audience comments on the state of british comedy

8/14/2019 Audience Comments on the State of British Comedy

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AUDIENCE COMMENTS ON THE STATE OF BRITISHCOMEDY

BRITISH SITCOM TO BE SAVED BY ESTATEAGENTS, BANKERS AND FAKE

Independent, The (London) , Apr 29, 2001 by JANE ROBINS

MEDIA EDITOR

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ITV, THE BBC and Channel 4 are launching a dozen new sitcoms in a bid to find

the elusive holy grail of television - a new comedy classic to match Porridge, OnlyFools and Horses or Dad's Army.

The broadcasters are hoping that a star show will emerge from the bunch to rebutthose critics who say the British sitcom has been in decline since the 1970s and1980s, and is now totally eclipsed by American hits such as Friends, Frasier andSeinfeld.

ITV's High Stakes, starring Richard Wilson as a banker, is the first of the newsitcoms to reach the screen, along with the BBC's The Savages by Men BehavingBadly writer Simon Nye. The next, ITV's Sam's Game, will be broadcast within afew weeks. The show stars Big Brother host Davina McCall, and has a familiar"twenty-something friends in a cafe" theme.

ITV has commissioned at least three further pilots, including a black British showcalled Juggling - and the BBC is similarly busy. Its head of comedy GeoffreyPerkins is currently promoting a new wave of sitcoms at the international televisionfestival in Montreux. His repertoire includes another Richard Wilson comedy, thistime about an ageing journalist married to a hyperactive former head mistress

played by Stephanie Cole.Channel 4's offerings are mostly still in development, but a channel spokesmanadmits particular excitement a show called Roy Dance is Dead, which will be set inan estate agents' office. Over the past few years television critics, the BBCgovernors, and the ITC have all bemoaned the sad state of the British sitcom, andbroadcasters have resolved to do better.
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However, they are split on the way forward. Geoffrey Perkins at the BBC iscommissioning programmes which include techniques used in modern "new wave"sitcoms such as Caroline Aherne's The Royle Family and Paul Whitehouse'sHappiness.

A number of his projects will be shot without a studio audience and with no

background laughter. They will then be tested out on BBC2 or the youth- orienteddigital channel BBC3 in the hope of building mass market BBC1 potential.

ITV's approach is more traditional. Sioned Wiliam, the controller of comedy, arguesthat critically acclaimed shows like Channel 4's Spaced and BBC2's Happiness"are wonderful and ground-breaking, but are not popular". She believes them to besuitable only for minority channels where they attract what are, in ITV terms, lowratings.

Instead, she favours familiar, old-fashioned characteristics, such as studio

audiences. "There is still a huge appetite for programmes like The Likely Lads,One Foot in the Grave and Porridge," she says. "Frasier is the most traditionalsitcom you could find, and it's still going strong." She puts emphasis on the"rhythm of performance" of actors, who time their lines both for studio audiencesand the camera, and cites Richard Wilson, David Jason and Geoffrey Palmer asmasters of the craft.

Most British broadcasters exhibit some irritation at the much- repeated criticismthat Britain is trailing America, and failing to come up with megashows like Friends,Seinfeld and Frasier. Andy Harries, controller of comedy at Granada withresponsibility for The Royle Family, points out that the British had a huge debateover whether a single-camera, no- audience programme could ever be shown inpeak time. The BBC took the risk, and won audiences of up to 10 million when TheRoyle Family switched from BBC2 to BBC1.

Only now, he points out, are American broadcasters having the same argument.They have shot a pilot of the US version of the programme with no audience, butare still to take a decision on whether it would work as peak-time viewing.

"If you went to America and went on about how better American sitcoms are thanBritish they would look at you in a bewildered way," says Perkins. "You have toremember that we see the best of their shows and they see the best of ours. Theyrate Only Fools... highly, for instance, as the show that brought Bill Cosby back totelevision because of the quality of the writing."


