Page 7 of Today, Thursday 15th July 1993:
OLD KINGS OF COMEDY ON THE BBC'S SITCOM CRISISPage 7 of Today, Wednesday 21st July 1993:Why did the laughter have to die?
by DOMINIC MIDGLEYIT WAS etched in stone: BBC comedies are the best in the world. Even though we've lost the Empire and the National Health Service has taken to its bed, the sun will never set on Auntie's sense of humour.
Well, that the theory. The truth is that chuckles are hard to come by in today's streamlined BBC.
The director general may have a mission to explain, but he doesn't appear to have a mission to raise a laugh. You have to go right down to number 37 in TV's top 50 before you come across a BBC comedy - and then it's a repeat.
In fact, all three of the BBC's light entertainment entries in the audience chart are reruns: Birds of a Feather, The Good Life and Open All Hours.
The golden age of British television comedy is well and truly over.
Critics round up the usual suspects - too many news people at the top, too little cash - but the root of the decline is an invasion by the men in grey suits of territory once firmly in the hands of the writers and producers with a direct line to the national funny-bone.
Ray Galton of the legendary Galton and Simpson partnership, who wrote for Tony Hancock and produced the classic series Steptoe and Son, recalls the late Tom Sloan, then head of light entertainment, offering 10 half-hour slots, saying: "You can do what you like." Rash? Perhaps. Unusual? Certainly. But it was this trust that produced some of the best TV comedy in the world. And there is no place for it in John Birt's bureaucratic BBC.
One of Sloan's successors was John Howard Davies, who left the BBC for Thames and is now an independent producer.
HE SAYS of the Sloan incident: "It shouldn't really happen like that, but then it was an experimental period.
"The BBC had much more money. Income from the licence fee was going up every year because of the introduction of colour and they could plough more resources and money into programmes.
"It was a golden era and thank God I worked in it.
"The main problem with the BBC at the moment is it seems to have lost its bottle in programme-making terms. Too many people have to agree before a programme is commissioned. Nothing is done on instinct, everything is done on logic."
Johnny Speight, who created Till Death Do Us Part, is working on a new series of In Sickness And Health. He reckons he is one of the lucky ones. And he sees this as part of the problem. "Maybe it's because the writers who wrote those shows aren't employed any more," he says. "Perhaps it's all down to ageism, the culling of the seniors.
"Part of all this political correctness: you can only work up to 45 and then you are put out to grass. I don't know whether younger people are cheaper or what.
"But it seems to me that a lot of young people are employed beyond their capabilities. Look at our Prime Minister.
"I remember talking to (playwright) Harold Pinter about how standards were failing, and he said the worst part of it was these were the standards the people coming into the business would be aiming at.
"Instead of raising standards, they seem to be more interested in lowering the fences so people can get over them more easily. It applies to drama and current affairs as well.
"There's a big rumour going around that it's the university mafia. They're all buddies and give each other work.
"I go round universities quite a lot and I find that all they want to do is be in the media. They don't seem to want to go into industry, the lifeblood of the country, any more.
"In the old days of showbiz, like in any industry, you'd have worked your way up from the bottom. But it doesn't happen that way now."
So what of the future? The BBC1 controller Alan Yentob has already made one contribution to the cause of quality programming by ditching Eldorado.
But many feel that the intellectual who arrived from BBC2 would be happier watching a Ukrainian art movie than sitting through Bobby Davro's Rock With Laughter.
"I can't really see Yentob being at home with the likes of Bruce Forsyth and Jimmy Tarbuck," says Galton.
"Not that most people would be, but it's just not his world. Birt looks like he should work for Abbey National anyway.
"In the so-called golden age of comedy, most people in positions of power were army captains.
"That was one of the things Hancock didn't like about the BBC - everyone had a military background. But it didn't stop them being responsible for good and popular shows.
"I AM pessimistic at the moment. The Beeb is not the Beeb I grew up with.
"Programmes used to have to fight to get ratings but they got them by exciting people. People rushed home to catch programmes and then talked about them all the next day.
