The British Broadcasting Corporation has a new Chairman. Samir Shah took up his role at the beginning of March, telling staff that, from hereon in, “We [the BBC] must be the home for showcasing the full range of British culture and talent, geographically of course, but also in terms of class and thought in all its diversity.”
Did Mr. Shah really mean these fine words, though, or were they merely All Gas and Gaiters?
Are You Being Served?
How in touch with the average British person outside the usual BBC bubble is Shah likely to be? Well, according to his CV, he was born in India, has a CBE, was privately educated at West London’s Latymer Upper School, has an Oxbridge doctorate for his 1979 thesis ‘Aspects of the geographic analysis of Asian immigrants in London’ and is a known quangocrat, being Chairman of the Runnymede Trust race-relations think-tank between 1999-2009. In other words, he probably wasn’t part of the core target audience for old episodes of Spike Milligan’s Curry & Chips.
Possibly Shah’s words about “showcasing the full range of British culture and talent… in terms of class and thought” were influenced by the release of a report from those unlikely blue-collar champions at Ofcom back in December, criticising the broadcaster for failing to appeal more meaningfully to working class audiences, who often felt poorly served and patronised by the BBC’s output, which is clearly not aimed at the degenerate likes of them.
If there is one particular genre of programming Mr. Shah should concentrate on refocusing towards the benefit of a working class audience, however, it is surely comedy – specifically, that of the sitcom, once one of the BBC’s main areas of acknowledged expertise, but now one of its greatest weaknesses.
Curb Your Enthusiasm
One of the few relatively popular sitcoms from the corporation, the comedian Lee Mack’s long-running Not Going Out has just finished a repeat-run on BBC One, having notched up its hundredth episode with a festive special on Christmas Eve. And yet, despite being demonstrably popular, the show was nearly strangled at birth, only escaping cancellation early on in its run following an online audience petition. As Mack has complained, ever since the show started broadcasting in 2006, “broadsheet snobs have been asking ‘How can this show be on television in the modern age?’ That’s not the question. The question is, what is it about this show that is winding you up? Audiences love this sort of comedy.”
And there, Mr. Mack inadvertently answers his own question. If audiences love his shows, then this does not really matter, as the modern-day BBC quite self-evidently hates the vast majority of its own viewers – who, quite logically, now increasingly hate it right back.
For Mack, the sitcom itself is an inherently working class artform, and one which, crucially, bypasses the traditional role of the upper-middle class critic as an arbiter of quality. If an audience is laughing at the jokes in a show – even if that is an episode of the allegedly primitive half-hour of juvenile knob, poo and bum jokes for retarded Northern whippet-breeders that is Not Going Out – then, says Mack, “it negates their [the critics’] job… if your job is to make them [the audience] laugh, and they laugh, then what can the critic say?”
With other, more critically acclaimed – but distinctly unfunny – modern day BBC ‘sadcoms’ of the Fleabag or Motherland type, however, the broadsheet critic or BBC commissioner’s role becomes more amenable to his high opinion of himself as an aesthetically enlightened cultural gatekeeper. What is a sadcom, precisely? In a laudatory profile, the Guardian helpfully explains: “Most of the time, they won’t have you doubled up with laughter. By unshackling themselves from the promise of gag after gag, they are free to be as interesting and progressive as they like.”
A dire, unfunny, painfully woke s(h)itcom with few real jokes in it, then – Rev as opposed to Father Ted, basically. To the typical Guardian critic or BBC commissioning editor, if the audience fails to laugh at Fleabag, then perhaps this does not necessarily indicate that Fleabag is not particularly funny: maybe it just demonstrates the audience is not intellectually or morally advanced enough to appreciate all the jokes, let alone the general Leftish message being imparted. Therefore, guesses Mack, “I just think they just said, ‘Let’s call it comedy-drama instead’.”
Mack recalls one dismissive Guardian review of his show, in which a central criticism of it was that, quite shockingly, “The studio audience falls about laughing.” Heaven forfend!
Studio-based sitcoms filmed before crowds are now something of a rarity in TV-land, perhaps because, if dismal crap such as Alma’s Not Normal or Man Like Mobeen were indeed filmed in front of real, live, human beings, they would most likely be received with the stony silence they so richly deserve. As Mack rationalised about the Guardian’s bizarre objection to his comedy show being received with actual human laughter: “Early on in your career you think, ‘I wish they weren’t so sniffy about what I’m doing.’ And then you realise what’s really happening when you read a bad review – they’re actually reviewing the [entire] genre.”
