Victoria Wood, celebrated comedienne and the creator of Dinnerladies and Acorn Antiques, has pronounced the sitcom dead. "The likes of The Office are so good that there's no turning back," she said when picking up a comedy award earlier this week. "Everything is very naturalistic now whereas before it used to be quite contrived."
But is that really the case? It's easily arguable that The Office was in fact a sitcom, despite its spoof fly-on-the-wall documentary conceit. It had a set of characters in dramatic situations and a script that made people laugh – isn't that a situation comedy?
What does seem to have happened is that sitcoms have split into two categories. BBC1 - and occasionally ITV1 – still serve up traditional offerings such as My Family or the Frank Skinner vehicle Shane, which with their laughter tracks, punchlines and finely tuned plots draw attention to the artificiality of the genre and often, it has to be said, seem rather dated.
And then there is the new breed of sitcom, more akin to comedy drama, perhaps, which dispenses with audience laughter and goes for observational humour that cruelly lays bare the delusions and hopeless flaws of its characters – BBC3's Nighty Night, BBC4's The Thick of It and Channel 4's Peep Show all fit into this category.
The tension between the two categories came to the fore three years ago, when the second series of I'm Alan Partridge, screened on BBC2 at the height of The Office's acclaim, was criticised for its laughter track and felt by some to be, well, too much like a sitcom. Its writer Armando Iannucci reminded viewers that there had been a laughter track for the first series in 1997, and no one had seemed to mind.
So a change in sensibilities appears to have taken place over the past ten years, probably shaped by British admiration for sophisticated American comedies such as The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
But when it comes to the humour, how much really has changed? Sitcoms, whether traditionally executed or cutting-edge experiments, are typically about people trapped by their own character failings and thwarted by those around them. For whatever reason, that's the stock material that in Britain we seem to find funny: it isn't hard to draw a line from Tony Hancock, Harold Steptoe and Rupert Rigsby to Edmund Blackadder, Alan Partridge and David Brent.
The style of skewering this sitcom archetype, with its strange blend of the pitiable and contemptible, may have changed as television drama draws away from its origins as filmed theatre, but the sitcom is surely alive – and, on the evidence of recent years, in rude health.