"I overheard somebody from one of the ITV companies saying you don't need good programmes because you can market bad ones. I don't think people are such fools."
Absolutely hilariousPages 4 and 5 of Part Two of the Guardian, Friday 20th September 1996:Sitcoms dying? We're still laughing, says the BBC
LAST Thursday, in an article entitled "Why did the laughter have to die?", TODAY lambasted the BBC for the quality of its TV comedy programmes. We pointed out that its highest light entertainment entry in the TV top 50 was at number 37 - and that all three of its entries were repeats. We spoke to comic scriptwriting greats such as Johnny Speight (Till Death Us Do Part) and Ray Galton (Steptoe And Son) who argued that things are not what they were.
But here MARTIN FISHER, head of BBC Television Comedy, goes on the counter-attack in a vigorous defence of his regime...
SO THE Golden Age of Comedy is over. Well, all I can say is that it takes a long time for comedy to go bronze, let alone gold. Some of the comedies today hailed as classics would never have reached that status if they had been judged by just one series.
Dad's Army was originally shown to three separate audiences, all of which gave it the thumbs-down. BBC bosses disagreed and the rest is history.
Only Fools And Horses was at first believed to be "too downmarket" for BBC audiences - but a second series was commissioned nonetheless and the programme has gone on to become a British institution.
Its creator, John Sullivan, believes that ITV wouldn't have had the confidence to back a second series.
"The BBC has the courage of its convictions," he says. "It transmits second series of comedies to give them a chance to catch on with the public.
"If Only Fools And Horses, One Foot In The Grave, Blackadder and Dad's Army had all been ITV programmes, they would been killed off on the showing of their first series."
No, comedy is still king at the BBC. One Foot In The Grave recently attracted more than 18 million viewers to BBC1, the Jennifer Saunders/Joanna Lumley comedy Absolutely Fabulous walked away with the BAFTA Best Comedy Award this year, and BBC comedy has dominated the BAFTA Awards for the past decade.
DAVID Renwick, the writer who gave us Victor Meldrew the "capped crusader" and folk hero of the Nineties in One Foot In The Grave, endorses Sullivan's point of view.
"The BBC is unrivalled in its ability to nurture programmes in which it has faith," he says. "It has the kind of creative scheduling that ensures programmes are given the best chance to build up audiences."
Johnny Speight and Ray Galton are right when they say that the BBC isn't the same as it used to be. Nothing is the same as it used to be. The BBC's comedy output must move with the times, while retaining its production standards, if it is to appeal to today's audiences.
David Renwick believes that there is a danger in having one foot in the past.
"I have the greatest respect for the work of Speight, Galton and Simpson, but comedy reflects the society we live in - and there has been a sea-change," he says.
"In my experience of working with the BBC, the climate is more receptive than ever to innovative scripts."
This autumn and winter will see the return of many comedies that have won viewers' affections, including Keeping Up Appearances, Waiting For God, Chef, Two Point Four Children, Birds Of A Feather, As Time Goes By and Last Of The Summer Wine.
There will also be six new comedies on BBC1 and a new series of BBC2 pilots harnessing fresh talent and scripted, in the main, by writers new to television.
The BBC has always had an outstanding record for attracting top performers of the calibre of French and Saunders, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmonson, Alexei Sayle, Victoria Wood, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.
Our situation comedies have produced wonderful characters such as Richard Wilson's Victor Meldrew, David Jason's Del Boy, Patricia Routledge's Hyacinth Bouquet and birds of a feather Pauline Quirke and Linda Robson.
JOHN Sullivan believes that it would be foolish to write off a wealth of comedy for the occasional failure. "I've spent 17 years with the BBC. although I've been offered more money from ITV companies," he says.
"I stay loyal because of the quality, commitment and love that the BBC puts into its productions. If there has been a poor crop occasionally, so what?
"You don't dismiss Manchester United for one lost match and you don't condemn Bordeaux for one bad bottle of wine."
