JUST when you thought you'd finally heard the last of Mrs Slocombe and her feline-based double entendres, the BBC brings her back again.

The Beeb tonight screens one-off updates of two classic sitcoms - Are You Being Served? and Porridge - as it launches its Landmark Sitcom Season, marking 60 years since the "terrifically misanthropic" Hancock's Half-Hour made its debut.

Shane Allen, Controller of BBC Comedy Commissioning, says the season celebrates the BBC's "rich legacy" at a time when British comedy is as popular as ever. “The British sitcom," he added, "is a huge part of our national identity and cultural heritage."

Popular sitcoms range from vintage offerings that attract new fans even on their umpteenth repeat - Blackadder, One Foot in the Grave, Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army, Only Fools and Horses, Absolutely Fabulous - to comedies of a newer stripe: The Inbetweeners and The Office, and the freshest addition, the sexually frank Fleabag, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

Trying to select the best home-grown sitcoms of all time, however, is no laughing matter. Whatever your selection, it will be mocked as much for what it includes as what it doesn't. When the Radio Times staged a poll to find the best sitcom of the 21st century, Mrs Brown's Boys position at number one raised eyebrows, given that it edged out The Office, The Thick of It and Peep Show.

Undaunted, here we present our selection of 'classic' sitcoms from the 1960s and 70s.

HANCOCK'S HALF-HOUR/HANCOCK (1956-1961)

HANCOCK'S Half Hour, scripted brilliantly by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, was initially a popular radio hit before crossing over to TV. Audiences loved Hancock's lugubrious wit. The fictional Hancock, in the words of BFI ScreenOnline, "may have been one of life's great losers - a pompous, pretentious bore with aspirations for self-betterment which were invariably thwarted - but he was also one of the country's most loved comic creations." The TV shows, it adds, were "some of the finest television comedy produced up to that time." His last BBC series, Hancock, also featured some classic routines.

STEPTOE AND SON (1962-1974)

ANOTHER timeless sitcom, which sometimes felt like it was written by Samuel Beckett, but once again came from the pen of Galton and Simpson. Set in a rag-and-bone business (the sheer griminess of the setting always looked convincing), and regularly drawing audiences of around 20 million, it featured Wilfred Brambell as a wheedling, conniving rag-and-bone man and the brilliant Harry H Corbett as his son, who forever dreamed of making good his escape. Regardless of their bickering and recriminations, you always suspected that, deep down, each horribly needed the other.

TILL DEATH DO US PART (1965-1975)

IN which actor Warren Mitchell portrayed Alf Garnett, a loudmouth mired in his own racism and wide-ranging hatreds, and an inability to come to terms with a world that was changing around him. Garnett, says the BBC, "was a character whom both writer Johnny Speight and Mitchell loathed. Racist, hating everything around him, his tirades are funny because they cannot be taken seriously. By allowing a hideous bigot to express his bigotry, Speight made fun of those who feared change." Not everyone saw it that way though.

DAD’S ARMY (1968-1977)

A SINGLE line from a 1973 episode of this great sitcom - "Don't tell him, Pike!", uttered by Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe) - has often made its way into lists of favourite sitcom moments. Jimmy Perry and David Croft's comedy about the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard had a fine cast (and, in Arnold Ridley who played Private Godfrey, a man who had not only fought in both world wars but had experienced hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches during the Great War) had lots of fine comedy and some vintage bluster from Mainwaring. John Laurie (Private Frazer) played a "Scottish purveyor of doom." A film version of Dad's Army was released earlier this year to a collective 'meh'.

THE LIVER BIRDS (1969-1979; 1996)

CREATED by Carla Lane, who died a few months ago, and her friend Myra Taylor, The Liver Birds chronicled the Scouse adventures of Sandra (Nerys Hughes) and Beryl, her flat-mate (Polly James). In the first season Beryl had been paired with Dawn (Pauline Collins) but her friendship in subsequent seasons with Sandra gave rise to what the BBC describes as the show's "golden era." "With a rivalry and friendship that bounced off the screen, the bed and the couch," the Liverpool Echo said last year when a DVD boxset of the series was released, "Beryl and Sandra grappled with boyfriends, bigger flats, smaller dogs, unaffordable holidays, sister’s weddings, challenging parents and feisty old grand-dads, all while having the time of their lives. It was like a Sex in the City for the 1970s."

