Is the sitcom dead? Not Going Out's Lee Mack and TV comedy bosses weigh in
They're expensive, risky and tricky to write, but if you get them right, there's a big audience wanting a laugh.
With a season of classic sitcom repeats under way on BBC Two, you might find yourself wondering: what is the funniest British sitcom of all time? Well, the polls are… confusing.
In 2004, the public voted for Only Fools and Horses. In 2015, Mrs Brown’s Boys was deemed the best of the 21st century. In 2019, Radio Times readers voted Fawlty Towers the greatest of all time. While in 2022, another poll’s top three was The Office, The Inbetweeners and Are You Being Served? But whatever the victor, such rankings always lead to anguished think-pieces about how the situation comedy is dead – that these days, we just don’t make them like we used to.
In May, the BBC’s director of comedy Jon Petrie seemed to confirm this. Talking to producers, he cited last year’s Radio Times Screen Test survey showing that comedy increases viewers’ happiness levels. “Audiences are telling us they want a laugh to combat the gloom,” he said. And to serve that, he made a plea – “Send us fewer shows that are ‘an exploration’ of something and more that know where their funny bones are.”
Does he think the sitcom is, if not dead, then in grave peril? “Mainstream sitcom is hard,” he explains when we catch up with him again. “It’s a lot of pressure to make ten million people laugh. It needs a consistent joke level, clear comic characters and big set-pieces but no convoluted plot – so much of the humour in a great sitcom comes from character. We feel that we’ve skewed too much into comedy drama recently. It’s time to push back.”
Channel 4’s head of comedy Charlie Perkins agrees. She’s looking for “a long-running sitcom, an ensemble show with gangs of characters like Ghosts”. So if there’s so much demand from channel bosses, why aren’t we in a golden era of sitcoms?
“There’s definitely a big audience,” says comedian Lee Mack – and he should know. His sitcom Not Going Out is the second longest-running in British TV history (after Last of the Summer Wine), and it’s been commissioned for a 14th season. “But there aren’t younger comics coming through wanting to write them. You can have a whole debate about why. I think part of it might be class-based.”
Nerys Evans agrees. She’s the creative director at Expectation, producer of returning BBC sitcom Alma’s Not Normal (and commissioned Derry Girls at Channel 4). “Most of the huge studio sitcoms had working-class writers like Victoria Wood and John Sullivan,” she argues. “There are so few working-class people in telly – and a lot of middle-class writers are horrified to have their comedy described as broad. Tom Basden really resisted writing a family sitcom when he created Here We Go. It started as a mockumentary, and he was coaxed into the sitcom format in development.”
RT has spoken to comedy producers and found, on the one hand, an abiding love of the sitcom. “There’s such pleasure in watching for joy, not jeopardy,” says Hannah Farrell, creative director at Fable Pictures, the company behind Lucy Beaumont’s comedy Hullraisers. “Sitcoms don’t often present any real life and death stakes in their stories of the week – which means we can relax and just enjoy the purely ridiculous situations. Sitcom characters become people we want to hang out with – like meeting a mate for a cosy pint after work and having a laugh. They make us feel better about the world.”
But certain themes keep coming up. Perhaps the biggest (after near-universal admiration for the recently concluded Ghosts) is that launching new comedy is a risk. “If you’re setting out to say this is funny, and people don’t agree, they’re offended,” says Neil Webster, whose father-son sitcom Only Child launches on BBC One in the near future. “You can’t predict what will be successful – you can have the best writers, best performers and best idea, but the moment you launch, people are thinking, ‘I’ll see about that.’”
Some producers also note that broadcasters want big talent from the outset, meaning growing new talent is harder. There’s a demand for new voices and YouTube can help – This Country and People Just Do Nothing both started there – but passionate, authored sitcoms may not produce long-running hits.