● WHAT do YOU think? Write to TODAY, 1 Virginia St, London E1 9DB.
Britannia rules the waves...Page 9 of Part Two of the Guardian, Friday 27th September 1996:No way, says American critic Elaine Showalter, who has spent a long miserable summer watching British television and its professional viewers
TUBBY PASSMORE, the hero of David Lodge's bestseller, Therapy, is a writer of a successful TV sitcom called The People Next Door. He is also chronically depressed. Tubby's cognitive psychotherapist thinks he suffers from a lack of self-esteem, and Tubby himself believes there's an epidemic of lack of self-esteem. "It was a time of hope ... when we were beating the world in the things that really mattered to ordinary people, sport and pop music and fashion and television."
I've thought about Tubby and his sitcom a lot. Pop music and fashion are holding their own. So what about television? Thirty years on, is England still beating the world? In a recent poll in London, 60 per cent said yes, probably thinking of Pride and Prejudice and other dramatic glories that carry on the golden ages. But American sitcoms are taking over the audience, and there is increasing evidence that British ones are worrying about the people next door.
I had planned to take a reality check, to do a British TV marathon, the way British TV critics hit New York and hole up in the Paramount Hotel with the zapper and a minibar of cold Buds. But there didn't seem to be any British TV to watch, or not as such. Coronation Street, to be sure, but otherwise five minutes of this, 15 of that, lots of American movies, sports, documentaries on the plight of the Israeli gazelle or sex among the very old.
I was fascinated, though, by the number of column inches devoted to previews, reviews, and opinions. The quantity of British TV criticism is in inverse proportion to the quantity of new British television. Many talented writers are writing about television, but few seem to be writing for it. The contrasts between tube and text suggest that there is a crisis at the moment is British popular TV. In a speech to this year's Banff International Television Festival, Melvyn Bragg argued that television was too infatuated with the present and that its "future growth must lie in a steady cultivation of the past". But most critics think that an obsession with the past is already the burden of British TV. As the Guardian's Stuart Jeffries has observed: "Many Britons are afraid of the present and want to wallow in the dimly remembered, perhaps kinder past."
Writers in the newspapers and magazines have been brooding or bragging about the differences between British and American sitcoms, TV, sports. Journalists disapproved of the Olympics - the patriotism, the commercialism, the unseemly hustle.
Of the success of American sitcoms, Nigel Planer said American audiences liked enterprise and equality between the classes, while "we want irreconcilable differences. Maybe because that's the way we feel - powerless. Also, you can't use smart heroes in British comedy. To be the hero of an American sitcom, you have to be smarter than anyone else." Simon Nye, the writer of Men Behaving Badly, says: "Modern American sitcoms are like stretch limousines: they're slick, expensive, and they go on for ever. A British sitcom is more like an old Triumph motorbike: magnificent when running properly, but hard work."
Television critics, though, noticed the hard work, sharp writing and strong casting that had gone into the success of Seinfeld, Friends and Frasier. Perhaps this success has something to do with the self-confidence expressed in American sitcoms - which, moreover, do not object to attractive actors. Nicholas Barber of The Independent admitted that Friends was very funny, despite its cast of "impossibly well-dressed, breathtakingly gorgeous, painfully witty" New Yorkers, and conceded that "a bit of physical beauty seemed a small price to pay" for non-stop laughs. In The Times, Brenda Maddox wrote: "The Simpsons tells you all you need to know about America today. Why can't someone do the same for Britain?"
Victor Lewis-Smith, of the London Evening Standard, is the most hard-hitting, principled, passionate TV critic in Britain today. He cares about television. It doesn't seem that he is writing about it until something better comes along. Unquestionably London TV reviewers are every bit as witty, gorgeous, and well-turned-out as their New York equivalents.
But overall I found British TV criticism a disappointment. How can the country with the finest cultural journalism in the world, with pop music critics who compare Charlie Watts to Samuel Beckett, continue to treat TV reviewing as badinage? At worst (need I mention A A Gill in the Sunday Times?), the chief qualification for writing about TV seems to be a sneering, dandyish contempt for the medium and its proletarian audience, and an overweening self-regard.