Only When I Laugh
Why do today’s cultural guardians so hate studio-based sitcoms with live laughter-tracks? Possibly because they represent the former presence in Great Britain of that evil thing which must now be disavowed and dispelled at all costs – a tangible sense of a shared national community filled with common values and outlooks. Sitcoms used to be about universally recognised common types, archetypes of the various aspects of our national character: figures like Basil Fawlty, Del Boy Trotter, Alan Partridge, Alf Garnett, Captain Mainwaring, Victor Meldrew, et al., were known to us all in fleshly reality, albeit in less cartoonish form. The main protagonists of issues-based ‘sadcoms’ like those generally pumped out by the BBC today are not.
The new and ever-growing genre of racial sitcoms – that is to say, ones where blacks and Muslims are the main, saintly characters, and the whites who surround them the only remaining acceptable butt of their jokes – is just another expression of these atomising trends. Today, we get pained and disapproving Left-wing academic analyses of now-derided 1970s sitcoms like Love Thy Neighbour, where a black couple moves in next door to a bemused white couple, in which jokes like the following are relentlessly overanalysed and deemed to be evil: “First, she [the white neighbour] explained that in future she would buy him [the black neighbour] black socks (so the holes wouldn’t show) and then that she was planning to give him white gloves at the cinema (so that he could see his choc-ice).”
Once, when Britain was less balkanised, less like Lebanon, 99% of viewers, 99% of whom were white, could be relied upon to react to jokes like the above with the same broad reaction. But not today, as we are all forced to retreat into competing silos of mutual identitarian adversity and loathing by the all-time civilisational wonder that is ‘diversity’. This fact can be seen in a confected furore surrounding a 1975 episode of the classic slapstick Frank Spencer vehicle Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, repeated on BBC Two in December 2021. As part of the plot, Frank dresses up for a kids’ party in a department store, introducing himself to the children with the rather camp words “I’m the chief of the pixies, I’m the friend of all the little boys and girls!” “Oh no you’re not,” replies one distinctly unimpressed little lad, “You’re a poof!”
Back in 1975, nobody would have thought to complain about the fact a homosexual was being held up as a figure of public fun on a TV comedy show. Back then, actual homosexuals like Kenneth Williams could build an entire comedy career out of being so treated. By 2021, however, queer politics dictated things were now very different, and the BBC Executive Complaints Unit was forced into action. Although they did actually dismiss this particular humourless complaint, one reason for the BBC censors doing so was that, prior to broadcast, a stern public warning had been issued to viewers about its “outdated language”. “Outdated” to whom? To those who now control our mainstream public media-space, that’s who.
Heil, Honey, I’m Home!
The very embodiment of the pious Lefty comedy critic so bemoaned by Lee Mack is surely David Stubbs, a walking bundle of self-hating ‘white, male, cisgender, Oxbridge’ progressive neuroses whose 2023 book Different Times: A History of British Comedy was widely panned in print and online when it came out as being the rough equivalent of a blind man with no penis reviewing an erotic movie – a man with no sense of humour reviewing comedy shows. (That’s a joke by the way, David – I know you have some difficulty in identifying them.)
Amongst Stubbs’ many bizarre reported conclusions were that Are You Being Served? sowed the “seeds of Brexit”, that Fawlty Towers would have been better without Manuel in it, that Porridge failed lamentably “to indict the penal system” and that there was not enough explicit focus upon distressing far-Right Nazi atrocities in Dad’s Army. Despite its name, Open All Hours disappointingly wasn’t about the street-corner experiences of a hard-working disadvantaged young black prostitute either, although very possibly The Brittas Empire was wholly responsible for the transatlantic slave trade and the Bengal Famine.
Overall, argued Stubbs, the entire British sitcom genre was one gigantic subliminal ploy designed to get viewers to vote Tory by pushing them into adopting reactionary attitudes like laughing at Frank Spencer done up like a fairy and acting like one too. With attitudes like this, perhaps Stubbs should be reviewing TV for the Guardian? Well, unsurprisingly, an extract from his opus did indeed appear in the rag in question, under the telling headline ‘Punching up: how British comedy became kinder and more inclusive – without losing its edge’.
Here, Stubbs bemoaned “the hegemony of the laugh track” on shows like Not Going Out, praising instead mildly humorous (and mildly boring) contemporary BBC mood-pieces like Detectorists, in which “the actors were conscious of a need not just to raise laughs but also to take on the obligation of maintaining the well-being and mental health of those watching” thus transforming comedy into “a safe space for all”. Except any watching Evil Tories, obviously.
