Didn't You Kill My Brother?

Comic Strip's radical remake of Bicycle Thieves has Alexei Sayle as twins: Sterling Moss is bad and ignorant, Carl Moss is good and prison-educated. Carl makes bikes with the help of a gang of dole-ites; Sterling, with their help, nicks them. Their murder-mad mum (Beryl Reid, as wonderful as ever: 'You should always put a dead badger on a head wound...') encourages the sibling rivalry with lethal results. Sayle's 'satirical' script takes social awareness to new shallows: the charges of a horribly realistic social worker are called Laura and Ashley. You'll laugh.