The sitcom is one of the defining and most-enduring TV genres.
Oh... God... Al...mighty!
I think people remember the sitcom landmarks of British television
more than they remember anything else.
I think the sitcom is kind of the Holy Grail of doing comedy.
For 60 years, sitcom
has brought us together and made us laugh.
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
Whoever you were, there are certain sitcom characters
that everyone was familiar with.
You felt like it was a sort of shared experience
with other people who you couldn't see.
It was a kind of feeling that you just don't get
from any other form of television.
It has shown us many aspects of the British character.
You snobs!
We like laughing at people who are rude to each other.
Bloody blasphemous Scouse git!
We like seeing people in pain.
Social discomfort.
You're not going to lose your job.
You know, you're not going to lose your job.
Awkwardness.
What?
Don't matter.
Someone who has fooled themselves into thinking
that they can put themselves across as better than they are.
That's automatically going to be funny.
Alan, you've, er... come free at the side.
Oh! Sorry.
One of the things I love about sitcom was I think,
in some ways, it's often very realistic.
I think sitcoms, particularly in Britain, reflect the world
and the times that you're living in.
That's what's so funny, quite often.
They come over and get all their false teeth, false eyeballs...
Sitcoms often challenge us directly
to reconsider who we are and what we think.
Got their £2,000, go home,
start up in business, a new man!
Trying to find taboo subjects, and find a way of doing them
so that no-one can be offended,
is a very interesting challenge in sitcom.
That's it, now. In you go.
Isn't that better? Good man.
This will keep you nice and warm.
Sitcoms, in particular, can give voice to...
..attitudes that dare not speak their name.
And in that way, it's quite cathartic, because once you've
said things out in the open, you've acknowledged
this prejudice that you have, you've sort of...anaesthetised it.
This hasn't been cleaned out for years.
Hey, there's a little Japanese soldier in here,
still fighting the war.
You daft racist.
So the British sitcom is not just a way to lift the spirits,
but a way to enlighten us, and tonight,
we're going to look at how sitcom has dealt with everything
from our obsession with class
to our attitudes to homosexuality,
and from gender politics to race.
You've got it now, white boy.
The roots of British sitcom are found in the work
of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.
These ground-breaking writers gave us
the first landmark British sitcoms
with Hancock's Half Hour and Steptoe And Son,
shows which created the blueprints for much of the comedy to come
over the next 60 years.
BBC television presents Tony Hancock in...
Hancock's Half Hour.
Hancock's Half Hour featured Tony Hancock
as the central character,
Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, a man with delusions of grandeur
who was constantly thwarted by his own inadequacy.
I loved Hancock...
Stone me, this is hopeless.
..because it perfectly captured a sort of Little Englander mentality
that is both contemptible and lovable at the same time.
Everybody gets colds. Not like I get them.
Oh, of course they do. No, they don't.
Samples, that's all they get.
Me, I get the full output of the entire germ kingdom.
There's a slight inherent negativity,
glass-half-empty attitude that Hancock had that permeates sitcoms
right through the decades, and it's something that captures
an essence of Britishness.
The Hancock character always thought he should be living better
than he was but, I mean, that's why he, at times,
wore the astrakhan coat and the Homburg hat.
It gave him that sense of success.
BELL RINGS
Good afternoon.
I wish to fly to Australia.
What, on that or the carpet?
What I loved about Hancock in particular was that there was also
an aspiration to be artistic, and what that allowed for is
some material that was... that's ostensibly quite esoteric, like,
you know, he'd have things about poetry,
he'd talk about Bertrand Russell and make these references that,
ordinarily, you might think were beyond the ken of most people
and yet, that sitcom had huge viewing figures.
As the good poet Oscar Khayyam put it...
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
..you can fool some of the people half of the time,
you can fool half of the people all of the time,
but you cannot fool, all of the time, some of the people
who last laughed. Good luck.
After the success of Hancock's Half Hour,
Galton and Simpson created another pioneering sitcom.
Steptoe And Son gave us not only a mixture of laughter and pathos,
but also British sitcom's first working class family.
Steptoe And Son kind of broke the mould in that it was about,
you know, real situations and a tricky relationship,
and it was set on the streets of London.
What was interesting about Steptoe And Son, for me,
was that it just reflected an England that I saw then.
There was the rag-and-bone man.
Steptoe And Son tapped into the intergenerational conflict
that was increasingly common in 1960s Britain.
Harold Steptoe was an aspirational,
if sometimes pretentious, man who dreamed of a better life.
But in a decade when many people of his age were moving out
and living independent lives,
Harold was stuck in a down-at-heel rag and bone yard
with his grubby, lazy and stubborn father.
With Steptoe, the father and son
and love-hate relationship works so well because it was very funny,
also quite sad at times...
I was thinking of going on holiday on my own this year, anyway. Oh?
Cos you saw this son trying to leave his environment, and yet,
he couldn't really leave his father.
He needed his father as well.
We've been on holiday together since you was that high.
I know we have, Dad.
That's what I mean.
He is trapped by his father,
and this job that he doesn't really want to do,
and he knows he's sort of, better than it,
and he wants to move on and every time he does move on,
you get the "Oh, don't leave me!"
The more I see of Steptoe, the more I think it's in line with,
you know, Harold Pinter and Noel Coward and stuff like that,
in terms of sort of family and tension and torture.
If you're mucking about, I'll wallop you!
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
We were very honoured to have that on our screens.
In 1964, with the arrival of BBC Two,
television gained a new outlet for situation comedy,
and in December that year came the first sitcom
to be set in the North of England.
Written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais,
The Likely Lads centred on the lives of two young men in Tyneside,
set against the background of the huge social and economic revolution
of the '60s and '70s.
I was talking to somebody the other day who was saying
when his dad first saw The Likely Lads,
he was thrilled just to see his part of the world on the screen.