Going to see a “trans, lesbian, autistic… recovering alcoholic and drug addict” stand-up comedian at his local pub, Stubbs appears to undergo a sudden epiphany: “British comedy had never been in a better moral state. It has been strengthened by its inclusivity, its diversity, its neurodiversity, all the embedded values of political correctness.”
A better moral state? What about whether or not the shows in question are actually funny or not? Apparently, that is now wholly irrelevant. If the jokes are bad (or even outright non-existent) then it doesn’t matter – just so long as they are the right kind of jokes, with the right kind of targets. Ironically enough, isn’t this just how Bernard Manning once used to operate too, but from the direct reverse bigoted political perspective?
White Cisgender Men Behaving Badly
A similarly egregious essay appeared in Esquire magazine for July 2021, ‘How Sitcoms Got Less White, Less Male… and Funnier Than Ever’, in which author Tom Nicholson inaccurately observed that “the last five years have been a golden age for British sitcoms” – presumably not a reference to the continuing popularity during that period of Mrs Brown’s Boys.
If popular sitcoms of the past once captured some very real things about our national character, laments Nicholson (who, predictably, is himself every bit as white as Eddie Booth from Love Thy Neighbour), then “for decades, that element of our national character was mostly forged by writers from a very specific sliver of the nation. They may have gone to private school. They probably went to university. [Galton and Simpson didn’t, nor did John Sullivan, nor Johnny Speight, nor Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais…] They were almost certainly a man, and they were definitely white.”
That final ‘disgrace’, of course, might just have had something to do with the fact that, up until 1997, when Tony Blair’s Cabinet unilaterally told the civil service to open up the nation’s borders and civil servants immediately replied Yes, Minister, Britain had always been an overwhelmingly white country. Whom did he expect Terry & June to have been written by, precisely? A pair of Chinese Rastafarians?
The “glaring whiteness of British sitcom history” (Would Nicholson ever dare speak of “the glaring yellowness of Japanese Noh Theatre history”, or “the dismaying brownness of traditional Indian Bollywood cinema”?) as “a white space” was finally being overcome, however: “The old way of making sitcoms [i.e., putting jokes in them] had to wither to let more voices in, and it’s not a coincidence that just as British sitcom has become less male, less middle class, less white, less straight and less London-centric, it’s also been far funnier and more original than it has in decades.” As proved by all those hilarious, high-rating episodes of Dreaming Whilst Black you’ve never actually seen, of course.
Nicholson cites Channel 4’s then Head of Comedy, Fiona McDermott, to the following effect:
[Sitcom is] one of the best forms for tackling some of those bigger issues, whether it is mental health, whether it is inequality, whether it is female representation, whether it’s something like our response to Brexit … If we don’t do that, we just risk drowning in misery.
No, Fiona: none of that ‘claptivist’ crap is the purpose of comedy at all. The main overriding purpose of comedy is to make its viewers laugh, not to get them to think about “tackling the bigger issues” like mental health. Isn’t laughter supposed to be the best medicine, anyway?
One Foot in the Grave
Nicholson virtuously – and rather unsmilingly – concludes his piece thus (with my emphasis added):
The ‘situation’ bit of ‘situation comedy’ hasn’t really changed, but the perspective has… It’s a reflection of how the country’s changed, too. It often doesn’t feel like it, but the sitcoms we make and watch show we’re more interested now in hearing from people who’ve been ignored [other than Brexit voters, of course]… and that we’re more ready to talk about difficult, awkward subjects with a bit of nuance. Sitcoms can do that now.
Yes, but who is this “we” here? Once, viewers of shows like Dad’s Army, ‘Allo ‘Allo and Blackadder Goes Forth would have known the answer to such an answer immediately. Today, however, in our vibrantly diverse, post-1997, multi-channel, multi-identity world, there is no collective “we” left to be invoked within the living rooms of Great Britain any more at all. The only “we” that counts now is that demographically defined by the term ‘the governing class’ – the ones who get to commission, make and broadcast the programmes that, increasingly, only people like they themselves actually want to watch.
One of my favourite old BBC sitcoms was a fake 1990s documentary series called People Like Us. Evidently, those running the BBC these days liked at least one part of the programme, too – its title.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The BBC is part of the communist Trojan horse pushing net zero. It’s to the eternal shame of the fake conservatives they didn’t put it out of its misery.