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The sitcom offensive, though, is bound to produce some turkeys. ITV is said to beparticularly concerned at the risk it has taken in casting Davina McCall in Sam'sGame. The last time the network tried to turn a television presenter into a sitcomactress it came up with Denise Van Outen in the much-derided Babes in the Woodabout three dippy blondes sharing a flat. The show bombed so badly that it wascriticised for poor quality by the Independent Television Commission.

TEARS BEFORE BEDTIME

First published inIssue 67, May 2002

by Michael Bracewellhttp://www.frieze.com/issue/article/tears_before_bedtime

And yet it is these precursors of the last decades TV comedy - the so-calledGolden Age of British Sitcom, stretching approximately from 1970 to 1985 - whichhave been the leading informant of contemporary television comedy.

But the history of the British sitcom, as a response to the national mood, is bothconvoluted and at times self-contradictory. What endures in the currentrehabilitation of classic sitcom melancholy, misanthropy and frustration, seen inrecent shows such as Stella Street (1997) or The Office (2001), is the sense ofcosmic struggle played out in microcosm.

The template of this dynamic can be seen in such Ealing Studios comedies asPassport to Pimlico (1949) or The Titfield Thunderbolt (1952). Here was a world ofcheerful stoicism in response to the threat of oppression. This world formed thebasis of the early Carry On films made by Anglo-Amalgamated, such as Carry OnCabby (1962) and Carry On Nurse (1959), the latter concerning the patients on amale hospital ward uniting to overthrow the dictatorial matron, played witheffortless ferocity by Hattie Jacques. This is an England in which the new civic

services put in place by the postwar government - such as the very council estatethat Big Jim and his mates are building on the edge of their seaside town - haveinherited a certain militarism, to which the local population present the classicambivalence of Englishness: thinking in terms of class (Us and Them), yet deeplyresenting anyone whogets above themselves.
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But if this is the founding premise of postwar British comedy, so too is its collapse -the abandonment of a common struggle. Its replacement by a more contemporarysense of cynicism, failure and alienation was pivotal in the development of theBritish sitcom. The sense of the genre studying the dregs of a life revolving aroundthe plughole of existence reached its apotheosis towards the end of the 1970s witha run of depressive sitcoms including The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976)

and Carla Lanes long-running Butterflies (1978), with its soft Folk theme song,Love Is Like a Butterfly.

By the time of Britpop, and comedys increasing involvement with a Pop culturalcomedy of recognition, many of the sitcoms from the 1970s and early 1980sexisted only as ciphers for an idea of the recent past: as the landscape of baby-boomer adolescence, like the memory of Marc Bolan or the unmodernized interiorsof the London Underground. Pulp had only to source the colours of the 1970s (awashed-out blue to orange blandness) in order to make an unspoken statementabout the inheritance of domestic memory. Somewhere on the edges of recent

recollection the older sitcoms were reminders of a comedic revolt against theclaustrophobia of daily routine way before broadband media.

Two of these earlier situation comedies took as their opening premise the leadingcharacters lament for a life gone wrong: Leonard Rossiters suicidal office workerReggie Perrin and Wendy Craigs deeply depressed suburban housewife Ria, tiredof life but unable to change it, in Butterflies. Ever Decreasing Circles (1984), thethird in a triptych of ambiguous despair, presented the situation itself - a kind ofber-suburb of suffocating order and pettiness - as neurosis made landscape, like

a middle-class version of the brooding terraces and canal-side bomb sites ofkitchen sink films such as A Taste of Honey (1961). Another shuffle of the deck,though, and Ever Decreasing Circles could have been a side project by DavidLynch - right down to the spookily normal neighbours Howard and Hilda, whoalways dress in identical anoraks. This is suburbia as Munchkinland, but withoutthe Yellow Brick Road to the big city. All three comedies were laments for failedpotential, revolving around the constitution of domesticity and routine - a traitrecalling Larkin once again. In his poem Home Is So Sad (1958), responding tothe aged familiarity of familial domesticity, Larkin refines the complex abstractionsof sadness to the two words of its final image: That vase. This is a quiet, forceful

closure to an account of the family home, which has somehow failed in what hecalls its joyous shot at how things ought to be. You might also be reminded ofMorrissey, name-checking the school in Carry On Teacher (1959) in his lyric aboutleaving the family home, Late Night Maudlin Street (1988), with its elegiac line Ahalf life disappears today.