I thought you might fancy this at half-time.
It's not my birthday, is it?
The original Likely Lads ran for three series
and dealt with the friendship of Bob and Terry
as they navigated the changing times of the '60s.
# Oh, what happened to you?
# Whatever happened to me? #
These two Geordie characters returned to our screens in 1973
in Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?,
delivering not just laughs, but also powerful social commentary.
And of course, they've moved on, or Bob certainly has,
and Terry is the one wishing it were not that way.
The fact that he'd been out of the UK for five years
automatically meant you were going to touch on the social landscape,
social issues, because Terry was new to it all.
He felt that he'd missed it.
Death of censorship. A new morality.
Oh, Calcutta! Topless waitresses in see-through knickers.
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
They never caught on.
The topless waitresses.
Well, that's a crumb of comfort.
At least, I'd like to have been here to see them not catching on!
Permissive society, I missed it all.
It provided a commentary on these people who were...
who were trying to improve themselves,
and drink wine with their meals.
Now, I've got white, red or fizzy rose.
Well, Thelma prefers white.
It's a very interesting vignette of what, perhaps, was going on
at the time socially, with groups of people thinking,
"I just don't want to be like that any more.
"I want to improve myself, I want to get on,"
and yet, there was Terry reminding us,
"Are you sure? Is that what you want?"
Oh, and these lovely table mats. These are new.
Wow, hunting scenes.
Just haven't had them out before.
They were a present from Auntie Elsie.
Oh, your auntie Elsie.
How is she, Brenda? Is she still a cleaner down the brewery?
The social and political change in Britain of the '60s and '70s
also inspired one of the most opinionated characters ever seen
in a British sitcom.
No-one was quite prepared for the force of nature
that was Alf Garnett.
Johnny Speight said to me one day,
cos I was his agent as well,
"I want to write a series about, um...
"a family where the father keeps arguing with the son-in-law."
So I said that to the BBC and they said,
"Oh, well, we'll do that, then."
The series addressed political issues at a difficult time
in British society. As a result of post-war government policy,
the number of migrants to Britain rose in the '50s and '60s
and with mass immigration came the rise of racial prejudice,
a subject which was directly addressed in the show.
Look what's happening to your National Health Service! See?
In Till Death Us Do Part, conservative Alf Garnett
was constantly at war with his more progressive and socially liberal
daughter, Rita, and his son-in-law, Mike.
Look, up £100 million in one year, the cost of your health service!
100 million increase on it, innit?
So? So? That's all your bloody foreigners, innit?
And all the antibiotics
for all their new diseases they're bringing...
He was a very political writer, and Till Death,
it was a very political show.
It felt very real.
It felt like the conversations people were having...
in their sitting rooms and kitchens and bedrooms around the country.
Johnny Speight was doing the most difficult thing,
which is treading the line of irony, really,
in which you have to be careful that you don't write characters
that are so awful that a percentage of your audience think,
"I like this guy. He's... Finally, there's a man on television
"speaking the truth."
The ingenious thing about Speight
is that he'll put in a couple of things that would just tickle the,
you know, the nation's conscience and so, you'd be laughing with him,
too, because he'll say things that people said, felt,
but daren't say. But on the whole, yeah, you were laughing at him.
The tricky question of whether the audience was laughing
at Alf Garnett or with him was addressed by Johnny Speight himself
in a 1973 interview with Michael Parkinson.
I often wonder about Garnett.
Was he a throwback to your childhood,
or is he a discernible character that you see around you?
I see him around me all the time, not only in the East End.
I see him in the middle classes, the working...the upper classes,
I think there's too many Garnetts around. You know?
Far too many ignorant, bigoted people.
Johnny Speight did not escape criticism
when Till Death Us Do Part was broadcast.
Mary Whitehouse and the Clean Up TV campaign
were not amused by Alf Garnett.
However, Mary wasn't troubled so much by his shocking views
as by his shocking language.
Today's post brings a flood of letters bitterly criticising
remarks made in the previous week's Till Death Us Do Part.
All of them, I think, objecting to the blasphemy.
"The reason why God and the Virgin Mary hadn't had any more children,
"except Jesus Christ, was perhaps because they were on the pill."
People who pontificate about things like Alf Garnett,
"We shouldn't let him go on television," say, they themselves
are never affected by it, but they believe that everybody else is.
They're speaking on behalf of people they don't know.
And they're assuming the audience is idiots.
Well, of course, the audience
are smarter than anybody who sets themselves up as an arbiter
of what should or shouldn't be allowed to be said on television.
Johnny Speight responded to the criticism from Mary Whitehouse
in the most powerful way he could -
by making Alf Garnett her number one fan.
You want to read something a bit edifying, something a bit educative?
Educative? Yeah. Well, what are you reading anyway, Mickey Spillane?
No. No, not Mickey Spillane.
Mrs Whitehouse, innit?
Mrs Mary Whitehouse.
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
And the thing about Alf Garnett, he was weak.
He was vulnerable. You know.
And his way of dealing with that was to attack. Was to...
was to apport blame to immigrants, or, you know...
And it was a big political statement at the time.
But I think the thing about these monster characters,
who sometimes will say the most ridiculous things,
the important thing is, they don't get away with it.
You're Jewish, aren't you?
I AM NOT JEWISH!
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
You are!
You know you are.
They all know you, round this area.
And listen, your grandfather's name was Solly Diamond!
LIES! It's all lies!
Lies! Lies! It is not lies!
Race has probably moved on in the last half-century,
more than quite a few other attitudes.
And so the attitude to race then looks...bad, you know?
But it doesn't look as bad as Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes
in Curry And Chips.
Curry And Chips was a short-lived sitcom from 1969,
based on an idea by Spike Milligan and written by Johnny Speight,
starring Milligan as an Asian immigrant.
Short-lived, and indeed, more than a little ill-judged.