ARE YOU BEING SERVED? (1972-1985)

OLD-fashioned comedy with clunking stereotypes (similar to Mrs Brown’s Boys) but its innuendo, slapstick humour, caricature characters (camp Mr Humphries, the pompous floorwalker, Captain Peacock, perky Miss Brahms), and brilliant ear-worm of a theme tune (Ground floor: Perfumery, stationary, and leather goods, wigs and haberdashery, kitchenware and food. Going up), made it hugely popular: it attracted an audience of 22 million at its peak. It crossed the Atlantic in the late 1980s and became a hit there, too. In the words of USA Today, in 2015: “PBS began airing reruns and it immediately gained an enthusiastic Yankee following. To this day, the show can usually be seen somewhere on PBS in the United States; in decades past, some of the cast-members participated in PBS's annual pledge drive.”

SOME MOTHERS DO’ AVE’ EM (1973-1978)

MICHAEL Crawford was the endearingly accident-prone, anxiety-inducing, all-round challenged Frank Spencer in this charming sitcom. To an extent the memory of it has been overshadowed by Spencer's beret and 'Oooh Betty' catchphrase, but there was much more to it than that: Crawford's often risky stunts, for one, and his relationship with his long-suffering wife, Betty (Michelle Dotrice) for another. In the words of the BBC: "Endowed by Michael Crawford with an effete manner, a nervous laugh and a desperate need to please, Frank was the sweetest walking disaster area you could ever want to meet."

PORRIDGE (1974-1977)

A MUCH-loved series that often impressed the hardest audience of all: men who had actually seen the inside of real-life prisons as guests of Her Majesty's, or the nick as it was known in the show. The brilliant Ronnie Barker was Norman Stanley Fletcher, a cynical, likeable, habitual criminal, and he played off a strong supporting cast that included Fulton McKay and Richard Beckinsale. As with all classic comedies, Porridge's scripts, by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, have scarcely dated. Sir Alec Guinness, for one, admired Barker's talent for characterisation. Porridge caught the claustrophobia and rhythms of prison life perfectly.

FAWLTY TOWERS (1975-1979)

NOT everyone was amused by this John Cleese/Connie Booth-penned classic. Beatrice Sinclair, the Aberdeenshire-born widow of Torquay hotelier Donald Sinclair, upon whom Cleese based Basil Fawlty, claimed in 2002 that the sitcom had turned him into a laughing-stock. But Fawlty is one of the greatest ever comic creations. Only 12 episodes were ever made, and time has not dulled their brilliance: Basil’s splenetic outbursts (famously thrashing his own car to within an inch of its life), his relationships with Manuel and Sybil, the astute plotting, the great comedy moments, the seamless ensemble work of a talented cast.

THE GOOD LIFE (1975-1978)

GARDENING expert Monty Don recently criticised the notion of self-sufficiency that underpinned John Esmonde and Bob Larbey’s 1970s comedy, describing it as a recipe for terrible food and malnourishment. But this has long been one of Britain's most-loved sitcoms. Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal were the middle-class couple, the Goods, who turned their garden into a farm, to the initial bemusement of their neighbours, the Leadbetters (Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington). Comfort comedy at its best.

THE FALL AND RISE OF REGGIE PERRIN (1976-1979)

LEONARD Rossiter had already made his name as Rigsby, the seedy landlord in ITV's sitcom Rising Damp, and he was equally compelling as the middle-aged executive in the grip of a mid-life crisis who fakes his own death, in David Nobbs's brilliantly-judged dark gem of a series. "The enduring appeal of both oddballs owes much to the comic genius of Leonard Rossiter," one critic observed. Earlier this year, it received the accolade of "greatest sitcom of all".

UP POMPEILL! (1969-70)

What list of sitcoms could be complete without the genius of the late, great Frankie Howerd. Basically, Up Pompeii! was one huge smutfest filled with double entendres, telling the tale of Roman slave Lurcio - played with gurning perfection by Howerd - as he stumbled from one orgy to another. Looking back, it sums up the different world that was the 60s and 70s in terms of what was acceptable when it came to sex and language. Today, like many other sitcoms on this list, it would cause eye-popping offence and instantly break Twitter. Back then, it was just a bit of a laugh. Wasn't it?