In my view, Clive James did British television a great disservice by establishing banter as the appropriate form for its critics. James set out a dismaying view of TV aesthetics in a collection of pieces for the Observer: "Television is not a medium - at least not in the sense that McLuhan and lesser pundits tried to call it a medium, with special properties shared by no other medium. Television is a medium only in the sense that a window is a medium. His view, which treats all television as shared event or unmediated experience, has prevailed.
His reviews show a preference for easy targets, such as the Eurovision Song Contest. Yet he was fussy about the way actors read Shakespearian verse, and got a lot of mileage out of Johnny Foreigner's funny accent, such as a Japanese TV correspondent reporting the royal wedding ("Royaroo Famiree is so exciting reahree"). Re-reading these reviews is a startling reminder of the casual xenophobia of the past, but otherwise doesn't teach much about the development of British television in the 1970s and 1980s.
So how will the latest British imports - both starting this week - work on American TV? The hilarious and sadistic One Foot In The Grave is much softer as a vehicle for Bill Cosby, but the show's premise is so clever it will probably work anyway. But I found Men Behaving Badly unfunny, charmless, and clumsily written, very different from Nye's witty novel. The production values seemed crude, and I couldn't understand the casting either - why would these men choose these women? NBC has made a lot of changes, particularly in putting together a Friends-style cast. But it still looks dire, clonking, and unsophisticated in the context of NBC's powerhouse comedy line-up. Let's not forget that American television has done versions of this good ol' boy, New Lad shows many times, largely without success. In 1995, cable network UPN tried out Pig Sty, about five men in a two-room Manhattan apartment. In 1996, Fox brought us Local Heroes, about four beer-drinking, marriage-dodging buddies in Pittsburgh. I suspect that another guy straining coffee grounds through his jockey shorts won't catch on either.
What I miss most about British television comedy these days in irony. You know it must be in trouble when the Times Literary Supplement runs pieces about the aesthetic of the native sitcom. I know that British journalism can't get through the week without invoking the myth of the unironic American. Simon Nye clings to this in the face of powerful contrary evidence. "Why," he wonders, "in a country, not known for its sense of irony, are two of the most watched shows Friends and Seinfeld, which ooze cool, knowing detachment?" Maybe, bro, because this treasured British belief that Americans lack irony is blinding you to the truth that we love it. Have you ever watched M.A.S.H, The Simpsons, Beavis and Butthead or David Letterman? Bill Bryson says that Americans are so devoid of irony that we haven't even got an equivalent term for "taking the piss". Hello? Has Bryson been in Yorkshire so long he's forgotten how to say "put-on", let alone "camp", "goof" or "riff"?
While British comedy writers are congratulating themselves on their superior sense of irony, American critics such as Andrew Delbanco describe irony as "the dominant style of contemporary American culture".
British television has produced some of the most innovative and influential contributions to contemporary TV programming, from Monty Python and The Singing Detective to Absolutely Fabulous. But TV irony needs an intellectually-committed cadre of TV critics to sustain it. We don't have anything approaching a poetics of TV criticism. The daily and weekly review columns could be doing more to educate viewers and to pressure stations to produce and retain quality programming. irony is the wave of the television future; why doesn't Britannia seize the chance to rule it?
Elaine Showalter is a TV critic for People magazine and Professor of English at Princeton University.
Courage under fireSimon Nye
, the creator of Men Behaving Badly, responds to Elaine Showalter's assault on British television, which appeared in the Friday Review last nextI'M GOING to attempt to rebuff Elaine Showalter's hilariously jingoistic view of her native America as the new home of irony (Guardian, September 20). In so doing, I shall be defending Men Behaving Badly, which I write, against her criticisms and against the embittered rantings of the local TV pundit (Guardian, June 28 - must contact new cuttings service). Oh, what the hell, I'll also say something outrageously trenchant about the oppressive culture of criticism of Britain today (Guardian, every day), and comment on the transfer of the show to America (Guardian, September 23).