Curry And Chips wasn't received all that well at the time,
and probably cos it wasn't quite up to standard, to be honest.
I hardly remember it, that's not a good sign, is it?
Hey!
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
What's your name?
O'Grady.
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
Kevin O'Grady.
That's an Irish name.
Yes, I'm Irish.
How did Spike Milligan get away with that?
But, you know, I speak to my mum and my aunts,
and they talk about watching that.
You know, and they said, "Yeah, we did watch Curry And Chips.
"We watched it." And...
But I think, because there was no representation at all of diversity,
I think they felt, "Well, yeah, OK, we will watch this and, you know..."
But, yeah, I do look back at that now and go,
"I'm not quite sure how you got away with that."
It wasn't that it was racist or homophobic or anything terrible,
it just wasn't very good.
The show came to the attention
of the Independent Television Authority
and they declared that it was offensive,
and it was cancelled after just six episodes.
The subject of race was at the core of another sitcom,
broadcast on the ITV network from 1972.
Love Thy Neighbour was written by Vince Powell and Harry Driver, and
it explored the tensions that arose
when a black couple moved next door
to a suburban, white working-class couple in south London.
We must face the facts fairly and squarely.
A coloured family have come to live next door,
and it's up to us to come to terms with it.
We'll move.
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
And that was a real issue, I think, in the '70s.
And you know, you heard words like "Paki" and "whitey" and "honky",
and all these words, which you heard on the street or at the office,
but you didn't see on television.
And it was a breath of fresh air.
I don't understand you, Eddie Booth. For years,
you've been shooting off your mouth about socialism and equality.
"Equal rights for all."
Equal rights does not entitle nig-nogs to move next door.
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
With Love Thy Neighbour, I thought it was very...
It was...mild.
You know? The fact is, they're only calling me a nig-nog.
Compared to the names we were getting in the classroom,
on the playground, in the streets, you know...
This was a very, very mild show.
What's wrong with me being a blood donor?
I do have blood, you know.
Yes.
I know that, but it's coloured blood.
Love Thy Neighbour has been criticised for its
politically incorrect handling of issues of racism,
and is one of a number of sitcoms that are no longer repeated
as a result of changing attitudes.
We did watch it, and, yes, you look back, and you go...
Some of that stuff definitely wouldn't sit right today.
But, in a funny kind of way, it had its place at that time.
Our blood has matured over thousands of years.
You make it sound like wine!
Exactly.
You could say it's more like vintage champagne.
Yeah, you could...
And what's ours? Brown ale?
They might have been very big, stereotypical characters,
they might have been the butt of jokes at times,
but it was somebody who looked like our uncle.
You know? And that was...!
There's something quite warming and quite, you know...
There's quite a connection in that, really.
As well as dramatic changes in race relations,
the 1960s saw a transformation in the role of women in society.
There was a boom in the number of jobs available to young,
single women, and more girls went on to higher education.
Having lived away from home and with greater intellectual
and financial independence,
many women could now have aspirations
beyond being a wife or mother.
And in 1969, a sitcom came along that reflected just that.
The Liver Birds was written by a young Liverpudlian, Carla Lane.
And in another first, the script put two women at the heart of the story.
It took a woman writer, Carla Lane, to really put women
at the centre of the screen, and write fully-rounded women.
And explore their problems and issues and conflicts
from a woman's point of view.
How do I look?
Well, you won't exactly make Queen Magazine.
I'll be lucky if I make Horse And Hound in this!
Women had always been girlfriends and wives and sisters before,
and we were the first women who were actually the so-called stars of it.
Remember your mum when Gloria got engaged?
"Oh, my daughter, my innocent little daughter!"
Yeah, and there was our Gloria,
scoffing her pill with her elevenses.
Carla did tap in on the gradual emancipation of women, really.
That women were beginning to feel,
"Actually, we stand on our own two feet."
I tell you what, I'm going dead off this marriage lark.
The only ring I'm going to wear is the ring of confidence.
Yes. Freedom...
And it was reflected right through, really, in the theatres,
in the television, and the politics, that women began to matter.
# I am what I am
# What I am
# What I am... #
Attitudes in society were changing,
some more quickly than others.
But lagging way behind the rest was the attitude towards homosexuality.
# People have the right
# To be just who they are... #
For a long time, gay men were either ignored,
warily alluded to,
or camped up to within an inch of their screen life.
Originally, a gay artist or whatever, it wasn't discussed much.
Some now and again, I think it was rather hidden.
As though it was not going to be acceptable, or normal, or whatever.
So, with Frankie Howerd, for example...
..it wasn't referred to, but you would... He would use gestures...
..over the top.
And that's where the humour came from. You know.
John Inman used to do that, really over the top.
Mr Humphreys, are you free?
I'm busy pricing my ties, Captain Peacock.
The gentleman wishes to try on a dress.
I'm free!
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
I think the popular thing to do is to diss them,
but, you know... If your only experience of what...
What a gay man is like is Melvyn Hayes
in It Ain't Half Hot, Mum... I clung to them.
I've warned you once before!
Next time, I'll...
Knock it off! He nearly did!
We needed more, we needed better.
The bottom line was they were funny,
so it didn't really bother me too much.
It took until 1979 for sitcom to give us the first witty,
non-camp gay couple,
when Michael Grade commissioned the sitcom Agony.
# I'm feeling kind of on the shelf
# Sometimes I... #
The show featured Maureen Lipman as an agony aunt who lived
next door to Rob and Michael,
her more down-to-Earth neighbours.
We wanted two guys who looked like they had ordinary jobs,
and loved each other.
Well, now, how long has it been for you two?
It's three years today since you introduced us. No!
And you're still happily unmarried?
Made for each other.
The only reason we row is because we enjoy kissing and making up.
It seemed to us that if we could establish these people
as nice people, that would be good.
Home-made nut roast. Ooh! It's organic.
