About 15 years ago, I tried my hand with an open-submission BBC Radio comedy current affairs series called Newsjack. Week after week, none of my jokes or sketches were chosen for broadcast, despite the fact that, whenever listening to the thing, it was clear the show’s standards of selection were unutterably dire. So, one week, I tried out a test: alongside all the jokes I thought were actually amusing, I emailed in one I thought deliberately unfunny. It got picked to be read out. I never bothered submitting ever again.
It would appear similar strangely inverted criteria of quality still prevail at the BBC Comedy Commissioning Department, to judge by the broadcast last week of a brand new sitcom called Smoggie Queens, which, as the following PR material unmistakably reveals, is about a gang of big daft transvestites.
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