As the BBC's TV comedy department faces crisis...Is this the end for TV sitcoms?

by Michael Leapman

Source: Daily Mail; Wed May 30 2001

Were you sitting comfortably in front of the box last night, chortling away at BBC1's hit sitcom? I expect many millions of us were. But the bad news for the BBC is that the show that captured our attention was yet another rerun of One Foot In The Grave - the one about the tortoise first screened 11 years ago.

And all recent attempts by BBC1 controller Lorraine Heggesey to come up with something fresh in the way of sitcoms have ended with more tears than chuckles. New writers have been encouraged, new stars carefully groomed - but there is nothing in the schedules with anything like the appeal of Victor Meldrew's accident strewn twilight years. The British sitcom has been a pillar of the nations life and discourse for more than 40 years. while it may be premature to write its obituary, the signs that its slow and possibly irreversible, fade to oblivion has begun.

Comedian Lee Evan's learned at the weekend that his much anticipated but critically panned series So What Now?, has answered its own question: it is not to be given a second series.. During its run, the audience fell from 6.5 million to just 3.6 million - not enough to justify a prime-time slot on a mainstream channel. There are doubts too, about the survival of two other BBC series, launched with so much hype and hope earlier this year. Miss Heggessey has yet to decide whether to recommission Office Gossip (starring Pauline Quirke) and The Savages (written by Simon Nye, creator of Men Behaving Badly). The average audience for both new shows has never risen above five million - around half the number who switched on for Victor Meldrew in his heyday.

So who or what is to blame for this terminal decline in a once flourishing art form? Do we just find life less ridiculous than we did? Or could it be the other way around, that our daily lives are so strewn with banana skins - whether the joke is on us or our neighbours - that we are living out our own real-life situation comedies, and the writers struggle to top them? It is significant that the only recent example of the art form to have been a palpable hit was the Royle Family - not so much a sitcom as an anti-sitcom.

Just as Radio 4's wonderful I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue advertises itself as 'the antidote to panel games', so were the Royle's the antidote to the conventional TV family. The show boasted nothing much by the way of situation and even less conventional comedy. It was simply a family clustered listlessly round the TV set, mirroring the audience. We were laughing at ourselves. There was no slapstick, no pies in the face, no falling trousers and nobody caught in embarrassing clinches by unexpected visitors: just wickedly subtle observation of people whom we instinctively recognised.

Looking back over the decades, it is this quality of observation that has marked out the hits from the flops. Dad's Army, Fawlty Towers, Till Death Us Do Part, Rising Damp, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Absolutely Fabulous and Yes, Minister - all featured characters, either lovable or despicable, who were dangerously close to some that we knew in real life.

Too many modern British efforts are clones of American originals, about smart-talking thirtysomethings sharing an apartment and working together in a white-collar office. The characters uniformly dishy and bland, are virtually indistinguishable and in some cases interchangeable. we soon lose interest. There is a question whether, in this age of political correctness, the BBC would be offered scripts about strong, controversial figures such as the racist Alf Garnett and the snobbish, paranoid, German hating Basil Fawlty - and an even larger question as to whether its executives would have the courage to commission them.

Even making fun of the short-fused pensioner might cause lips to purse. Dawn French's Vicar of Dibley and Victoria wood's dinner ladies are about as far along the road of social comment as today's writers dare to stray. Yet, in one sense, the dearth of quality sitcoms is our own fault as much as the TV moguls'. It cannot be much fun being a channel controller in a period when our tastes are becoming more and more volatile.

Sitcoms used to be given time to build an audience. One Foot In The Grave did not really capture the nation's imagination until its second series, and Men Behaving Badly had its biggest success after it was dumped by ITV and taken over by the BBC. Today, with scores of alternative channels available on satellite and cable, we demand instant satisfaction or we reach for the channel tuner.

In our high-speed world, fashions in TV last no more than months. The huge success in the past two years of ITV's Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? spawned imitators - most notably The Weakest Link - but the audiences for both are now sinking. The second series of Big Brother on Channel 4 is not fairing nearly as well as the first, while Survivor, in the same mould of sadistic reality TV, has disappointed ITV bosses.

But the demise of the sitcom transcends the world of the small screen and its fads. Over the years Meldrew, Mainwaring, Fawlty and Garnett were just some of the characters who insinuated themselves into the British heart and soul. They became folk heroes inhabiting our very lives. They still do, to an extent, with frequent repeats on mainstream TV and back-to-back showings on satellite nostalgia channels such as UK Gold and Granada Plus. The crusty Mainwaring can still shift the spirits of generations much too young to have any first hand memory of what the Home Guard was.

But it may be that we no longer need such larger-than-life creations to enrich our private worlds. Perhaps the real soap opera of everyday experience provides as much comedy and drama as we can take. A current must see hit on the London's West End stage is Alistair Beaton's biting political satire Feelgood, about the misadventures of New Labour spin-doctors. One of the characters is a writer of sitcoms, hired to insert a few populist jokes into the party leaders conference speech. His entrance line gets one of the biggest laughs in the show. Arriving unseen, as the politicos are manically discussing the latest farcical but potentially highly damaging scandal, he listens for a few minutes, wide eyed, then pops up to ask innocently: 'Are you sure you need a comedy writer?".

And that may be precisely why today's sitcoms are failing. Our life is so manipulated that cynical and knowing as we have become, we have learned to make our own jokes about it. Or, of course, the explanation could be rather simpler: they just aren't writing them like Dad's Army anymore.

Transcribed from the original newspaper article by Andy Howells

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