Not to make them saints, but to say,
as we had all said to each other in private conversation,
"You could live next door, you'd never know."
I keep thinking of Lawrence having a great time
with a different girl each night,
and me sitting at home with two gay boys. Nothing personal.
No, no.
To see the first gay couple that felt real, rather than...
..the more Dick Emery version of it, you know,
was to some people shocking, and some people just unusual,
and to some people a brilliant move. You know.
It... But it was definitely something that made you go,
you know, "I've not seen that before."
I've got the answer. What was the question?
The question of cheering you up!
Why don't you become gay and forget about men altogether?
Didn't work for you, did it?
People seemed to like it, too. People enjoyed it.
Not just the gay community, who finally found expression
on television in a way that wasn't kind of music hall.
It was real.
But also, the whole audience enjoyed it,
and I think it did move sitcom forward quite a bit.
As the sexual and social revolution progressed,
sitcoms continue to explore a wide range of themes and attitudes.
But there was one British preoccupation
that was returned to again and again and again.
Class.
If you're writing fiction in this country, for a British audience,
you have to be very secure in what class your characters sit.
Otherwise, the audience doesn't know where they are.
And, you know, if it's a cosy, middle-class show like...
..Terry And June, that's fine.
It knows where it sits in the hierarchy.
Despite the economic woes of the '70s,
there was a rise in consumerism
and increased spending on leisure activities and foreign holidays.
As a result, middle-class sitcoms were springing up quicker
than you could say, "Avocado bathroom suite".
Terry And June, Butterflies and The Good Life
all became huge hits.
If you look at the '70s sitcoms, stuff like The Good Life,
they're obsessed with class.
The point is, Barbara, I got it home, I put it on,
and I said to myself,
"Margo, that simply looks cheap and nasty."
So I wondered if you'd like it?
Class is a subject that absolutely runs through British comedy.
Because comedy at some point, in some way, is always about
conflict, and about wanting to get somewhere where you can't go.
And class, in the past, not so much now, I don't think,
has always been the great barrier to it, isn't it?
You know, you can't... Posh is a club you can't join.
Top of almost every classic British sitcom list is Fawlty Towers.
And in Basil Fawlty, we found the epitome of the class-obsessed,
frustrated, social-climbing middle Englander.
I don't think there can be a greater example of someone who was
trying to improve their social status than Basil Fawlty.
Beg your pardon?
Would you put both your names, please?
Well, would you give me a date?
I only use one.
You don't have a first name?
No, I am Lord Melbury, so I simply sign Melbury.
Go away.
He's fooled by anyone who's in a higher status than him,
as happens when the aristocrat comes to stay
and tries to borrow money.
And Fawlty does it, simply because he thinks this man is an aristocrat,
and therefore, he's to be trusted, there's no questions about it.
Lord Melbury, may I offer you a little aperitif, as our guest?
That's very kind of you. Dry sherry, if you please.
What else?
What's more interesting, to me, is, we're still talking about that,
as a thing. And we are still...
Sort of, even at a subconscious level, looking, immediately,
at a character and going, "What class are they?
"What do they say?" You know,
"What's their thing?" And it's often defined by that.
At the beginning of the 1980s, the new Conservative government
brought sweeping changes to Britain.
They moved to liberalise the economy through privatisation
and the promotion of entrepreneurialism.
It was a profound change that was quickly incorporated
into the world of sitcom.
The country seemed to be in the thrall of this new Prime Minister.
There was a whole sway, a whole generation of people,
who were very much anti-Thatcherite,
and a sort of groundswell of political activism,
especially with young people and students that sort of...
were very vociferous in their... antiestablishment-ism.
# Once in every lifetime
# Comes a love like this... #
When The Young Ones came along, to me it was a real revelation,
because I was a student at the time,
and it seemed to voice all the things I was preoccupied with,
in a way that many other sitcoms hadn't,
because they were different times.
It wasn't a sitcom for the people who'd been watching sitcoms.
It wasn't a family sitcom, it wasn't a middle-aged sitcom,
it wasn't a, "Let's sit cosy in front of the fire
"and all laugh at this" sitcom.
It was for teenagers, wasn't it?
No! No!
We are not watching The bleeding Good Life!
Bloody, bloody, bloody!
I hate it! It's so bloody nice!
When Ade Edmonson smashes through the titles of The Good Life,
and goes, "This is rubbish!",
I found myself going, "Yeah, it's rubbish, The Good Life.
"I'm going to be one of these people
"that thinks The Good Life is rubbish."
Even though I didn't think that.
It made me think I should think that way.
And now, as you're older, you go, God, The Good Life was brilliant!
And it's definitely, it's probably stood the test of time
more than The Young Ones. But I still love The Young Ones for...
You know, just shaking it all up.
Well, how ruddy considerate, Vivian!
Thank you very much!
Yeah, thanks, Viv, that petrol bomb's really cleared my sinuses.
The Young Ones was a show made by
a group of young and left-leaning comedians.
It threatened the middle-class and suburban status quo
that dominated British comedy in the 1970s,
and was aimed squarely at the next generation.
Well, then, I shall write to the lead singer
of Echo and the Bunnymen!
I remember, when I first saw the first episode, thinking,
"Oh, there are other people like me, who think like that."
And that was quite encouraging to me, from a creative standpoint,
because it felt like the attitudes I had
would resonate with other people.
My parents wouldn't get it, and that made its appeal all the greater.
Hello, Vivian. Piss off!
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
That's no way to talk to your mother, Vivian!
All right, then.
Piss off, Mum.
Viv was such an exaggeration of the punk cliche,
and Rick was such a great, still valid,
caricature of right-on politics.
Well, I'm going to tell Thatcher that we've got a bomb.
And that if she doesn't do something to help the kids
by this afternoon...
AUDIENCE LAUGHTER
..we're going to blow up England!
