Mark’s TV: BBC SITCOMS
These days there aren’t many phrases uttered by continuity announcers which can make me frantically try to reverse the bonding process that has gradually taken place twixt my arse and my sofa cushions. Such is the incremental conjoining of my cheeks and my chair that I fear my office will have to install extra large doors, and fairly bloody sharpish. There is however, one particular set of words which can separate sphincter and settee like no other, a set of words which should have anybody who knows their funny bone from their elbow jumping up and scrabbling around madly for the Black Adder box set. Are you ready for it? Have you got the box sets in sight? Here goes: NEW. SITCOM. BBC. ONE.
Yes. This past week the BBC comedy department unleashed yet another malformed comedic foetus, twitching and struggling to breathe, onto our prime time telly schedules. Say hello to In With The Flynns. In With The Flynns is a ‘new’ show about, surprisingly, the Flynn family, and one which proudly continues the Beeb’s current obsession with thinking up programme titles first before shoe horning in “wacky” and “dysfunctional” family stereotypes, such as the inappropriate grandfather, or the bitchy mother (see also: Life Of Riley, about the Riley family), and other concepts so fresh, you can almost smell the rigor mortis filtering down from the commissioning editor’s office.
This time, Will Mellor of Casualty and Two Pints of Lager fame is the rather laddish family man (nice to see he’s not been typecast, eh?) struggling with his 2.4 little shits who always get the best of him and OH CHRIST I CAN’T TALK ABOUT THIS SHIT ANYMORE. Basically right, It’s My Family, mark two. Or to put it another way, it’s exactly the same as any other primetime BBC sitcom that has trudged down the skid mark strewn trail that My Family’s Harpers ploughed in their inexplicably long time on the telly.
It’s so formulaic that an Alzheimer’s sufferer could probably write a decent script from the memory of seeing any episode of My Family over the last decade, and the sets all echo with the haunting wail of the ghost of Jasper Carrott’s comedy career from when All About Me was being produced. It’s dross, pure and simple, and further proof that the BBC and BBC One in particular are now pretty much incapable of producing quality sitcoms. Outnumbered is probably the only real exception, and that largely succeeds because it does away the 100% recycled sets and the fact the child actors are largely unscripted. Any other new BBC sitcom though? Forget it. Reach for the DVD remote instead.
I can’t help but feel that the bewildering commercial success of My Family is largely to blame. A show that wouldn’t have been funny in the sixties, My Family is a chicken korma of a TV show; offensive in its inoffensiveness and peddling slapstick and jokes a seven year old would roll their eyes at. To me that’s not what comedy should be about. At its best good comedy can actually impart knowledge and a sense of humour (I’ve lost count of how much I’ve learned from The Simpsons over the years, and I wouldn’t be who I am without exposure to Black Adder and Red Dwarf from an early age), but shows like My Family, In With The Flynn’s and Life Of Reilly are so sickly that they aren’t even heart warming. More often than not they’re just irritating to the point where you wonder when the BBC lost its sitcom edge. It’s as over the eleven years since My Family infected our screens, panel shows have come to exist solely to be the new form of ‘edgy comedy’ delivery (with individual performers able to take the rap for any contentious material) whilst sit-coms have been relegated to dreary, laughter tracked, cut and paste affairs with less than a quarter of the inventive spirit seen in American shows like Frasier or How I Met Your Mother. On the Beeb they are safe, sterile, beige coloured vacuums of shows which only function to be shown after QI and before Have I Got News For You.
So next time you hear the fateful words: ‘Brand new comedy now, on BBC One’, and you’re reaching for the remote, mutter an explicit curse on The My Family brood, because it’s them who have gotten BBC sitcoms into this mess, especially Robert Lindsay and that bloke from the BT adverts. The shits.
