In Shakespearean comedy, a wedding is a happy ending. But in a TV sitcom, it’s more likely to be an unhappy beginning. At best, a married couple will endure DIY or cookery disasters as their tyrannical boss suddenly drops by for dinner. At worst, a husband will throw a surprise 40th birthday party for his wife, only for her to demand a divorce – as happens to Ben Miller’s character in the new BBC show I Want My Wife Back.
The man’s attempt to avoid divorce involves much slapstick business, including a violent stand-off at an anger management group and adept use of missed and misunderstood mobile phone messages. But the underlying suggestion in I Want My Wife Back, that some marriages are abandoned too easily, continues the use of sitcom over the past six decades to reflect changing attitudes to relationships – from pre-marital sex through rising divorce rates to gay marriage.
Newly weds
In the innocent early years of television, the simple fact of having just become husband and wife was seen as enough material for a show: Richard Waring got five series and two Christmas specials out of the Starlings, a young couple played by Richard Briers and Prunella Scales, in Marriage Lines (1963-66). This union of a junior clerk and a housewife was disturbed by constant cooking catastrophes and that classic recurrent nightmare: the boss coming to dinner.
Oldie weds
The prospect of entertaining your employer was also a frequent threat in Happy Ever After (1974-78), the grandparent of the “empty nest” genre in which a couple adjust to their children having left home. To inject some comic conflict, the Fletchers, played by Terry Scott and June Whitfield, were immediately given an annoying aunt as their lodger. Scott and Whitfield went on to share their own first names with another long-wed couple, although their surname was now Medford, in Terry and June (1979-87). Giving the characters children who have grown and flown is one way of avoiding the logistical problems of child stars, while another is to make them childless. Victor and Margaret Meldrew (Richard Wilson and Annette Crosbie) in One Foot in the Grave (1990-2000) are unusual among comedy husband and wives in having no children, though there were hints that a son may have died as a baby.
Pre-marital sex
The liberations of the 1960s created a subset of sitcoms that came with the increasing chance of intercourse before marriage. In Carla Lane’s The Liver Birds (1969-79), the Merseyside flatmates would discuss “doing it” with boyfriends, while Man About the House (1973-76) contrived an even more permissive situation – a man lodging with two single women.
Ex-spouses
As divorce became more frequent in Britain, Richard Waring explored the social consequences of having former spouses around in My Wife Next Door (1972). John Alderton and Hannah Gordon played a divorced couple who both move to the country in the hope of a new start, but find that they have bought adjoining cottages – one of many sitcom scenarios social media would have ruled out. In John Sullivan’s Dear John (1986-87), a divorcee, emerging shyly on to the dating circuit, is haunted and taunted by his libidinous ex-wife.
Single parents
As part of his apparent mission to explore every possible marital position, Waring’s And Mother Makes Three (1971-73) had Wendy Craig bringing up two children alone while contemplating dating – though he took the precaution of stressing her status as widowed rather than divorced. The scriptwriter then became one of the first to dramatise the “blended family” in And Mother Makes Five (1974-76), in which Craig’s character marries a widower with a child.
Jilted lovers
Just Good Friends (1983-86) started with Jan Francis’s Penny bumping into Vince (Paul Nicholas) five years after he abandoned her just before their wedding. Although writer John Sullivan is best known for Only Fools and Horses, this funny account of a love-hate relationship threatening to become love again also scores high in polls of top sitcoms. Of course, the starting premise of one of TV comedy’s best-loved characters – Jennifer Aniston’s Rachel in Friends (1994-2004) – was that she had been forced to apartment-share with a friend after abandoning her intended at the altar.
Adulterers
Having explored the comedy of pre-marital sex in The Liver Birds, Carla Lane flirted with extra-marital liaisons in Butterflies (1978-83), in which Wendy Craig never quite betrays her dentist husband with a businessman she meets in the park, and The Mistress (1985-87), which starred Felicity Kendal as the long-time lover of a married man. Critical and viewer disapproval resulted in this remaining a rare example of the love-cheat sitcom.
Househusband
The exhausted form of domestic family sitcom was reinvigorated through role reversal in Holding the Fort (1980-83), written by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, in which Peter Davison was a brewery executive who, after being made redundant, stays at home to look after the baby while his wife (played by Patricia Hodge) goes back to her atypical job as a captain in the Women’s Royal Army Corps. Almost two decades later, the idea of a man as main child-carer was still considered comically odd enough for ITV to screen Holding the Baby (1997-98), in which a wife runs off with her lover and leaves her husband to look after their son.
Multiple divorcee
Half-way to Henry VIII’s record, Dr Ross Geller, played by David Schwimmer in Friends, began and ended three marriages during the 10 seasons of the sitcom, becoming known in a running gag as “the divorce force”.
Gay marriage
America led the world in same-sex equality, which was reflected in US TV comedy too. In a 1995 episode of Roseanne (1988-1997), regular character Leon Carp married his boyfriend Scott in what is generally regarded as TV comedy’s first gay wedding. This landmark was compromised for some by the fact that a kiss between the men took place out of shot, and that the network imposed a later-than-usual transmission slot. The character played by Ellen DeGeneres also married her female partner in the final episode of Ellen (1994-98), although this could be seen as a defiant act as the show had already been cancelled over concerns that it had become “too gay”. More lastingly influential was Modern Family (since 2009), which features a gay married couple, Mitchell and Cameron, who have an adopted child. Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden have credited this plotline with encouraging their legislative acceptance of gay marriage.
I Want My Wife Back is on BBC1 on Monday 18 April at 9.30pm.