There are perfect episodes of The Young Ones,
and I just loved the...
..utter energy of it, and the stupidity of it,
and the violence of it.
Here goes... I'm completely bloody sick of this!
# Gotta get up... #
While The Young Ones' rebellion set the tone for much of the
alternative comedy to come in the '80s, more mainstream sitcoms
were also dealing with the fallout of the new political regime.
Carla Lane set her 1980s sitcom in a period of mass unemployment
in her native Liverpool.
Bread was on the runway when I arrived as controller of BBC One.
I was a huge fan of Carla's,
and I looked at it and thought, "Yeah, this is a really great show."
Bread was firmly set in Thatcher's Britain,
and charted the ups and downs of the larger-than-life Boswell family.
Number one.
House!
With most of the family out of work, they relied on trading stolen goods,
and getting every last penny they could from the benefits office.
She got a lot of criticism for writing about scroungers,
you know, they were living off the Welfare State.
I had friends who were like,
"Oh, it's a dreadful representation of unemployed people.
"Dreadful representation of Liverpool!"
But it still made me laugh.
We have got a case of incontinence in the family,
and I understand you have a special allowance for this?
We do, yes.
But owing to the sudden rush of incontinent 19-year-olds,
we're only giving it to those who qualify.
The benefit culture in Liverpool was something Carla recognised,
understood and felt confident enough to write about.
But again, it was a family, so they were very much redeemed,
because they were all struggling to survive,
and make their way in the world.
Another family adapting to the new political landscape in the 1980s
were the Trotters from Peckham.
In Only Fools And Horses,
Del Boy embraced the Conservative ideals with open arms,
and approached life with an entrepreneurial spirit
that Thatcher would surely have been proud of.
# Cos where it all comes from is a mystery... #
He was definitely a Thatcherite, wasn't he?
He would definitely have voted Tory at that point -
and constantly wanting...
It was all about self-improvement and dragging yourself up.
Tremendously British theme to it, wasn't it?
Executive mobile phone.
State-of-the-art.
You can phone someone from the top of a mountain
with one of these, you know.
It's all to do with... statellites or something.
My dad, who's a kind of old hippy left-winger,
hates Margaret Thatcher, loves Del Boy.
There's something about him - it's given a kind of human face
to that kind of money-grabbing, '80s Toryism, really.
It was about seeing a barrow boy
and wondering what his world was like, and going into that -
and the sort of pathos of someone's ambition.
Tell you what, I'll show you how it works,
I'll give you a little demonstration.
First of all, press that...
KEYPAD BEEPS
You'd see those characters make idiots of themselves,
again and again and again -
but half the time you felt for them, as well, you felt it,
and that's what makes it so good.
It's not just someone that you don't know or care about slipping up,
it's someone that you actually kind of do care about.
# From the long warm nights with the ocean breeze
# To the damp and to the rain of London city... #
Meanwhile, in another part of Peckham in the 1980s,
more history was being made.
Desmond's was the first sitcom to feature a predominantly black cast
in the workplace, and portray the black community
within a British context.
Based in a south London barbershop,
it would go on to become Channel 4's longest-running sitcom.
The whole family thing
was the fact about just reflecting the black experience
in this country,
and it's one of mobility, of education, of wanting to do well,
and every family felt that.
Hah!
Father, I can't read the paper... You can't read?
After all the education I gave you,
my son, the bank manager, can't read?
The show looked at the differing experiences
of the original immigrant members of the family
and their children, who were growing up in Britain,
and it remains one of the most successful sitcoms
that Channel 4 has ever made.
What's your paper called?
I never wrote Desmond's for black people.
We know who we are.
I wrote them for white people, so they can know who we are.
There goes my street cred.
It was from a completely different world
to what I was living in in Devon -
but the thing about a sitcom is,
because you're welcomed into that world,
it kind of brings other areas into your living room
that you can't see on a day-to-day basis,
and it's a very good way of creating social integration
without people even realising what they're watching.
Listen, you two, after you've had this,
I want you to go.
This is not a cafe, you know.
Come on, Shirl, don't be like that -
it's people like us that keep this shop going.
Without us, this place wouldn't be the same.
Without you, this place would be a barbershop.
Instead of a bookie and a social club.
Where we lived, in a little village outside of High Wycombe,
was not particularly diverse -
and here was a world that I was not exposed to,
yet here are characters that I absolutely love
and associate with.
I've got a couple of tickets
for me boxing club dinner and dance in a couple of weeks' time.
I'm fighting, I'll knock him out first round if you come.
How about it, then, eh?
SHE SPEAKS FRENCH
But even as an Asian family, we would connect with that,
we really would connect with that.
We felt it was talking about us, in a way.
We felt it was saying something about the immigrant life in Britain.
The great thing about Desmond's, and comedy specifically,
it gave you a platform to ridicule, debate or, indeed, expand on -
not necessarily your view,
but the collective view of your culture at the time.
# They say I might as well face the truth... #
Writers have often used sitcom to study our attitudes
to different sections of society,
and, in 1990, David Renwick decided it was time
to investigate how we treat our senior citizens.
Of course, the biggest problem of all
was - how do you ever replace a man
like Victor Meldrew?
Well, basically, with this box...
Because Meldrew is in that position of having to retire early,
you've still got a very active mind,
and someone who's full of creativity, if you like,
and doesn't have any focus for that.
So his domestic life becomes a drama around him, because of that.
Afternoon!
I think, after Del Boy falling through the bar,
the greatest moment ever in British sitcom
is Victor Meldrew picking up the small dog -
which I watch on YouTube once a month.
PHONE RINGS
4291?
Where the bloody hell did you come from?
PHONE RINGS
Bugger off!
A lot of people didn't actually realise
how subversive One Foot In The Grave is.
It's an extraordinarily surreal sitcom.
I've certainly wheeled a lot of old ladies about, Mrs Meldrew.
