi and Rupert Murdoch… 'nuff said…

Just remember, Auntie Beeb is a rare treasure these days, it might have its faults, yes, the good and bad of government-run TV are both present there, but it's still a matter of envy for a lot of us furriners…

It did happen, admittedly by mistake, ITV HD went to a commerical break 5 minutes into the first England World Cup match this year and missed the first goal.

I don't have HD so I was watching the normal broadcast match... (HD is the biggest con in the world, but that's a different debate...)

I watched both 'Harry and Paul# and 'Whites'.

I thought Harry and Paul was far better than the last series, which if I remember right had an annoying fake laughter track.  I can see them getting into trouble though, I'm sure some one complaind about them blacking up and calling Cameron a probable queer.

As for 'Whites', why didn't they just say:  "We've remade 'Chef' but it's so crap Lenny Henry told us to get lost so we've changed the name but everything else is exactly and we mean EXACTLY the same'...' then it would have been less of a surprise.

Yes, he is a bad actor isn't he?  I liked Jonathan Creek but he was even worse in that sometimes.