The Spat Family series comes in for lot of hard knocks fro not being Harold Lloyd or Our Gang but it is not really so awful as all that. If one appreciates that, in one form or another, the various companies that still specialised in comedy shorts (far too many of them in the US) were all working their way towards the notion of "situation comedy" (the form of the future, of the talkies, of the television), then the Spats are more the sort of thing they needed to be thinking in terms of than the Harold Lloyd style of comedy which would only barely survive into the thirties. The trouble with the Spats is that they are neither sufficiently typical of the US (rather bizarrely anglicised à la P G Wodehouse) nor strongly enough characterised. The basis of the rivalry between Spat and his brother-in-law Ambrose (or why they should all live together in the first place or the Spats allow him to tyrannise over them), which dominates the action in all episodes, is never very clearly established (not even seemingly in the first episode - Let's Build). Without any clear social milieu, they are a bit like three curious upper middle-class gypsies.
In this episode the three of them win a yacht in a tombola and quarrel over the captaincy while Mrs TS goes swimming and risks getting lost. It is all fairly feeble but at lest it is not simply slapstick. At times one has the inkling that a clear relationship between them is emerging "How can you expect Tewkesbury to know anything?" Mrs. TS asks her brother "when you know it all" With better acting (D'Albrook as Brother Ambrose is the weakest link) and with better scripts, something more might have come of the series.