But who's going to wheel me about?
The show challenged the traditional boundaries
of more conventional sitcoms,
dealing with subjects such as death and old age
with pathos and black comedy.
Victor!
I think the marvellous thing about Victor Meldrew
was that, there but for the grace of God go I.
The things that irritated him actually irritated nearly everybody.
I was out the back working in the garden when he arrived,
so I asked him if, for the time being,
he'd put in the downstairs toilet for me.
And you know what he's done?!
He's only planted it in the bowl!
He's trapped by the conventions of old age, isn't he?
Trapped by the idea that you have to be a particular sort of person.
But also playing fantastically on the idea that, as you get older,
you really don't care much any more,
so you can just be as rude as you like.
In the 1990s, Britain was awash with a new sense of optimism.
New Labour were on the rise, Britpop was cool,
and, for a while, it seemed that things could only get better.
Likewise, many of the hit sitcoms of the era
were big, bold and even brash.
Brightest of all was a satire on excess,
which started out life as a sketch
from two of the country's funniest women -
Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.
Where is it you're going?
Aberdeen. Aber-bloody-deen!
I don't know anybody
in Aber-bloody-deen, darling!
I think the '90s was quite a kind of surface, kind of facile decade.
It was kind of between the fear of the Cold War
and the fear of post-9/11,
there was this era which was obsessed with celebrity and fashion
and kind of just having fun.
# Wheels on fire... #
You talk about a sitcom that completely caught the moment
and absolutely bottled it, and that was it.
When we started it, I remember the late George Melly on a review show
saying, "Dear, oh, dear, oh, dear,
"there is nothing funny about recovering alcoholics."
To which my response is, "Who said they were recovering?"
You're not eating, Patsy?
No, liquid lunch for me, Mrs M.
Ab Fab is just about excess, isn't it?
And that feeling, which I think was very prevalent at that point,
of how things looked being the most important thing.
Opening a shop, Pats.
Ooh, what are you going to sell?
Ooh, just gorgeous things, you know. Ooh, lovely!
What sitcom's brilliant at
is identifying a kind of social movement or type and skewering it,
and going, "This is stupid."
What we need is a princess with a press following
and a designer dress on her back!
Jonathan Swift said satire is a glass
wherein each man sees every face except his own -
and it's an interesting thing,
that when you set out with something like Ab Fab,
which is about a bit of an industry, if you like,
and you're poking fun at it.
DANCE MUSIC PLAYS
They loved it, they loved it. No, they hated me, they hated me!
No, they love, love, loved... Oh!
When Jennifer wrote it, what she was really trying to do, I think,
was to say, "Look at these people, they are a waste of space,
"they're a waste of air.
"PR is a kind of nonevent."
I'm going down in history, Pats,
as the woman that put Princess Anne in a Vivienne Westwood basque!
But it was interesting,
how the people who immediately embraced Ab Fab
and took it to their bosoms were, first, people in fashion and PR.
So either we got it wrong - which I don't think we did -
or are they just went, "Hooray! PR, you noticed! We're valuable!
"We're useful to the community."
What do you see when you look in the mirror, darling?
Me looking fabulous, what do you see?
It also objectified the time, which was materialistic,
it was putting the wrong emphasis on labels, and...
You know, not the sort of thing that was meaningful, really.
It wasn't very meaningful -
but she was being meaningful... flagging it up. Clever girl.
BOTH: # They say our love won't pay the rent... #
I'm Cher, Patsy!
I'm doing the Cher bit.
While Jennifer captured the zeitgeist
with her satire of the fashion and PR worlds,
her comedy partner, Dawn, was equally timely
with a sitcom about a very different issue affecting Britain at the time.
Good evening. Centuries of tradition and decades of campaigning
came to an end tonight
when the Church of England ordained its first women priests.
# The Lord is my shepherd... #
Just eight months after the historic ordination
of women in the Church of England,
the Vicar Of Dibley arrived on BBC One.
Written by Richard Curtis, the show introduced us to Geraldine Granger,
the surprise arrival in a small English village.
Oh, dear. Oh, my God!
You were expecting a bloke?
Beard, Bible, bad breath?
Yes, that sort of thing. Yeah.
And instead, you've got a babe with a bob cut and a magnificent bosom.
So I see.
The argument was in the air,
and I was very interested in the argument,
and I got to know a woman called Joy Carroll,
who was a female vicar, and I remember going to see her
in one of the synods where they were all arguing about the issue,
so I knew a fight was on,
and it was always my feeling
that if someone could just see a woman in that job,
their doubts would instantly evaporate,
and I think that was one of the helpful things
about The Vicar Of Dibley -
people just knew, "Oh, no, it makes total sense" -
in fact, it makes no sense that you would say a woman can't do this job.
I did actually write The Vicar Of Dibley
in order to try and win the argument.
Ah, Owen, this is Geraldine -
she's the new vicar.
Hello.
No, she isn't.
Why not?
She's a woman!
Oh, you noticed!
These are such a giveaway, aren't they?
It's a studio sitcom, it's family-orientated.
You kind of forget that the idea of a woman vicar,
at the time, felt kind of controversial -
or it was a new thing.
It's kind of amazing that sitcom can take an idea like that
and smuggle it in to 8:30 on a Thursday night on BBC One,
or whenever it was on, and make that feel normal and accepted,
and that's kind of a brilliant thing
that Richard Curtis and Paul Mayhew-Archer, who wrote it, did.
The idea that, having seen Geraldine Granger at work,
you would ever think, "Well, of course there shouldn't..."
You know, "The idea of women priests is nonsense."
She's unanswerable, really. Every parish should be so lucky.
RAPS: Nothing could be hotter Nothing could be slicker
Lock up your son and daughter Cos here comes the vicar!
