You can gauge the state of the once great British sitcom by last week’s triumph at the National Television Awards of Mrs Brown’s Boys being named best comedy – for the fourth time. Yet what’s really remarkable is not so much that it gets voted for so often, as the struggle to think of any current alternative winners on our screens.
At a pinch, the Scottish series Two Doors Down is a worthy successor to the long tradition of suburbia-set sitcoms. Otherwise there’s a comedy void in the TV schedules, never more starkly exposed than by the 50th anniversary this year of Rising Damp.
One of the greatest comedy actors of the past century, Leonard Rossiter, played the sour and dowdy landlord Rigsby railing against the permissive society that, thanks to his youthful tenants, now reached inside his tenebrous terrace dwelling.
As its late writer, Eric Chappell, said of Rossiter: “I may have written the words but he provided the punctuation. The twist of his head was an exclamation, his eyes blazed italics and the open-mouthed stare was a line of dots going into infinity.”
Yet Rossiter was only one part of a superlative cast, that featured Frances de la Tour as the frustrated romantic who despite being the object of Rigsby’s desire, longs for more sophisticated horizons beyond bedsit-land. She also longs unrequitedly for Philip (Don Warrington), the black tenant whose quick wit skewers Rigsby’s knee-jerk prejudices. And then there was Richard Beckinsale as the medical student Alan, whose left-wing opinions similarly inflame his landlord, though he is equally inept with the opposite sex.
As I said a couple of years ago following Eric Chappell’s death, the series provided one of my best lessons growing up of the absurdity of racial prejudice – “a handy reminder to today that it remains a much more effective counter to take the mick than the knee.” Most British comedy remains on its knees, in more ways than one.