I am assured that the subject of Men Behaving Badly will then be closed, hopefully for ever. It is, after all, only a situation comedy about two rather dense men.
It is difficult to take Elaine Showalter's critique of British television seriously when she caricatures it as: "Five minutes of this, 15 minutes of that, lots of American movies, sports, documentaries on the plight of the Israeli gazelle or sex among the very old." This suggests either that she was tuned into Belgian TV by mistake or that she was watching the right channels but kept fainting for long periods.
Whatever your view of British television - and having watched Kilroy I'm not blind to its faults - this is a golden age of factual programming, when every week throws up a dozen quality documentaries. Given her preferences, Showalter would no doubt advice the BBC to divert all the money it spent on The People's Century and Fine Cut into one wise-cracking team-written sitcom because that's how much it costs to produce a few episodes of Friends or even - more to the point - Home Improvement.
And, I'm sorry, Elaine, but goddammit, we care about the Israeli gazelle, whatever it is.
She also foolishly attaches herself to the irony bandwagon at a time when everyone knows that we've had it up to here with irony. We've started sending irony back to the kitchen to be heated through. It could be ironic indeed if, just as American gets the bang of the Big I, everyone else is embarking on exciting new adventures like warmth, sincerity and plain-speaking.
But, sadly, the irony theory doesn't really stand up. How much irony was there in NBC's reinvention of the Olympic Games as the Games Featuring Lots Of Plucky Americans Competing Against A Few Annoying Foreigners? Not so much irony as plasticity. Or in the networks' continuing refusal to broadcast any programmes made outside its 51 states? Precious little irony in the great swathe of US programming from Beverley Hills 90210 to Melrose Place, in its daytime schedule or in the splurge of shows featuring helicopters racing across town in search of car crashes, killer fires or murder victims huddled in bundles oozing blood across the tarmac.
I exaggerate, as you do. Seinfeld, Friends, Letterman, Larry Sanders - these are television programmes that make life worth living, rustling as they do with a dry, peculiarly American intelligence. But the US version of Men Behaving Badly, and to a lesser extent the English one, is partly a reaction to that urban sophistication, and surely a worth while one. We're saying: Ok, we've agreed that we love lychees, and these are the best lychees in the world, but now let's go out and grab ourselves some bananas.
It's an overloaded market over there: Caroline In The City shares jokes with Ellen who is sleeping with Frasier and Murphy Brown, a close personal friend of Grace Under Fire, itself related to Roseanne, and so on. Much as I love comedy, maybe it's time to commission some documentaries.
But I hestiate to criticise. There is far too much of that going on already. It's heard not to agree with Elaine Showalter's perception that most British TV critics see themselves as personalities rather than reviewers. Stuart Jeffries (one of the few critics she commends) writes in the Guardian of Men Behaving Badly: "It has tapped into the zeitgeist and has won a ridiculous number of awards. It has become a national institution. No wonder I dislike it so much." Fair enough - I don't always like the show myself - but it is hard to imagine a book reviewer or a dance critic damning the subject of their review simply because people enjoy it in large numbers.
The critic-as-comedy-turn approach is fine if done well, and it is no secret among viewers and readers which of them does it badly. Special mention in this regard must go to Roy Hattersley, who has topped his regrettable performance in keeping the Labour Party in the wilderness throughout the 1980s by producing a TV column which is almost certainly ghosted by a 12-year-old schoolboy. Contrast Victor Lewis-Smith or Nancy Banks-Smith, who don't just know a joke when they see one, they can also write a joke.
I speak as someone who has been treated well by the critics and even learnt from them. Nevertheless it is hard not to feel that the real action is in making and enjoying the programmes. The drudgery, as in life, is in judging and disliking. If making a TV programme is like having sex (it's actually not quite that good), then being a TV critic is like having to come in afterwards and change the sheets. I may regret this analogy when I spend my twilight years reviewing satellite TV for the Brighton & Hove Gazette.
