It’s a sort of deja heard thing.”The first rule of nostalgia being that the fondly recalled always remain just the way you remember them, radio actually offers some in-built advantages for any sitcom that has reached the menopause. The recent TV revival of The Liver Birds signally failed to clear the awkward hurdle that its chief characters had aged with the actors who played them On radio, though, wrinkles are not an issue. Penelope Keith, who, on screen, is nowadays reduced to playing a grandmother in Next of Kin, can lop off 20 years on the wireless, while major cast changes, such as that by which Keith Barron has transplanted Peter Bowles as the arriviste tycoon in To the Manor Born, can be discreetly accommodated. Really ghastly TV shows can even be given a complete facelift, as with Shelley, which will be entirely recast for radio.

There is, however, one effect of ageing that even radio’s reconstructive surgery cannot remedy: Reggie Perrin may have feigned death, but Leonard Rossiter sadly wasn’t faking, and TV’s recent sequel, The Legacy of Reginald Perrin, had to stumble on without its star. (It was because of Paul Eddington’s death that Penelope Keith flatly vetoed Jim Moir’s proposal to revisit The Good Life: “It was so associated with the four of us, and one couldn’t ever think of doing it with anybody else.”)Though few of these shows ever receive their kiss of life from radio without first having been pronounced dead by television, there can be advantages in seeking a second opinion. Probably the most seamless transfer from television to radio was achieved by Resnick, the sequence of Nottingham- based crime novels written by John Harvey, who has also written profusely for both broadcast media. Two Resnick stories were filmed for BBC1; then, when it became obvious that television would not commission any more, two further adaptations were recorded for Radio 4. Tom Wilkinson played the lugubrious jazz-buff detective for all of the first three, while Tom Georgeson took over for No 4 (which he could hardly have done on television, having already played a burglar busted by Wilkinson’s Resnick in an earlier episode).”We were trying to find a way to do the programmes on radio in a way that was special to radio,” says Harvey. From the novel sequence he chose to adapt No 5, Wasted Years, “partly because it would have been the most difficult anyway to have done on television. It takes place over three different eras in Resnick’s life, and radio gives you a tremendous amount of scope to do that.” But also, of all the Resnick novels, Wasted Years has the most intrusive jazz soundtrack, “which is much easier to weld in and out of the narrative on radio, to some degree because it’s much cheaper to get permission to use music on radio.”To the Manor Born has a head start over other sitcoms awaiting customisation, since Peter Spence actually wrote it for radio before Penelope Keith asked if she could offer it to television.

The new radio series is a rare hybrid form of six “classic” (ie second-hand) scripts adapted from the television series bolted on to four original ones commissioned especially for radio. And although the ancestral pile which the widowed Audrey fforbes-Hamilton has been forced to sell gave the television version a distinct pictorial flavour, the show was always more of a comedy of manners than a comedy of manors In other words, it’s a perfect fit for radio. The only question now is whether the dilemma that eventually killed the original show after 21 episodes will recur. “It was very much, `will they, won’t they get together?’ ” Keith recalls, “and I felt we couldn’t go on teasing the audience for that much longer.”For the moment, the only shows Radio 2 is reviving seem to be directed at middle-aged audiences of conservative tastes.

But we can hazard a prediction based on the station’s current policy of hiring once-trendy disc jockeys cast off by Radio 1. Like Steve Wright and Ed Stewart, Father Ted and Men Behaving Badly will not always be at the cutting edge. When the time comes, they can always be put out to grass in the comfortable pastures of 88-90.2 FM, where their currently youthful audience will one day be happy to join them in the sure and certain knowledge that the pictures are, as they always say, better on radio.The new series of `To the Manor Born’ begins 1.30pm today on Radio 2. The new series of `Rumpole for the Defence’ begins 8.45pm Friday, also on R2Jasper Rees reviews the week’s TV on page 31. In his recently published critical biography of Harold Pinter, Michael Billington proclaims that The Homecoming is the dramatist’s “masterpiece”.