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As the sitcom explored existential themes of suburban torpor (a kind of Kafka withcupcakes), presenting the modern world as a place of neurosis and spiritualloneliness, it often seemed more at home in the stylized world of the 1940s and1950s, before the common struggle became ingested as individual malaise.Through Dads Army (1968), Hi-De-Hi (1981) and It Aint Alf Hot, Mum (1974),screenwriters turned their comic brilliance to evoking that better place mourned by

the narrator at the start of Big Jim and The Figaro Club. This trio of sitcoms, happyin the pre-modern world of the Home Guard, the holiday camp and NationalService in the last reaches of the Empire, described the reassurance of a simplersociety in which the hierarchies of social institution protected us from our owncapacity for disillusionment and disaffection. Wide open to accusations ofsentimentality, but more than armoured by the precision of their characterization,the sitcoms of Perry and Croft remain in place as the fictional descendants of thatbetter world of the imagined English past. Like their own subjects, they seem tobelong to an older, less complicated society - one that the contemporary comedyof League of Gentlemen or Stella Street would turn on its head in a dystopicversion of itself.

When sitcom pursues a better world, it also raises the question of whether muchof the bland middle ground of the genre was written to be comfortingly familiarrather than funny. This is the comedy of recognition as an anaesthetic - the Terryand June (1979) factor of positing the ubiquitous, amicably cranky couples ofsuburban sitcom as idealized neighbours. This is where, as old Marxists will pointout, the sitcom becomes softly political; in its world of runaway lawnmowers andstunned milkmen, punctured pomposity and collapsing furniture, the 27 minutes of

the average British sitcom was a window on class. By extension, this made theform perhaps more articulate of Britishness than almost any other popular medium- a trait that is picked up by contemporary comedys deconstruction ofdemographic types in their mediated form.

When audiences of nine or ten million were tuning in to their favourite sitcoms,they were relating above all to a comedy of social types: from Arthur Lowesportrayal of Captain Mainwarings ravenous ambition to embody the officer class inDads Army (Mainwarings sombre musings on the nature of his unhappy marriageto the unseen but dominant Elizabeth were a study in confession) to Leonard

Rossiters sublime creation in Rising Damp (1974) of Rigsby, the proprietor of agloomy, gothic boarding-house who shuttles at breakneck speed between cunning,cowardice and an intimation of himself as the ultimate matinee idol. In a charactersuch as Rigsby the subsonic sadness has a kind of desperation to it, recallingGraham Greenes pronouncement in Journey without Maps (1936) that seedinesshas a very deep appeal; it seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for


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something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back. Which is the rot andthe sourness revisited, perhaps.

In a temporal sleight of hand the word sitcom has become synonymous with anidea of the past; it retains the capacity to sum up the old broadcasting notion oftelevision being the nations hearth, with us all taking our place on the collective

sofa to watch a miniaturized enactment of ... family life around a sofa. As areasonably terrifying idea, with regards to the exploded dynamics of the family, thisis a piece of cultural circuitry that re-routes our experience of sitcom back throughLarkins experience of familial domesticity.

Can sitcom play us back to ourselves, as potential Rias or Reggies, living - heavenhelp us - in the landscape of The League of Gentlemen? This is a theme - sitcomas life in a sitcom - that comedian Sean Hughes attempted, uneasily, to investigatein his first series for Channel 4 in the early 1990s. This was a time when a gradualdisillusionment with sitcom possessed the programmers, as though they regarded

the genre as reactionary and an impediment to the quest for their Holy Grail ofyouth programming. Such a view resulted in a flurry of half-hour comedy spotssuch as Seans Show (1992) and The Paul Merton Show (1996) - crypto-ironictakes on traditional comedy playing to the knowingness of the audience. With lesscontrived irony, however, the hit sitcom of the 1980s, The Young Ones (1982) shotstraight from prime time to cult status, with barely a pause for breath. But how didthis relate to sitcoms precursors?