“The problem is authored stories can be told often in two or three series, then the writer moves on,” says Josh Cole, head of comedy for BBC Studios, producer of Apple TV+’s Trying and Amazon’s Good Omens.
Evans agrees. “We need to develop longer-running shows with ensemble casts and a writers’ room so that the writer doesn’t get exhausted,” she says.
For Mack, this is key. “When I was writing the first series of Not Going Out, I looked at American sitcoms,” he recalls. “The difference was the rate of gags. UK producers have a joke on every page. In America they slave over every line. On average ten per cent of a US sitcom budget goes on the writers, whereas in Britain about five per cent of the money goes on writers. Writers are twice as important there.”
Everyone RT spoke to also pointed out that there’s less money around, and that compared with other programming, comedy is an expensive risk as it takes time to develop. Sophie Willan, for instance, took 18 months to write her Alma’s Not Normal pilot – and she later won two BAFTAs. Stath Lets Flats, meanwhile (which won four), went through four pilot scripts, two read-throughs, a Comedy Blap (a short showcase slot) and a taster episode.
“[Roisin Conaty sitcom] Gameface started as a Blap,” recalls its producer Charlie Lewis, head of comedy at Objective. “That’s always been part of hit sitcom culture.”
For example, if we turn to comedy history, Porridge and Open All Hours both came from a run of pilot shows starring Ronnie Barker. Though this practice is not without its problems. “That’s more development than a drama usually needs and that costs money,” Lewis says.
“There are increasing production costs and shrinking opportunities,” explains Shane Allen, co-founder of Boffola Pictures and the man who commissioned Fleabag, Upstart Crow and Inside No. 9 at the BBC. “Channel 4 has advertising woes, the BBC’s licence fee freeze has a huge impact. But comedy punches well above its weight. Ten years ago, it was seen as a high-cost high-fail genre, while reality shows cost a fraction of the price. But broadcasters now know that comedy becomes incredibly good value and reaches young viewers. Ghosts will be watched for generations to come and has sold to America.”
One solution to money woes can come from international co-productions – although Allen warns that brings creative problems. Fleabag’s first series was BBC-funded “with the creative freedom that provides”. But after Amazon co-financed series two “a whole raft of US male execs turned up to the read-through and – bear in mind this was a piece exploring self-destructive feminism – proceeded to tear the show apart and demand Andrew Scott was recast with only four days until the shoot started,” he sighs. “Anyone less effervescently charming and smart than Phoebe would have buckled.”
We could also be stuck in old ways of thinking about sitcoms. The top ten comedy programmes of 2023 were Ghosts, Mrs Brown’s Boys, Not Going Out, The Cleaner, Two Doors Down, The Power of Parker, Gavin & Stacey, Queen of Oz, Black Ops and The Windsors. Most of those are sitcoms, but only two have old-school studio audiences.
But maybe those old-fashioned laughs are now drawn out in different shows. Jon Thoday, co-founder of production company Avalon, says that pitching Taskmaster to broadcasters, Alex Horne insisted on the same cast of comics for an entire season “because it becomes an unscripted sitcom”, he explains. “Have I Got News for You was like a sitcom at the beginning with the three main presenters. If I was Jon Petrie, I’d cancel one episode of EastEnders and put Ghosts and other sitcoms in that slot. That would change the face of comedy and make ITV think about it too.”
Overall, Petrie says the BBC understands the issues and plans to experiment with writers’ rooms. He cites Tom Basden, Holly Walsh and Simon Blackwell as potential British comedy showrunners and cites forthcoming sitcoms Amandaland (a Motherland spin-off) and Smoggie Queens, about a gang of bitchy Middlesbrough drag queens, as possible long-running shows of the future.
“We’re prepared to make a few shows that might not hit in the way we hope,” he says. “Big audiences for the first series is hard – look at Blackadder and Only Fools and Horses. We have to hold our nerve. And the rewards are not just financial. If you create a great sitcom, you’ve got a place in TV history.”
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