I was really keen, in The Vicar Of Dibley,
to write someone nice and funny -
because I think that's the British joke, really,
which is that we're always in trouble trying to be nice -
we can never break the truth to people.
And there is great tradition of angry people in sitcoms.
You know, the Arthur Lowe, Basil Fawlty -
the greatest of them all -
One Foot In The Grave. Blackadder's in that tradition,
and I was really glad to be in the nice tradition, as well.
While Dibley was quietly subversive on the subject of women vicars,
another clerical comedy was about to air
which was equally subversive,
and had much to say about our neighbours in Ireland
and the role religion played in national life.
We originally thought no-one would want to do a sitcom
about Irish people,
so we wrote it in the form of a series of mock documentaries
with a different character every week -
and the one we handed in as an example was Father Ted.
They liked it, but they said,
"No-one will want to see a different character every week.
"Can you do this character and do him every week?"
And we were like, "Really?!"
They actually asked us for an Irish sitcom.
..eck! Arse!
These really do work, don't they, Dougal?
Oh, you're right, there, Ted.
Feck! Arse! Feck!
The British-Irish relationship has not always been a happy one.
I can well see why the idea of putting across these stereotypes
almost in an ironic sense, "OK, if you want that kind of Irishmen,
"here they are," you know?
We used to like taking the extreme approach to everything.
So, if Jack was going to be an alcoholic,
then he was going to drink things like Toilet Duck.
Oh, no, Ted. Look at this. Oh, God...
And if Dougal was going to be stupid,
then he was going to be stupid to an extent
that you've never seen before.
Like, someone who, when you turn out the light, turn it back on again,
he thinks he's had a sleep.
Anyway, night, Dougal.
Night, Ted.
Oh, damn!
Oh...
Ahh!
'To be able to go in and explode a few myths...'
DOUGAL WHISTLES
No, Dougal it's not morning.
'..we built him in an image that we liked
'and we had fun with.'
I don't know, it was healthy.
The larger than life approach to sitcom would continue
throughout the decade,
and was exemplified by the outrageous flat-share sitcom
Gimme Gimme Gimme.
Following in the footsteps of the huge characters
in Absolutely Fabulous, Tom Farrell and Linda La Hughes
were queenie, camp and a long, long way over the top.
The show revelled in innuendo,
and in Tom it also gave us the most out and proud gay character
we'd seen in British sitcom.
# Gimme, gimme, gimme a man! #
The differentiation between him and, say, John Inman's character
in Are You Being Served? was at least Tom had a dick
and he was going out and he was copping off, and he was openly gay.
He wasn't in the closet.
'He was an actively sexual gay man,
'so that was the difference for me -
'that that step forward was being taken.
'The gay press hated it.'
I had done that play and film, Beautiful Thing,
which had a rose-tinted ending and positive role models
for young gay people, and then here I write a...
a comedy show about a vile, camp queen,
and I suppose they were hoping it would be the next role model,
but it wasn't.
Did you have a good evening, sir?
I am twatted.
Is that a Welsh name, sir?
Linda and Tom are not an ideal couple...
Do you have to eat with your mouth open?!
How else am I supposed to get the bleedin'...?
'..but we love them.'
We love them for the extremity of what they do.
I'm reading my stars. Shush.
Is the moon in Uranus?
One was not quite as pretty as she thought she was,
and neither was the other.
# Knowing me, knowing you
# Ah-ha... #
Towards the end of the decade,
we got another sitcom character with ideas above his station.
We'd previously seen and heard Alan Partridge on a radio show,
in a sketch show and a mock chat show.
You'd better believe it, babe. There's a new chat in town.
His latest incarnation, I'm Alan Partridge,
explored the character who was trying to change with the times -
and usually got it wrong.
Current affairs...
Would it be terribly rude to stop listening to you
and go and speak to somebody else?
'The character's definitely evolved.'
The pathos creeps in more and more as the years go on.
He's playing catch-up with changing social attitudes,
and when we write the character, we grapple with those things.
We're not gay!
I've nothing against them, it's just...
As I see it, God created Adam and Eve.
He didn't create Adam and Steve.
Whereas before, it would have been funny to laugh at someone
who was just prejudiced and narrow-minded,
it was funny to see Alan struggle with attitudes
that maybe don't come naturally to him,
but he tries to be modern, if you like.
Can I have a sniff? Yeah, sure. Great.
HE SNIFFS
Mm...
Actually, sorry, I shouldn't touch members of staff -
unless I'm reprimanding them,
and then I'll put you across my knee and smack your bare bottoms.
Normally, comic characters live within their thing and their world,
and that's where it exists.
It is incredibly rare to have a character
just to span...a lifetime within your lifetime
and never, ever let you down.
Ben, can you take this up to my room? Yeah, sure, no problem.
Cheers.
'There's something about...'
putting it in a comedy, also, which allows you licence
to talk about things that, otherwise, you wouldn't be able to.
# Curly, black and kinky...
# Mixed with yellow chinky. #
Can you still say that?
Oh, you're all right with that, like,
cos it's a race of people, AND it's a food.
Chinese...
Yeah, you're absolutely right, yeah.
'Alan Partridge, in his ignorance, can say things'
which reflect deeply held prejudices,
and can say them out loud, and people will laugh at them
because they realise the joke is on Alan.
If I were to say some of the things Alan said,
as myself, unironically, I'd be in deep trouble.
You're listening to North Norfolk Digital,
Norfolk's...North Norfolk's best music mix.
In his modern incarnation,
he tries to reflect those social changes,
so Alan is aware that, for example, it's OK to be gay,
'so he tries to reflect those things.
'He's aware of the zeitgeist, and tries to fit in with it.'
..kicking off your shoes and socks
and sharing an expensive bottle of wine with the woman in your life.
Or the man in your life, if you're a woman.
Or, the man in your life, if you're gay.
Yeah - oh, y-yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely, yes. Um...
