Thank you Paul for so stylishly demonstrating your wicked wiliness. It is a delight to lock horns with you. mhl: thanks also: you must have got up in the middle of the night….or at least got some of whatever Rightback is on!

But the theme was also the Achilles heel of the crossword.
When you are familiar with all this Bryanesque rubbish (many thanks to the Other John H to put the rubbish in the bin!), many clues fell into place too quickly.

RISING DAMP was our first, but I thought there would be a word for ‘wall’ in there that was rising, so a reversed reversal.
My PinC remembered RISING DAMP, and mentioned a thing like ‘comic soap series’ [whatever that is], but as I saw F????? T?? in 23/19, I had to think of the inimitable FATHER TED rightaway. Fine, another clue solved, but that was my ‘problem’.
For some reason I thought 1d had to be SHOW, and then the ball went rolling. PEEP SHOW was explained áfter writing in the answer [btw, today in the dead tree version].
I got ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE for the enumeration.
For me (more than for my PinC) this was the weak point of the crossword.

I think ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS was clued in an unusually inferior way. It’s hardly cryptic, just like PORRIDGE [the clue would have worked well if Paul could have used the Breakfast Show (instead of Breakfast 1)]. The aforementioned RISING DAMP is also not great as the title probably refers to a similar thing.

My PinC’s only quibble was 13ac (FORTUNE), which she didn’t like because of ‘for’ being in the clue ánd in the solution.

Although one might have a different impression, I didn’t have that many complaints about the clu(e)ing as such, but the theme, although very entertaining, stood in the (read: my) way eventually.

But, dear friends, there were certainly some splendid clues.
1ac (HAIRBALLS) was great, as was the long one at 14,26,10 [although there's something lurking in my mind that says: the surface could have been even better].

Today’s Well Respected Man (mhl) wasn’t sure whether the definition of 5d (ASTEROID) was fair. I do understand that, but I think this is a great clue. At first we thought ET had to be removed from ‘editor’, giving us a word ending in ‘roid’, for example. But it was a lot less complicated than that. Once we found the solution, we had to think about the ET bit, but we liked it.
Oh, and 27ac (EATS) is one of the best, too.
Re DRIBBLERS (24ac), we saw this as a dd, rather than a cd.

Yes, it was a good Paul, but perhaps the theme – once discovered – made the puzzle not challenging enough.
Well, something like that.

I enjoyed some excellent clues here, even though the theme was off-putting.

A good list of some classic British sitcoms, not too obviously highlighted either.