Corrupt little sh*tbags like Hancock told them to push the Save Granny narrative or get cancelled, so he could take a tidy profit from Midazolam sales at the start of ThePandemic™
I liked ‘the Blood Donor’ though
Not THAT Hancock! Tony was very funny, unlike the MP.
it is to the eternal shame of any self respecting white Briton who still pays the BBC propaganda tax.
I suppose this fits into the Reithian pattern, a upper-middle class paternalist BBC offering ‘education’ at every opportunity and shuddering slightly at the base tastes of its own audience. The education on offer today is just rather different from that of Lord Reith’s time.
And the “Reithian pattern” was developed in a foreign country, in effect, in which there were only three broadcast channels for much of the time, then four. The audience has grown up alongside the technology we’re using today.
The BBC’s primary purpose is to brainwash its audience into a certain type of thinking. Entertaining is just one of the approaches, but entertaining will never be prioritised over the primary objective, which is brainwashing.
I’d like to see an explanation from your downticker of where you’ve erred with your statement.
It’s not just the BBC either. I suspect certain other organizations have also been transformed in this way – advertising agencies, for sure, but also quite a few large corporations. I get the impression that many of their leaders and employees go into certain professions not to pursue those professions but to use them as a vehicle for “doing good” or “fixing the world”.
The ones not doing it are reported the OfCom, such as GB News, who are not telling the “right” (leftie) story.
Does that mean they won’t be showing reruns of In Sickness and in Health, then?? Haha Pigs will fly first.
I loved this show and Alf Garnett was ace. Even the theme tune brings back happy memories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrpVs0G5BWA&ab_channel=MarkKiernan
Did you laugh like me at:
“Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books”
If it takes over 10 books for a journalist to come up with the term for a BBC “shitcom” then all journalists need to write over 10 books.
However, the author and lead of ‘Fleabag‘ does look good in a short skirt – and f-me if she doesn’t have a penis – what is the BBC coming to putting on a show without the lead being a chick-with-a-dick.
Of course I have nothing against chicks-with-dicks.
In fact I intend to keep it that way.
I could rant on like I usually do on Daily Sceptic, but I think on this occasion I would rather just recommend “BBC Brainwashing Britain” by David Sedgewick——-Cheers everyone
Yes, definitely worth a read.
Second hand, at Amazon from £3.56.
I wonder why you got 2 red thumbs down for that. ——weird.
Wot, only one down tick for your reply?
The down-tickers are slacking.
This comment deserves better.
Come on down-tickers – give this all you’ve got.
[Tossers].
I think the last BBC sitcom I watched was AbFab. In the ’90s.
It stopped being broadcast in 1996, so just before Blair was elected …. and carried out his mission to destroy the country.
That’s when comedy died on the BBC.
I think many people don’t realise just how much deliberate damage the Blair creature did to this country.
There have, in my opinion, been two very good sitcoms since then: Outnumbered, from 2008 to 2016, and W1A – ironically satirising the BBC – from 2014 to 2017, which was a follow-up to Twenty Twelve – which satirised the organisation of the Summer Olympics in London in 2012. I’m not aware of any sitcom worth watching in the last seven years.
To correct myself a bit, W1A/Twenty Twelve began in or before 2012, and Outnumbered began in 2008, so really there hasn’t been a new sitcom worth watching for more than 12 years.
But yes, both 2012 and W1A were very funny, even the small sketch for Comic Relief last week was streets ahead of much comic output of recent years.
AbFab AFAIAC was AbFlab or AbGab.
I cannot remember anything Jennifer Saunders [or Dawn French] ever said that was funny.
I could never bear more than a few seconds of their stuff.
Add Dinner Ladies to that.
In fact, unless it is a great movie, I cannot remember when I last spent time on stuff on the BBC other than things like Six Nations.
You can’t trust their factual stuff and as for comedy Steven Tucker’s “BBC Shitcom” sums it up most efficiently.
Add Mrs Brown’s Boys to my list of unfunny TV shows – and thank goodness Steven Tucker in his article agrees.
But it does have a chick-with-a-dick playing the lead so it must be funny.
I thought those days were over – making fun of trans-people is so un-BBC and I for one am totally in opposition to that. It is not being woke but empathy because it cannot be easy to be truly trans and getting on with life.
I believe the woke activists have made life a lot more difficult for transgender females.
