There is a quip beloved of comedians, when asked if their industry is going down the pan: “Nostalgia? It ain’t what it used to be.”
But for fans of well-worn jokes, and the shows in which they appear, 2024 could be truly a golden era.
There has been a spate of classic comedies announcing a move to the West End in recent months, the sketch series The Fast Show is beginning its nationwide stage tour, and the UK tour of Drop the Dead Donkey: The Reawakening! has already added dates.
John Cleese’s stage production of Fawlty Towers launches in May, and in autumn, a musical version of Only Fools and Horses will start a 30-city tour of the UK after a successful West End run.
It’s not just theatre. Alan Partridge will soon be back on screens in a new six-part BBC mockumentary series, while some shows have never gone away: reruns of Dad’s Army are still broadcast on a Saturday evening on BBC Two. The comedian John Kearns joked in his live show that he’s competing for audiences with Arnold Ridley, who played Godfrey in the show and was born in 1896: “He’s a Victorian!”
None of this is a joke, however, for the acts or new shows. In November, Ofcom warned that scripted comedy – sitcoms and sketches, rather than panel shows, which are significantly cheaper to make – was an “at risk” genre for the fifth year running.
Sitcoms, of the type made in front of a live studio audience, have “essentially stopped being made”, says Mark Boosey, the co-editor of the British Comedy Guide. According to its data, there were 899 hours of comedy made in 2014, including 226 hours of sitcom, compared with 633 hours of comedy, including 126 hours of sitcom in 2023.
Boosey said: “Last year, the only sitcoms filmed in front of a studio audience were Mrs Brown’s Boys and Not Going Out: the rest was ‘single camera’ sitcom. The money has shifted to other forms of comedy.”
One example was The Bear, a “dramedy” that explored mental breakdown and dysfunctional families via the pressure-cooker environment of a Chicago restaurant kitchen. It won best comedy at the Grammys and Emmys.
But comedy’s next turn will be different again, says Kenton Allen, the 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, starring Stephen Merchant.
“Comedy is expensive and prone to failure, but when you get it right it’s a gamechanger,” Allen says, pointing to the success of the Channel 4 sitcom Friday Night Dinner, which ran for six series. “I think we’re seeing a return to ‘hard funny’, where every other line is a joke,” he says, citing the BBC’s Here We Go. “We’re getting back to silly.”
Shane Allen, the former BBC director of comedy who set up the comedy production company Boffola Pictures, says that in a world where streaming is king, classic returnable comedy shows are a good investment for commissioners. “Comedy is a super genre which has a very long tail and over time becomes incredibly good value, as well as being something that overly indexes for young viewers.”
While recognising the long-term benefits of comedy, broadcasters have been hit with the reality of high inflation, spiralling costs and falling advertising revenues, while the US writers’ strike has taken a toll on co-production funding.
The BBC director of comedy, Jon Petrie, argues that the BBC – which styles itself as the “home of comedy” – is well aware of its responsibility to future comedy nostalgia-seekers, and says commissioning by the broadcaster is steady, pointing to a £10m increase to the comedy budget in 2022. But in a challenging environment the BBC, like its rivals, had to be cannier about financing, he adds.
“In the past maybe the BBC could just pay for everything outright [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 bit more entrepreneurial.”
That might mean a co-production, as with The Outlaws, shown on BBC One in the UK but Prime Video overseas, which he argues means better value for licence fee payers. “Our main interest is UK audiences and licence fee payers … so they can turn on the telly, and watch something funny that reflects their lives,” he says.
Liam Williams, the writer behind Ladhood, has noticed “less money and more risk aversion” in comedy in the past decade, but thinks reports of its imminent demise have been greatly exaggerated. “There is a tendency towards this slightly catastrophising belief that everything is terrible now, but there is still lots of good stuff being made,” he says, highlighting the highly acclaimed Dreaming Whilst Black.
And while the rapid rise of on-demand and subsequent sense of panic as viewers cancel their subscriptions has left the comedy world feeling “a bit uncertain and dysfunctional”, he thinks people will always return to the shows that made them laugh in their youth. “Hopefully by that point we will have a few quid,” Williams says. “And we can spend it on nostalgia too.”
