What's It All About?

A while ago, I was asked to write a slightly tongue-in-cheek article about the ingredients of a successful sitcom. The result of that is here. In short, a successful sitcoms needs characters, conflict, confinement and catastrophe. Crucial to success is also casting. And a catchphrase is nice too, if you can bear it.

I'm happy to stand by this. It is true. And it's possible to have a perfectly good and successful sitcom with those ingredients.

But a great sitcom has another ingredient. It's a certain je ne sais quoi. Or a certain something, as the French say. The show needs a philosophy, an attitude or a stance. It needs to capture something about the human condition, or the times in which we live. These are the shows we still want to watch on Dave or UK Gold. The hairstyles may date, and the cultural reference points change, but the show says something.

So What?
I've been thinking about this recently as I've been doodling on a few new ideas for sitcoms, and thinking of characters that seem interesting and funny, and scenarios and situations that feel fresh and fertile. But I keep asking myself the question 'So what?' It's a good question to keep asking yourself because somewhere along the line, someone is going to ask you that question - a comedy executive or a commissioner. They ask questions like 'Why would I watch this show?' or 'What's this show really about?' There's no point getting cross or rolling your eyes. They may not know why they're asking that question. They may have read in a manual that it's a good question to ask that sounds plausible. Or they may realise that good shows are about something.

The Office
The Office was about funny characters, and had good stories, conflict, confinement and all that. It was very recognisable and felt fresh. But it felt like it was about something. About being trapped in a dead-end job and feeling powerless to do anything about it. Or about the lunatics surrounding you. Tim (Martin Freeman) was really the eye of the story and one sensed that he could see his life and chance of happiness slipping through his fingers. It infused every episode. And when Tim did something about it, and finally said something to Dawn, and David Brent himself seemed to change after the love of a good women, the show was, essentially, over.

Just Jokes
If you've only got jokes, you ride or fall by every joke. And when the jokes misfire, as they will surely do now and then, the audience may realise there's nothing underneath, and that the whole thing is artifice. They already know it is, and are willing to suspend their disbelief - because a really good show is about more than characters and jokes. Look at the great sitcoms, and you'll see they're not just confined characters coping with catastrophes: Only Fools and Horses, Yes Minister, The Good Life, Steptoe, One Foot in the Grave, Dad's Army, Reggie Perrin. The list goes on and on. Great shows that said something, and still say somthing.

Friends isn't about Friends
One of the most successful shows of recent times is Friends, which is a multi-billion dollar industry in its own right. It's about six friends. That's it. Well, not quite. The creators of the show spotted there was a strange post-college, pre-family time of life when twenty-somethings relied on friends and hung out with each other, and were wanting to form close-knit groups that functioned like families. They were right. The show captures that, without ever saying it. They also thought that Monica and Joey would be the 'hot couple' for the show, which shows they didn't get everything right.

But you don't need to get everything right at first. You start with a fairly good idea of where the show is and what it's about, and with a bit of luck, an open mind, a good cast and following wind, you might just make a great show.

Hut 33
It is clearly absurd to make a leap to this largely ignored radio sitcom what I wrote, but I can only speak from experience. When I had the idea of setting a sitcom in Bletchley Park during World War Two, it would have been easy to have written a show about boffin odd-balls like Alan Turing doing daft things. Like a 1940s Big Bang Theory. But I felt that would become fairly tiresome fairly soon. And so I wondered about other themes that emerged during World War Two - and remembered my wife telling me that one of the main reasons for social reform after the war was how our nation were forced to work alongside each other, rich alongside poor, elites alongside outcasts. And both sides were pretty appalled.

And so I wondered whether throwing two characters together from different ends of the spectrum could work. Hey presto, we have a posh, highly-educated, elitist Oxford Professor (Robert Bathurst), and a self-taught, working class, Marxist Geordie (Tom Goodman-Hill) Both saw the world through completely different eyes. And both were right. And both were wrong. And it made writing the show a lot easier than writing Enigma jokes. After all, did you hear the one about the German and the Enigma Machine? Me neither.

