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Jean Carmet and Michel Bouquet lead the line in what I think is a rather brilliant work of comedy.

Visual gags doggedly follow these two stressed, lugubrious heads of family about, Georges as he deals with his mother's funeral, Claude as he hosts his daughter's wedding. Their wives Christiane (Micheline Luccione) and Paulette (Anouk Ferjac) somehow keep the show on the road but no-one is immune from the deluge of mishaps.

This is a Paris of traffic jams. Not a car bumper is spared, not a parking ticket avoided. Those cars that have not been driven into lamposts are either clamped for parking or rendered immobile by container lorries and traffic jams. Don't miss the roundabout sign for the Place d'Italie. Georges meanwhile has clearly inherited his mother's wreckless driving habits. And while we're on transport, the coffee filter only works when Concorde passes by.

The modern world causes a stream of inconveniences. Faulty musical doorbells, rude teenagers in leather jackets, chewing gum, the newly-built Gare Montparnasse with its automatic taps, the photo booth, drinks machines, pyramidal cartons of milk, biros, rotating ashtrays, seat belts, telephone booths, hairdryers, glass doors with magnetic handles, electric doorbells, an electric clothes dolly, electric meat carvers, travelling alarm clocks and briquets... they each malfunction with impeccable timing.

Teenager Anne-Marie (Anicée Alvina) mopes about, reminding us at first of Alvina's funny cameo in 1970's 'Elle boit pas, elle fume pas...'. She is getting married, so desperate is she to escape her family. The long telephone calls to her boyfriend, the gentle flirting with her shy uncle Stéphane (Michel Lonsdale)... admirers of Alvina's charm will not be disappointed.

But there are little moments of revelation too, such as when Georges realises how horrible he has always been to the man in the wheelchair, always stuck haplessly trying to communicate or to simply reach the buttons in the lift.

The marriage celebrations and the funeral party take place in the neighbouring apartments. The funeral tea is commandeered by a monologue from the aunt (Gabrielle Doulcet), congratulating herself on her good health to the sound of snapping crustaceans. The wedding party clap their way through some bizarre chant (pu cha chi, pu cha cha...), bullied into enjoying themselves by master of ceremonies from hell Henri Guybet.

I think this comedy does more than stand the test of time. As well as being a delightful observational comedy, it's a encyclopaedic homage to seventies modernism; and, of course, it's a celebration of difficult families and of Frenchness.

This was a 1963 chance for a big television audience to see Delphine Seyrig who had been winning best actress prizes left right and centre following the successes of Last Year at Marienbad and recently Muriel.

She played international concert pianist Catherine Miller. I think it sails close to elements of Seyrig's own life... a husband in America she doesn't want to contact (for ten years she had been Delphine Youngerman), sole parent of a boy, not an actress but a concert pianist... torn between looking after her boy and pursuing her career.

And you always get a lot of Seyrig anyway in her roles... the dreamy speech mannerisms, the politeness, the other-worldly charm, the fierceness.

Gilles (Dominique Paturel), a charming and cultured critic, probes gently into her private life, something Delphine Seyrig was notorious for wanting to keep private, and sure enough Catherine Miller lays into him mistrustfully; but it is also a meeting of minds and she looks forward to seeing him again.

During their conversation she makes a slip of the tongue - Ravel's three concertos - which Gilles picks up on.

So far we have a two-hander piece of drama about the press intruding into the private lives of artists, but now comes a somewhat surreal twist.

She gets a phone call from her impresario Max (Gabriel Jabbour), putting her under pressure to work ever harder. Indeed, to do the impossible. He and conductor Philip Winterburg (Kajio Pawlowski) want her to fit in a performance of Ravel's 3rd Piano Concerto.

Impossible! Any fule kno Ravel only composed two piano concertos. A quick internet search would solve this, but this is 1963 and some convincing documents are enough to disquiet the tired pianist, and now, blimey! Up comes impresario Max with the score! "You've already recorded it three times!" he says. "You played it 34 times last year!" He calls in a creepy doctor to examine her.

This seems to me a high quality TV film crafted around Seyrig and elements of Marienbad, again playing with the idea of someone trying to convince her of memories she does not have.

Paturel and Seyrig fit well together; and here's a notably assured performance from an 11 year-old Didier Haudepin. It had apparently been suggested that her own son Duncan play the role, but she said no - that really would have been confusing!

This American series was filmed in the Épinay-sur-Seine studios in Paris. The commendably concise and diverting episodes are sown smoothly together by a confident and believable Ronald Howard.

English-speaking French actors are scattered throughout, as are Paris-based Americans like Billy Beck, their attempts at Cockney always entertaining.

The episode 'The Case of Mother Hubbard' is notable for Delphine Seyrig's first film participation. She plays the anxious fiancée with the slightly challenging line, "There was nothing wrong with his ears. They were beautiful. Both of them."

Her English was learned during her three years as a teenager in New York, and she had an American husband.

Her fiancé alas needed to be be more careful about Mrs Enid's ("She's sixty years old if she's a day. You'd take her for your own grandmother") divinity fudge, an incongruously American choice of home cooking.

Seyrig also appears in a later episode, The Case of the Singing Violin, where she is tormented in her sleep by a ghostly violinist. There's that Seyrig scream, to be deployed six years later in Last Year at Marienbad. "Emotional upset brought on by excitement about her forthcoming marriage," suggests Watson, a diagnosis the feminist Seyrig might well have wanted to challenge.

Wicked stepfather: "My stepdaughter is losing her mind." Bewildered fiancé: "She never told me."

Alas, the Seyrig's bewildered fiancé fares no better than her last.

We find Holmes and Watson crossing the Channel more than we might otherwise have expected, of course. The Case of the Deadly Prophecy is set in Belgium ("not the middle ages Watson, merely a small European village"). In just this one episode we find character stalwarts Yves Brainville, Jacques François and Maurice Teynac, Robert le Béal, Venezuelan-American-Swiss-French actress Héléna Manson; and it features Nicole Courcel, "young and attractive, with hair the colour of autumn honey," as Holmes correctly deduces from her letter.

Meanwhile Seyrig's cohabitant at Marienbad, Sacha Pitoëff, lurks about in The (less than convincing) Case of the Eiffel Tower. Often cast as a vaguely East European villain, Pitoëff was actually the Swiss-French founder of a theatre company. He's also to be spotted as a hapless policeman in The Case of the Christmas Pudding, one of seven episodes in which we come across Belgian actor Eugene Deckers. Meanwhile Jacques Dacqmine wins the prize for the most undetectably perfect English in The Royal Murder, where our friends François and Teynac again feature along with ex-model Lise Bourdin, who I have to say is rather outshone here by the uncredited gypsy dancer.

And so these Parisian actors play their parts from the menacing to the exotic, none of them able to stand up to Watson's punches or Holmes's swordwork, or any better than Inspector Lestrade at solving the mysteries that so persistently complicate their lives.