Not just Jack ... Dee as Rick Spleen in Lead Balloon. Photograph: BBC/Open Mike Productions
Last week, Jack Dee's Lead Balloon returned for a second series as part of BBC Two's Thursdays Are Funny lineup; an evening of comedy far better than its painful tagline. When the series first arrived last year it was dismissed by most as the milder, English offspring of Curb Your Enthusiasm. But, rather than being mocked for his Larry David fixation, Dee should be lauded as one of the only big-name British stand-ups of his generation to move successfully into sitcom.
In America trading in the mic stand for the studio sitcom is a natural career move. Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano, Rosanne Barr and Ellen DeGeneres all reached huge audiences on this well-trodden path. But in Britain we don't have quite the same success rate. Frank Skinner, Rhona Cameron and David Baddiel have all produced sitcoms that have been lost in the depths of time (they would hope), while Lee Mack's Not Going Out currently acts as a convenient shorthand for the BBC's inability to produce a watchable primetime sitcom.
In all these shows the stand-up's central characters claim all the best laughs as they fire out putdowns of their two-dimensional foils, or deliver material that sounds suspiciously close to their last stand-up show. For stand-ups who have spent years as the centre of attention, it seems they find it impossible to write a sitcom that isn't just a platform for their act. Lead Balloon succeeds because Dee avoids this trap, his character Rick Spleen may be central to the plots but he is part of an ensemble piece packed with believable characters who all share the laughs.
Sitcom is one of the most tightly balanced and formulaic genres of television, yet it is put in the hands of people schooled in a completely different type of comedy. In America stand-ups have their ideas passed through teams of experienced television writers, as they learn about the medium and are moulded into it. In the UK it seems television companies just hope that because people are good stand-ups they will produce a good sitcom. The idea that "funny people are funny people", regardless of context, is akin to asking Alex Turner to write an album of jazz.
The next stand-up who feels the pull of the sitcom should learn from Dee's example: In comedy you don't always have to be the centre of attention.