They are what I euphemistically describe as “chicks-with-dicks” but only because of the work of the woke activists – and the efforts of Isla Bryson the transgender rapist. I would not have done so otherwise. I believe in and live by ‘live and let live‘. But these people are screwing the world up badly.
I would rename the BBC as the OWGC—–Can anyone guess what it refers to?
No one got it—OK. ——One World Government Corporation.
If the BBC were a dog a vet would have done the kind thing and put it out of its misery.
No the vet would have offered it insurance first
An interesting rant but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I just looked over the entire week’s TV on all the major channels. The only sitcoms were “Not Going Out” and repeats of old sitcoms on BBC 4. It is not the BBC cultural guardians that are killing them. They just aren’t fashionable at the moment. Popular TV has turned to endless formulaic reality TV, sport and, for some reason, cooking programmes, and the BBC does plenty of those (Strictly regularly gets twice the ratings of Not Going Out). The commercial channels, which have to chase ratings to survive, have pretty much given up on sitcoms.
Perhaps people stopped watching them because they stopped being funny. I watch very little and certainly almost nothing modern. The odd glimpse of modern stuff tells me it’s mainly unbearable left wing woke anti-white propaganda, and regardless of the exact reasons for the demise of the sitcom, the important point is that I don’t want to be forced to pay for this propaganda or for it to bear the stamp of state approval.
There are no new sitcoms other than “Not Going Out” (which is certainly not left wing woke anti-white propaganda) so you aren’t being forced to pay for them – right?
I don’t want to be forced to pay for any of it. The state has no business running a media empire (nor a left wing campaigning organisation masquerading as a media empire).
“The only “we” that counts now is that demographically defined by the term ‘the governing class’ – the ones who get to commission, make and broadcast the programmes that, increasingly, only people like they themselves actually want to watch.”
I doubt they even watch them. They’re just leaden social re-education packages for the stinky little people.
With any luck, the BBC will eventually all burn to death in their EVs.
They probably get a warm feeling of superiority from putting out trash that they themselves don’t watch but think the unwashed masses love.
Another fine article from Steven Tucker although ironically not the funniest he has written for DS.
Never Mind The Quality, Feel The Width would never be made now. A red sea pedestrian and a bog trotter? Perish the thought.
As for Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death, they made fun of the racists so we could all see how foolish they were.
In a similar way to the very funny Blazing Saddles, the highly effective mockery of the racist viewpoint is entirely lost on today’s viewers.
David Stubbs’ head would surely explode if he saw an episode of ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’.
The object of the media is to make all White people believe they are in a diminishing minority, and we must accept the cultural superiority of every race but our own.
I think it’s more about must accept the self-serving misrule by political leaders.
Ironically, no mention of what to me is the best sitcom of the past 10 years – W1A, which is blisteringly funny by taking the micky unflinchingly out of the BBC itself.
Great article – so true. You forgot ‘Little Britain’ which would not get past the censors today, but was a big hit in our family – we still quote it. Also the ‘Detectorists’ was fantastic- it wasn’t really a comedy – so you can’t critique it within a review of sit coms. I loved it because it was soooo ‘English’.
Officer Crabtree was always my favourite
https://www.google.com/search?q=officer+crabtree+%22you%27re+our+bummers+are+farting+for+you%22+sketch%3F&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-gb&client=safari#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:e0b1105b,vid:fYNXMWRdCx0,st:0
We plebs fund the whole damn BBC shooting match. I so wish everyone would follow the legal path and stop paying which would entail cancelling Sky, Virgin etc. since these are illegal to view without the licence. Live sport of course would need a visit to the pub, no bad thing.
That might galvanise a genuine campaign to rid us of this ransom.I dream of course, they’d shift it to being funded out of general taxation.
Come the time of the election, don’t forget who it was that appointed Shah as Chairman, it was this pathetic faux Conservative Government. The same people that brought us the tyranny of lockdowns.
I agree with a lot of this. But I would also say that there is a room for different types of comedy. I quite enjoy some comedy dramas (I like comedies like The Detectorists which are not laugh a minute). You could argue that Afterlife is in a similar vein.
Variety is what people want. Let’s have classicly stupid sitcoms which are pure escapism. I loved Reeves and Mortimer’s House of Fools – massively underrated imo. But sure, we can have more ‘serious’ ones too.
Atm, it feels like things are leaned a little too heavily to the tastes of ‘tastemakers’ and what I would call the ‘trend-setting classes’.