During the 1970s, in sitcoms such as Man about the House (1973) and Are YouBeing Served? (1973), the genres study of failure became a high camp exercise indignity outraged and masculinity disempowered, reaching a high point of slapstickwith Michael Crawfords Some Mothers Do Ave Em (1973) and its catch-phraseOo, Betty!. In Man about the House George and Mildred Roper (the latter playedby Yootha Joyce, who would star on the sleeve of Ask, 1986, by The Smiths)depicted a middle-aged couple attempting to come to terms with retirement. Theirfrustrations became fixed on Georges excuses for avoiding sex and Mildredslong-suffering endurance of his slippered retreat into impotence. Similarly, the staffof Grace Bros. department store in Are You Being Served? played out a hugelycomplex algebra of sexual and social status, the tensions of which could turn a

slightly raised eyebrow into the equivalent of a hurled ashtray. Innuendo, itself aconsequence of archaism, is everything in this branch of sitcom, a veneering ofgentility across plainly sexual banter. Innuendo denotes a repressive society inwhich formality is the constraint on feelings. Hence, in Are You Being Served? MrsSlocombes glorious riposte to Captain Peacock, who has got hold of her catduring the pitch darkness of a power cut: Captain Peacock! Will you pleaseremove your hand from my pussy!


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Unlike their American counterparts, such as Bewitched (1964), The Dick van DykeShow (1969) and later Cheers (1982), Taxi (1978) or Rhoda (1974), there was verylittle feel-good factor within the British sitcom of the 1970s and 1980s - noachievement of an independent life in the heart of the bustling city or sunnydomesticity amid the hissing summer lawns in an idealized suburbia. In the UKsitcom land went from prisons to bed-sitting-rooms, and even the temperate

suburbia of Terry and June was held in place by a rigid formality that made therather weak jokes arise from outraging outmoded conventions. The manner inwhich the British sitcom was steeped in fatalism and bounded by formality meantthat its humour was ill suited to the strategies of funky Postmodern comedians.Like Blackpool or Las Vegas, sitcom confounds irony. In recent years the mostsuccessful sitcoms have maintained the traditional formula of failure withinbanality: the 1990s were dominated by One Foot in the Grave(1990), a hymn tomisanthropy, and Keeping Up Appearances (1974), Patricia Routleges reworking,as Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced bouquet), of Penelope Keiths defining role asMargot, the suburban snob brought low, in The Good Life (1974). Similarly, FatherTed (1995) and his entrapment on a remote Irish island, the kitchen-centricmayhem of Absolutely Fabulous (1992) and the sofa-based claustrophobia of TheRoyle Family (1998) were all, like their miserabilist precursors, concerned withclass and frustrated ambition within the oppression of a daily routine. It could havebeen 1974.

Sitcom generally fails when it attempts the Postmodern trope of making televisionitself the situation of the comedy - spoofing video diaries, docu-soaps or theactual televisual format of sitcom. The knowingness of the conceit - a presumed

sophistication of media literacy - all but suffocates the script and the acting, as wellas robbing the form of the basic plot device which make a 27-minute dramasustain its force. Most recently, however, The Office achieved a seamless blend ofclassic sitcom miserabilism with the technical devices of a documentary - renewingfor a new generation the ambiguous comedy of a dead-end job in a boring town.

