I can hardly believe I had never even HEARD of this show until only weeks ago...

I mean, never rerun, no video reprints that I know of (until very recently, that is), but how could something this good have been virtually forgotten for so long?

Clever writing (Richard Fegen/Andrew Norriss) and superb acting by the protagonists, Simon Callow and Brenda Blethyn, I watched the first 3 episodes in a row, than slowed down to make it last longer, while waiting for the other 2 series to arrive...

Tom Chance is trouble in human form, someone for whom life is one long uninterrupted litany of misfortunes. He must have run over a dozen black cats and smashed as many mirrors, so dogged is he by coincidental bad luck. As a result of one of his confusions, Tom meets Alison Little, a shy and retiring librarian, and right from the start she too becomes embroiled in his catalogue of disasters, returning home from their first meeting dressed only in her underwear. (This turns out to be portentous, for under her timid, mannered surface she is a simmering cauldron of desire.) The pair become engaged (in the second series), much to the despair of Alison's parents, and married (in the last), in Tom's usual disastrous circumstances: the wedding day begins with the bride and groom in jail, no best man, bridesmaids or guests, and the in-laws and the cake trapped in a sewer.

If this all sounds a little extreme it was meant to be, for Chance In A Million was a sitcom that set out to send up the sitcom genre. Writers Norriss and Fegen's intention was to take to their most ludicrous extremes the plethora of unlikely coincidences that litter comedy scripts. The 'hero' here - with his strange staccato way of talking and odd vocabulary; beginning each sentence with a verb and omitting all definite articles - suffered ridiculous flukes, such as when a paratrooper descended right into his house on a quest for bizarre objects and Tom discovered - to his own surprise - that he had them, including a nude photograph of Shirley Williams and a cricket bat signed by Alec Bedser. Or when - just as Alison's parents were about to visit for the first time - his bedroom was invaded by young women undressing in rehearsal for their attempt on the greatest-number-of-girls-in-their-underwear-in-one-telephone-box world record.

Well, I'm not on Amazon's payroll as an advertiser, I promise , but I still maintain I haven't seen anything this funny in a long time... just started watching series 2, and I'm wiping tears of mirth from my face

Chance in a Million first episode "Plumbstones" 1 0f 3