Wes added of the ultimate challenge: “It’s not the distance I’m worried about, being out in the open sea, fingers crossed it will all be okay.” A vintage BBC sitcom about two brothers. The older brother is ambitious, eager to grasp what the world has to offer. The younger brother is scruffy and hopeless, forever tempering the enthusiasm of his older sibling and raining on the parade of his aspirations. The setting is London at the dawn of the ’80s – Thatcher’s Britain – though in reality location filming in Bristol stands in for the capital. The producer/director is Gareth Gwenlan. The Last Leg presenter Alex Brooker was born with hand and arm deformities and a twisted right leg that had to be amputated when he was a baby. How does he feel in 17C water? “I’ve only got one set of toes I can’t feel.” Upbeat guy. That is just not acceptable! Christopher will be found immediately on 9-1-1 Season 3 Episode 3, and there is nothing else to say about it!

When Brian’s younger brother Steve (Robert Glenister) arrives in London looking for somewhere to stay, his lazy, cynical, noisy “Northern lout” attitude disrupts Brian’s already messy life. Like many BBC sitcoms from this golden era, Sink or Swim is blessed with a theme tune and score by the illustrious composer, Ronnie Hazlehurst– the man behind the themes for Are You Being Served? Last of the Summer Wine, Just Good Friends, Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, Yes Minister, Sorry! and, yes, even the first series of Only Fools and Horses. Like his memorable theme tune for Carla Lane’s Butterflies (an arrangement of the Dolly Parton 1974 hit, Love is Like a Butterfly) Sink or Swim was not an original composition. Instead, for this show about the fractious, chalk and cheese relationship of siblings, Hazlehurst was asked to arrange an instrumental version of He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother –a 1969 hit for The Hollies.

The celebrities taking part in the show include Olympic gold medallist Linford Christie and Coronation Street star Sair Khan.

That said, Sink Or Swim leaves questions to be answered. What happens if someone drops the baton mid-Channel? Are you allowed to swim after it and, if so, for how long before you are disqualified? After all, this is a bumbling British relay team we are talking about.With one in five British adults being unable to swim and one in three children leaving school without being able to swim, Channel 4 and Twofour, part of ITV Studios, today reveal the line-up for the new large-scale celebrity series, Sink or Swim (w/t) in support of Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C). Twofour Group is a family of award-winning companies producing and delivering world-class international TV. Working for broadcasters around the world, the Twofour Group spans drama, comedy, factual and entertainment. Twofour Group is proud to be part of ITV Studios

As a Northerner myself, I especially liked her belief that Brian and Steve’s father must be a miner as, in her mind, all Northern men work down the pit. When Brian corrects her, she comes to question whether he really is Northern after all! The character of Sonia also gets the prize that many a sitcom desires in an effort to establish the show in the public’s mind; the catchphrase. Seemingly every other earnest diatribe or long-winded monologue she delivers in an attempt to educate either Brian or Steve ends with “You know?”, delivered in an inimitable manner by Corper. Costume-wise, she’s often kitted out in dungarees, which was of course the shorthand for militant women at the time. Steven Handley, Commissioning Editor for Entertainment at Channel 4 said: “Sink or Swim promises to be one of the most perilous Stand Up To Cancer Celebrity Challenges we have ever attempted. Like Only Fools and Horses, Sink or Swim was filmed in Bristol doubling for London. Shearer later wrote the Nicholas Lyndhurst sitcom The Two of Us for LWT. Production of the sitcom overlapped the first two years of Davison also starring as the Fifth Doctor in Doctor Who, which imposed constraints on the recording schedules. [1] Sink or Swim airs on Tuesday nights at 9:15PM on Channel 4, straight after the new series of The Great British Bake Off.Completing the line up are television presenter Diane Louise Jordan and Linford Christie’s fellow Olympic gold medallists, Tessa Sanderson and Greg Rutherford.

In many ways, Sink Or Swim was a victim of circumstance. In 1981, the year after the show premiered, Only Fools And Horses launched on the BBC. Although it took time to build the huge audience figures it would go on to receive, the similarity in concept - two brothers sharing a flat in London - meant that Sink Or Swim fell by the wayside as Only Fools And Horses's popularity grew. Gareth Gwenlan, the producer of Sink Or Swim, went on to produce Only Fools And Horses in 1988, and further mixing the two worlds, Nicholas Lyndhurst starred in Alex Shearer's next sitcom, The Two Of Us. Holding The Fort and Sink Or Swim both started in 1980, and for the last two series of the latter he was filming concurrently with his opening series of Doctor Who. In the lead role, Peter Davison is at his well-meaning, slightly wet best as Brain Webber, a bespectacled prototype of the ’80s ‘New Man’ who is mostly wholly enamoured by the beliefs of his girlfriend Sonia, but whose more pragmatic Northern roots occasionally rise to the surface thanks, in the main, to Steve’s influence. In Steve, Robert Glenister delivers a fine comic performance which ought to be congratulated far more, given that this was his first TV role.Before starring as the fifth incarnation of television's favourite Time Lord, Peter Davison was a character actor. He got his big break in 1978 when he was cast as Tristan Farnon in drama All Creatures Great and Small Alongside Christopher Timothy and Robert Hardy, and his first foray into sitcom was Marks & Gran's Holding The Fort in 1980, alongside Patricia Hodge and Matthew Kelly; a sitcom that has, inexplicably, never been made available on home media.