The classic situations of the sitcom - the boarding-house, the suburb, the cornershop, the holiday camp or the department store - provided an instant sociallandscape that maintained the idea of a Britain where everything was still in itsplace within an accepted social order. By the time that Postmodernism, as a

rearrangement of intentionality and context, had ploughed its way through thefringes of comedy to the desks of commissioning editors, many of these classicsituations had found their place as the subjects for docu-soaps and reality TV.Here was a reversal of the sitcom, away from comedy of recognition into theanxiety of recognition. At the same time many of the characters and catch-phrasesthat typified the earlier age of sitcom found their way into the soaps - with DotCotton of Eastenders (1985) becoming a Mildred Roper comic character, for


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example. In the mid- to late 1990s, the cultural insistence on authenticity hadbecome the single peg upon which many of televisions hopes were hung, and theworld of the sitcom - beyond a zappy, ironic version of itself - was allowed todecline. This state of affairs prompted an address on the Internet by veteransitcom writer Vince Powell, who maintained that the ban on old-style Britishsitcoms ignores viewer-needs.

The belief that the traditional sitcom embodies reactionary values promptedcultural commentators in the 1990s to take exception to the very history of thesitcom, regarding it as the ambassador of suburban values that by definition weredemonized. Andy Medhurst, in an essay in Visions of Suburbia (1997), attempts anear-Marxist reading of the British sitcom, by finding the entire premise ofsuburban England to be offensive to his political orthodoxy. The suburban sitcomrepresents British comedys most sustained attempt at embourgeoisement, hesnarls, its plots often concerned with the maintaining of genteel values againstthreats from outside or below. Butterflies comes in for particular criticism as being

offensive to both women in particular and society in general. Championing thecause of Ruby, the programmes comedy-cockney cleaning woman, Medhurststates, the programmes tentatively feminist critique of suburban domesticity isthus undercut by its hugely retrogressive presentation of class.

And yet class itself, within much of British sitcom, is seen as a ludicrous,lumbering and deliquescent construct - with the characters dependence on itserving only to emphasize its fragility. Think of Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part(1965) railing against absolutely everyone except the Queen and West Ham

United, or of Harold Steptoe in Steptoe and Son (1962) - that pote maudit of therag-and-bone yard - lamenting his true calling as a Fellini-esque bohemian,discussing existentialism over cocktails rather than mucking out the horse. Herethen, is an individual struggle in a world of struggle, the history of which is theaccretion of a particular temper. And it is this spirit - or, rather, the perceiveddisappearance of this spirit - which seems to prompt the mournful observation atthe start of Big Jim and The Figaro Club. Perhaps the world turned rotten andsour when the streamlining modernity of the 1960s began to do away with theethos of austerity Britain and to bury its common morality beneath a brand newculture of supermarkets and Pop music, miniskirts and power stations. This sense

of mourning for a period, and, more importantly, for an ethos of Englishness thathas somehow passed, is crucial to the melancholy in British sitcom as both agenre and a form.

With this in mind, Big Jim and The Figaro Club can be seen as a definitive work forthe very reason that it admits its predisposition to embitterment from the outset,and that its characters have not so much failed within society as been failed by


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3. Most British sitcoms from the sixties, seventies and eighties were, let's behonest, mediocre at best. 'Allo, 'Allo, Hi de Hi, On The Buses et al - like mostBritish sitcoms from that era - were bordering on pantomime (from the wrongside of the border). They were terrible then and they're terrible now. This iswhy, outside of Britain, few people class British sitcoms up there with thelikes of Cheers, Seinfeld or the brilliant Simpsons. As for Only Fools and

Horses well, Only The Easily Amused would class that as classic comedy,But then again people in Britain still insist that Tony (a pint, a pint, that's verynearly an armful) Hancock is the funniest guy to ever read his lines on liveTV. Kick the Terry and Junes into the bargain bin of nostalgia TV where theybelong and learn how to make proper sitcoms from the Yanks.Ian Crawford, Australia

4. Being an ex-pat living in Chicago and getting BBC America on cable, I am

appalled that I cannot even see the original Fools and Horses over here, letalone the new stuff to come. All I get is British Men Behaving Badly andsome idiot and very strange talk show host that thinks he is funny by beinggay, crude and rude. Please repeat the old stuff and give us the newclassics. By the way, repeating Dad's Army was great! Blackadder iswonderful, but over and over and over and over etc is boring. You have somuch classic comedy in the archives, use it! Love The Fast Show and HarryEnfield. If it's new and good, put it out in the USA along with repeats of theclassics! Suit You!

