There’s a favorite joke among comedians when asked if their industry is getting worse: “Nostalgia? It is not like the old one.”
But for fans of the usual jokes and the shows that feature them, 2024 could truly be a golden age.
Recent months have seen a number of classic comedies announce moves to the West End, sketch series The Fast Show begins a nationwide stage tour and the UK tour of Drop the Dead Donkey: The Reawakening! has begun. The dates have already been added.
A stage production of John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers will be released in May, and in the autumn the musical version of Only Fools and Horses will begin a 30-city tour in the UK after a successful West End run.
This isn’t just theater. Alan Partridge will soon return to screens in the BBC’s six-part mockumentary series, but some shows have never gone away: repeats of Dad’s Army still air on BBC Two on Saturday evenings. Comedian John Kearns joked on his live show that he was competing for viewers with Arnold Ridley, who played Godfrey in the series and was born in 1896: “He’s a Victorian!”
But none of this is a joke for shows or new shows. In November, Ofcom warned that scripted comedy, which consists of sitcoms and skits rather than panel shows, which are much cheaper to produce, was a genre “at risk” for the fifth year in a row.
Mark Boosey, joint editor of the British Comedy Guide, says sitcoms of the kind produced in front of a live studio audience have “essentially been discontinued”. According to their data, 633 hours of comedy, including 126 hours of sitcoms, were made in 2023, while 899 hours of comedy, including 226 hours of sitcoms, were made in 2014.
Boosey said: “Last year, the only sitcoms shot in front of a studio audience were Mrs Brown’s Boys and Not Going Out; the rest were ‘single-camera’ sitcoms. The money was shifted to other types of comedies.”
An example of this was The Bear, a “drama” that explored mental breakdown and dysfunctional families through the pressure cooker environment of a Chicago restaurant kitchen. It won the best comedy award at the Grammy and Emmy awards.
But Kenton Allen, CEO of Big Talk, producers of Noel Fielding’s new play The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin and the comedy-thriller The Outlaws starring Stephen Merchant, says the next direction of comedy will be different again. says.
“Comedy is expensive and prone to failure, but when you do it right it’s a game changer,” says Allen, pointing to the success of Channel 4 comedy Friday Night Dinner, now in its sixth series. “I think we’re seeing a return to ‘hardcore comedy’, where every line is a joke,” he says, referring to the BBC’s Here We Go. “We’re back to nonsense.”
Former BBC comedy director Shane Allen, who founded comedy production company Boffola Pictures, says that in a world where streaming is king, classic throwback comedy shows are a good investment for commissioners. “Comedy is a super genre that has a very long tail and has become incredibly good value over time, while also being over-indexed for younger audiences.”
Broadcasters who recognized the long-term benefits of comedy faced the reality of high inflation, spiraling costs and falling advertising revenues; The US writers’ strike, however, damaged co-production financing.
BBC comedy director Jon Petrie argues the BBC, which describes itself as the “home of comedy”, is conscious of its responsibility to future comedy nostalgia buffs and says the broadcaster’s commissions are stable, with a £10 million increase to its comedy budget in 2022. But he adds that in a challenging environment, the BBC, like its rivals, needs to be more shrewd about its finances.
“In the past maybe the BBC could pay for everything directly [but] we gave up on that,” says Petrie. “We still do the same number of shows every year, [but] “Sometimes we ask producers to be a little more entrepreneurial.”
This could mean a co-production, as with The Outlaws, which is shown on BBC One in the UK but on Prime Video abroad; This, he argues, means better value for license fee payers. “Our main interest is UK viewers and license fee payers… so they can turn on the TV 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 over the last decade, but thinks reports of comedy’s imminent demise have been greatly exaggerated. “There’s a tendency towards a slightly destructive belief that everything is terrible at the moment, but there’s still a lot of good stuff being done,” he says, highlighting the well-received Dreaming While Black.
While the meteoric rise of on-demand programming and the sense of panic that comes with viewers canceling their subscriptions has left the comedy world feeling “a little uncertain and dysfunctional,” he thinks people will always return to the shows that made them laugh in their youth. “Hopefully we’ll have a few quid at this point,” Williams says. “And we can spend it on nostalgia, too.”