by Comedians have a famous quip when asked if their industry is dying: “Nostalgia? It’s not like it used to be.”
But for fans of well-worn comedies, and the shows in which they appear, 2024 could really be a golden age.
A number of classic comedies have moved to the West End in recent months, with sketch series The Fast Show starting its nationwide stage tour, and the UK tour of Drop the Dead Donkey: The Reawakening! dates have already been added.
John Cleese’s stage production of Fawlty Towers launches in May, and in the autumn, a musical version of Only Fools and Horses will begin a 30-city UK tour following a successful run in the West End.
It is not just a theater. Alan Partridge will soon be back on screens in a new six-part BBC fantasy series, although some shows haven’t gone away: reruns of Dad’s Army are still being broadcast on Saturday evenings on BBC Two. Comedian John Kearns joked in his live show that he is competing for audiences with Arnold Ridley, who played Godfrey in the show and was born in 1896: “He’s a Victorian!”
This is not a joke, however, for the new acts or shows. In November, Ofcom warned that scripted comedy – skits and sketches, as opposed to panel shows, which are much cheaper to make – was an “at risk” genre for the fifth year running.
Sitcoms, of the kind made in front of a live studio audience, have “basically stopped being made”, says Mark Boosey, co-editor of the British Comedy Guide. According to their data, 899 hours of comedy were produced in 2014, including 226 hours of sitcom, compared to 633 hours of comedy, including 126 hours of sitcom in 2023.
Boosey said: “Last year, Mrs Brown’s Boys and Not Going Out were the only sitcoms filmed in front of a studio audience: the rest were ‘single camera’ sitcoms. The money has shifted to other forms of comedy.”
One example was The Bear, a “drama” that explored mental breakdowns and dysfunctional families through a pressure-cook environment in a Chicago restaurant kitchen. He won best comedy at the Grammys and Emmys.
But the next twist in comedy will be different again, says Kenton Allen, CEO of Big Talk, producers of Noel Fielding’s new romp, The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin, and the comedy thriller The Outlaws, with Stephen Merchant.
“Comedy is expensive and prone to failure, but when you get it right it’s a gamechanger,” says Allen, pointing to the success of Channel 4 sitcom Friday Night Dinner, now in its sixth series. “I think we’re returning to ‘hard comedy’, where every other line is a joke,” he says, citing the BBC’s Here We Go. “We’re getting silly again.”
Shane Allen, a former BBC comedy director who founded the comedy production company Boffola Pictures, says returnable comedy shows are a good investment for commissioners in a world where streaming reigns supreme. “Comedy is a super genre with a very long tail and over time it’s very good value, as well as being something that over-indexes for younger audiences.”
While the long-term benefits of comedy are recognised, high inflation, spiraling costs and falling advertising revenues are affecting broadcasters, and the US writers’ strike has affected co-production funding.
The BBC’s director of comedy, Jon Petrie, insists that the BBC – which styles itself as “the home of comedy” – is well aware of its responsibility to the nostalgia-seekers of future comedy, and says that commissioning the fixed broadcaster, referring to a £10m increase in the comedy budget in 2022. But in a challenging environment the BBC, like its competitors, had to be less about funding, he says.
“In the past the BBC might have been able to pay for everything completely [but] we’ve moved on from that,” says Petrie. “We’re still doing the same number of shows every year, [but] sometimes we’re asking producers to be a little more entrepreneurial.”
That could mean co-production, as with The Outlaws, which is shown on BBC One in the UK but Prime Video overseas, which he claims means better value for license fee payers. “Our main interest is the UK audience and the license fee payers … so they can turn on the TV, and watch something funny that reflects their lives,” he says.
Liam Williams, the writer behind Ladhood, has noted “less money and more risk aversion” in comedy over the past decade, but he thinks reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. “There’s a tendency towards this slightly catastrophic belief that everything is terrible now, but there’s still a lot of good stuff being done,” he says, highlighting the critically acclaimed Dreaming Who’s Black.
And despite the rapid rise in demand and subsequent sense of panic as viewers cancel their subscriptions, the comedy world is “a bit uncertain and dysfunctional”, he thinks people will always return to the shows that made them laugh in their childhood. “Hopefully by that point we’ll have a few quid,” says Williams. “And we can spend it on nostalgia too.”