Barry Taylor, USA

5. I don't watch British comedy any more as the quality is so poor and they'reso bland. American comedies are far better than British ones nowadays [Inever thought I'd ever say that!]. Trying to revive old shows with new castswill not work with the exception of Dr Who.Steve, Australia

6. There is always the danger that the longer you drag out a sitcom, the worseit may become. But with the best like Only Fools and Horses, that theory hasproved fruitless. The 1996 trilogy contained arguably some of the bestmoments in its history and I think David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst lovethe show so much they would never let it slip. Plus, John Sullivan never fails


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to provide the unexpected in his scripts and Del Boy will forever remain thebest-loved character in sitcom. But the real key to reviving a sitcom iswhether it is relevant to today. For example, Fawlty Towers could exist today,but its 12 episodes were so superb any efforts at a re-make would destroy it.Steve Carley, England

7. Forget this pointless exercise in nostalgia - you should be ashamed ofyourselves. Look for and nurture new talent.Nick, England

8. Learn from Hollywood's favourite mistake. Rerun them but don't try toremake them; even with cloning it can't be done.

T.J. Cassidy, USA

9. Although for me Hancock will always remain the master, the way should bekept clear for new talent. I don't agree with 'new issues' of old shows with afresh cast. It simply does not work for me. Comedy to an extent reflects aperiod. I don't want to see Fools and Horses back. I want new talent to makeme laugh.

Andy, UK

10.There is a saying in showbiz: "Always leave the audience wanting more".That way, you create a work of art that MEANS something special to a lot ofpeople. Don't kick the old classics to death for the sake of banalities.Ian, Hong Kong

11.I always loved Ever Decreasing Circles and it's never repeated anywhere. Iagree these should be left in the past but repeated on UK Gold as often aspossible. I believe there's definitely a market for a TV channel called 'RepeatTV' or something, which showed nothing but requested old programmesincluding kids' programmes. I'd love to see Champion The Wonder Horseagain!Sara, England


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12.Although Steptoe and Son was fantastically funny, I feel that with both of themain stars having died starting afresh with new actors would be too strange.All the major characters from Are You being Served? are, however, still withus and with this programme also being popular in the USA it might make

sense to make some new episodes.Angus Gulliver, UK

13.No more Only Fools and Horses please! It's on all the time and I'm fed upwith it. The series finished on a high - leave it there. I love Blackadder,Fawlty Towers and many other classics but leave them as classics - don't tryto 're-make' them with new scripts and cast. It won't work. They will nevermatch up to the original. Repeats (of shows which haven't been shown for

ages) would be welcome - on the BBC - not all of us have Sky/Digital - andat a reasonable time!Liz, UK

14.Whilst there are a few exceptions at present, the 70's and 80's were anoutstanding era for British comedy (most of which was made by the BBC).Much as I love all the classics, they were generally products of their time andshould be appreciated from that standpoint. To try to recreate the situational

humour of say, Dad's Army, The Good Life or Are You Being Served, wouldrun the risk of appearing out of date, and trying to update them woulddestroy some of their charm. We have plenty of wonderful comedy momentsto view again and again, thanks to video and DVD. Let's leave the old stuffon the shelf (but take them down and watch them frequently!) and try to writestuff which will be as well-loved and remembered in 30 years time as theclassics are now.Matthew Salter, UK

15.No! None of them. Classics are classics because of the time and space theyoccupy. It is always best to let them rest, and if we feel the need to revisitthem we can do it via video or repeats. No shows are improved by exhumingthem. Let them die in the blaze of glory they deserve. Only Fools and Horseshas already been raised from the dead too many times and is beginning to


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leave an unpleasant smell whenever it returns. Leave it alone, or theentertainment it once gave will be lost.James, UK

audience comments on the state of british comedy

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