The BBC has deliberately killed comedy – it’s run by a coward and the viewers are the people who suffer
THIS paper’s TV critic isn’t a huge fan of the BBC’s latest comedy.
Ally Ross has a history of slagging off BBC sitcoms — and the title of Smoggie Queens alone would have had him reaching for the smelling salts.
The Guardian, meanwhile, doing its level best not to slate it, gives it three stars for being nice, bless, but wishes it had more jokes.
More jokes? What a revolutionary concept.
Only this past summer, Jon Petrie, the BBC’s head of comedy, called for writers to be bolder and come up with laugh-out-loud sitcoms.
As if the Head of Drama suddenly called for scripts to be more dramatic.
Allow me to prick Petrie’s balloon of blaming writers.
None of his empire has come close to Not Going Out, Blackadder, Little Britain or Fawlty Towers.
Worse, none of them even intend to aspire to the greats.
The death of comedy isn’t accidental.
It’s deliberate.
It’s like the music industry ignoring Coldplay and instead putting out only 16th-century choral music.
The many have to come before the few.
What’s my beef? Well, Petrie passed on my five-star-rated comedy series Hapless, first at Channel 4 and then again for series two when he moved to the BBC, depriving the public of free access to my satire.
I had to put it on Amazon Prime. One caring, hard-working NHS nurse told me she couldn’t afford Prime.
Take the mick
That hit me in the guts. Working nurses can’t afford Prime so Hapless doesn’t reach those on a tight budget.
It’s personal, yes, but it’s personal because populist writers want to reach you, the people.
Instead, Jon Petrie’s reign has included Black Ops, Juice and Smoggie Queens.
Forget about industry awards, none has broken through to the mainstream audience.
The industry magazine Broadcast has just crowed that Smoggie performed well with (wait for it!) 0.4 per cent of the audience share.
Jesus wept.
But it’s not Petrie who’s the problem. He’s just another commissioner who has no clue how to please a humour-deprived, disgruntled public.
Comedy needs a life-saving blood transfusion. All the self- imposed or Ofcom-imposed rules must go out the window.
No, we will not make comedy written by the Scots or Northern Irish just because they live there.
No, we will not make specifically for the black audience nor for menopausal women.
Not for the working class. We will make comedy for everyone, wherever they live, whatever their religion or upbringing.
One clip from Hapless has a Jewish journalist dressed as an imam, with a woman as Hermione from Harry Potter buying flavoured condoms — from a Muslim shopkeeper who refuses to sell them as he doesn’t want to facilitate grooming.
That clip launched two weeks ago and has got 3.5million views, been favourited tens of thousands of times.
And you know who by? Well, everyone, including young Muslim men.
Yes. Young British Muslim men get satire. Why not make them part of an inclusive British experience?
That would be healthy and healing. Inclusivity doesn’t mean making a Muslim sitcom.
It means making a sitcom that Muslims find as funny as non-Muslims.
Astonishingly, that needs to be said.
Satire is meant to take the mick out of idiots.
Or powerful bs. It gives us hope to see those we envy or dislike brought down low with comedy.
It fulfils a crucial role. The ancient Greeks knew this.
TV satire Have I Got News For You has become smiley and smug.
The original Spitting Image skewered politicians without mercy but HIGNFY invites them on as guests.
South Park went for Harry and Meghan something rotten. Where were we?
The buck stops with . . . well, with Tim Davie, the Director General of the BBC, who amazingly turned down Hapless when offered it at 1/100 cost of a BBC sitcom!
Davie is a scaredy cat. If he allows satire about Netanyahu he will be inundated with emails accusing him of anti-Semitism.
If he allows satire of the From The River To The Sea slogan, he will get threatened on social media.
If he had cajones, he would tell them all to get stuffed because the bigger picture is the wider population which wants, indeed needs, unifying comedy.
We have a coward running our national broadcaster, possibly protected by those who like it that way.
Who suffers? We all do.
Because our TV industry whines too much, I wanted to propose some solutions.
First, state comedy’s importance to UK culture and apologise for the BBC’s failure over decades to give this genre the weight it deserves.
Whiny society
Second, writers and actors know comedy. Not executives.
One wrote to me saying she really liked Hapless but they were looking to reach a younger audience, as if teens don’t laugh at Basil Fawlty and Harry Enfield. Gormless.
Another exec wrote saying my scripts were a bit like Curb Your Enthusiasm — generally acknowledged to be the best American sitcom this century. This bloke compared it to Curb — and passed!
AI is a better judge than executives and gives better notes.
Thirdly, stop working with those bloated TV companies whose interest is in high budgets to turn a profit. Instead, reduce budgets.
It’s easy to reduce the size of a crew to half what it is now.
Same salaries, fewer people. A painful battle with the unions and a lot of heartache for freelancers awaits.
But comedy is in crisis and it’s the one genre that can be very cheap and very successful.
Don’t wait for the same A-list actors. Cast unknown, but funny, and let them become stars.
These proposals would mean more comedy for less money. Who’s going to argue?
Finally, put all your comedy output on BBC One. Don’t hide it. Be proud of it.
Maybe kids will prove us wrong and have longer attention spans than we give them credit for.
Put it on your biggest channel and maybe they will last a half hour.
Maybe the fans of Clarkson can enjoy the same laughs as the fans of Friday Night Dinner.
Maybe comedy can become a force for good in our anxious, divided, depressed and whiny society.
Tim Davie has allowed comedy to become an aside in our divided world. A humour-phobic comic aside.
He can take his team with him because they can’t suddenly change tack. Let writers be petrified in some other place.
We need lots more comedy, we need edgy comedy and we definitely need satire that takes no prisoners.