I will be the first to hold my hands up and say,
in the past, circa 1983, I developed a fairly robust dislike
for the gay community -
but that was before I met Dale Winton.
The '90s was the era of outrageous characters
and exaggerated situations,
but the following decade saw a distinct change in direction,
and a new realism began to appear in sitcom.
Characters still had their flaws,
but now they found themselves in more naturalistic surroundings.
Ten years ago, the big things in British sitcom
were The Royle Family and The Office.
It set an agenda to be very naturalistic and real.
Are you going to make that cup of tea, Barb, or what?
The Royle Family, I think,
is probably the most important comedy that I ever watched.
It was the first time I had ever seen on TV...
a family like mine, watching TV.
The feeling of my dad in his regular seat, my mum there,
one or both of my sisters,
me, and then watching almost this sort of mirror image,
not in terms of situation or set, but just the dynamics of family.
Dad! Stop fiddling with yourself.
I'm not fiddling with meself.
I paid a quid for these underpants.
I've got 50-pence worth stuck up me arse.
I think if it hadn't been for The Royle Family, I don't know if...
I don't know if Gavin & Stacey would exist.
One of the great things about sitcom is we've been able to fit in...
We haven't got imprisoned by the form,
which you sometimes think American sitcoms have,
that they expect a certain level of brightness
and a certain level of noise,
and I think one of the brilliant things
that particularly the BBC has done
is experiment with the shape, form and texture of sitcom
over the years.
One of the boldest sitcoms the BBC has ever produced
turned out to be one of the most successful.
The Office was a mockumentary set in the Slough branch
of the Wernham Hogg paper company.
While the format was relatively new,
the themes that the show dealt with were familiar to British audiences.
Lovely Dawn.
Dawn Tinsley. Receptionist...
Social awkwardness, self-importance,
frustration and desperation.
I'd say, at one time or another,
every bloke in the office has woken up at the crack of dawn.
HE SNIGGERS What?!
The Office would have captured that feeling at the time
of the early noughties, of kind of, you know, "Why have a job?
"Why have a career?
"Why do you want to spend your life doing this?"
And that does reflect that people are no longer
going in to having a job for life, you know?
It was saying, "Hey, look, it's all changed
"and we haven't even noticed."
There's these brilliant kind of examinations of people's attitude
to things like race and sexism,
and how that laddishness of the '90s
against the politically correct movement in the '90s
clashed together.
Do you mind kissing me on the nose?
No. Put your quid in. OK.
Kiss me on the nose. Ooh!
Hey, what do I get for a tenner?
Oh, no! Squeal, piggy, squeal.
HE SQUEALS
..and I think David Brent and the character Finchy
embody that really well, and there's just really good little set pieces
that actually deal with things
that maybe, you know, it would take someone to write a 10,000-word thesis
at university to deal with,
and they deal with it in six lines, or something.
Real lives were back in vogue,
and another hugely relatable situation -
the classic boy meets girl story -
was playing out in both Essex and South Wales.
WOMAN LAUGHS
Stop it!
Everyone's looking at me.
Another big hit, this sitcom was about the modern experience
of parenthood, family life, loyalty, friendship and love.
It was unconventional in that it didn't rely on
the anguish or frustration of the central characters for laughs.
Oh, can you believe we're actually going to meet tomorrow?
Only 17 hours to go now, babes.
For a British sitcom, it was remarkably pain free.
One of the things about sitcom is it can be as far away,
like Blackadder, as you like, from any life that you know,
and then incredibly close -
and just the kind of intimate realism of Gavin & Stacey I adore.
I also love the fact that Gavin & Stacey is nice.
That's one of the great things about sitcom -
it doesn't need to point towards catastrophe.
It can point towards resolution, unlike most drama.
Stacey.
Oh, my God!
Hiya.
When did you get here? I thought you weren't going to come.
Of course I was going to come. I've only been here ten minutes.
I like your cardie. Cheers. River Island.
Oh, so is my belt! Amazing.
I don't think we set out to make a show that was warm,
but we definitely wanted to make a show that had a heart in it.
What's all the noise?
Everything all right?
Oh, don't worry, Pam, your little prince is fine!
It was about people
who loved each other, mostly.
Even when they would have rows or not get on,
it was still from a place of warmth, you know?
Very, very unusual in British comedy to be completely positive.
You've got to have a character who's annoyed or upset
or hasn't achieved - but it didn't have any of those.
It was just a really sweet love story
peopled by very funny characters.
Don't promise me nothing.
If this is all it's meant to be, I'm still so happy I met you.
I think there has always been shows that have
reflected where we're at as a country.
I mean, if we sat down to try and write Gavin & Stacey today,
it would be a very different show - purely because of social media.
You know, you can't make a boy meets girl...
Characters who don't...
Who've only seen a photo of each other,
and don't know much about each other's life,
because you are in a world of Facebook and googling people
and Skype and FaceTime, and all of those things,
and Twitter feeds and stuff like that, so...
that, on a very linear level, will always reflect the times.
If you say it, I'll say it back.
I love you. I love you too. Ooh!
In the last 60 years,
British sitcom has entertained and challenged in equal measure,
and done an excellent job of showing us who we are.
The gift of making the whole nation laugh
for half an hour every week is a very special moment.
Light, light...
The great sitcom characters can have as much impact on our lives
as real people.
I do think about Jim Royle.
I wonder if Anthony went to university.
I hope he did. Do you know what I mean?
There's something profoundly satisfying
about the way that sitcoms are shaped.
If you had to say... What I watch now most on TV,
we're in a golden age
of situation comedy, or half-hour comedy.
British sitcom continues
to point out our strengths and our faults,
and proves time and again
that the best way to take on a serious subject
is to make it funny.
If you can make someone laugh,
it is a pleasure that doesn't cost any money,
so it's a life-affirming thing
that you can do...that you don't need any equipment for.