Summary
When the BBC decided recently to identify "Britains favourite sit- com" it made a small tactical error. If your taste runs to over- familiar clips from endlessly rerun episodes of Only Fools and Horses or Porridge the series was perfectly adequate. If you had noticed - and how could you not? - that precious few decent half- hour comedies are still being made the celebration of an alleged golden age was merely irritating.
Dad's Army may have been a work of genius - though I doubt it - but what other reason is there for repeating the ancient farce at every opportunity if not the dearth of replacements? Soaps may rule the schedules, but does the success of that gormless genre mean that ITV and Five have given up even attempting to make sit-coms? Glance at the Radio Times and you will struggle to find even one on either channel.See the full content of this document
Extract
Our Dying Sitcoms Are a Serious Loss
The received wisdom, in any case, is that the Americans are the masters of modern TV comedy. The Simpsons (Sky, nightly) can stand repeated viewings better than anything on the box. Frasier (C4, Wednesday) is probably the most literate comedy around. And even Friends (C4, Friday), struggling a little as it approac...
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