Give 'Em What They Want: Sitcom

So, lots of media pundits are reacting, or being paid to react, to the news that BBC1 would like a 'blue-collar' sitcom. It isn't clear exactly when, where and how Danny Cohen said this, although he's made no secret of this desire over the last few weeks. But rather than fly reporters to North Africa and report on armed uprising, our media has decided to talk about situation comedy.

Why wouldn't Danny Cohen want a down-to-earth working class sitcom? Another Only Fools and Horses, Bread or Royle Family. Let us not forget that at its peak, Bread pulled in about 22 million viewers. Let us also not forget that To The Manor Born pulled in 24 million viewers. Was it the same 20-odd million watching both programmes. Probably. I used to watch both of them. I didn't care. They were both brilliant.

And this is point that rings loud and clear from all the media chats and discussion: as long as its funny, no-one much cares where the comedy is set, and how rich our characters are. So far so predictable.

Moreover, Danny Cohen isn't proposing to jettison middle-class settings for comedies too. He's not going to commission a factory canteen sitcom by Harry Northerer and not commissioned a boutique hotel sitcom by Harald South-by-South-East. But here's the thing. There's so little situation comedy on television that he may have to chose between.

I find this whole area very hard to understand. The audiences love sitcoms. They adore them. It's interesting that Miranda won the King/Queen of Comedy award at the comedy - against Harry Hill, stadium-filling Michael McIntyre and ever cheeky Ant & Dec. And David Mitchell is probably more associated with being a panellist and all-round good egg than Mark in Peep Show. But from almost a standing start Miranda Hart went and won.

Sitcoms sell DVDs - and decent ones continue to sell years after transmission. People are still buying Blackadder, Yes Minister and Porridge. They are not buying '1994 Compilation Have I Got News for You', or 'Call My Bluff: The Arthur Marshall Years - Uncut and Uncorked'.

And yet, the TV channels seemed determined not to make scripted narrative comedy - even though there are endless other scripted narrative things like soaps, hospital 'dramas', detective shows and those things that aren't really anything (I'm thinking Hotel Babylon?).

Let's look at the evidence. BBC1 tonight showed no comedy at all. None. Or last night. On Sunday night, there was a repeat of Gavin and Stacey at 10.30 (how many repeats, now?). And repeat of My Family at 4.25pm. On Saturday night, Come Fly With Me - a repeat from Thursday. On Friday night, a panel game and a chat show. On Thursday, Not Going Out. That's not a lot of comedy - and I wouldn't be able to tell you when I could regularly tune in to a sitcom. It used to be Friday night at 8.30. Not now. So when?

Over the same time period, BBC2 have finally repeated the wonderful The Great Outdoors from BBC4, and launched a new panel/improv game and shown a new series - Episodes. And that's it. And Buzzcocks on Wednesday.

So, between BBC1 and BBC2, in the last week, new episodes narrative comedies are: Episodes and Not Going Out. And Come Fly With Me (which is more of a sketch show in one setting)

Come on, BBC. More sitcom, please. I love cooking shows as much as the next man, but I'm pretty sure that everyone who wants to learn to cook has learnt by now. Can we have some funnies now?

Maybe I'm just being overly biased in favour of narrative comedy and want everyone to like what I like. But let's not forget that on Saturday night, after a repeat of Dad's Army, BBC2 also repeat a retrospective of Allo Allo - for an hour and three quarters. Now, I love Allo Allo. All 80-odd episodes of it. But I continue to be staggered at the sheer number of documentaries, re-enactments and pickings overs the bones of old sitcoms like Allo Allo. It reinforces my point about sitcoms being what people really want, since they are so powerful and memorable.

So my plea is not for more working class comedy, or middle class comedy - but more comedy. It really is what the viewers want. It's why they made Miranda their comedy Queen. And why they'd rather talk about Del Boy and Steptoe than uprisings in Tunisia.