Only Fools and Horses at 40

[Brekkie]

I think the last comedy hit that ITV had was Duty Free.

Depends how you term a 'comedy hit' but what about Mr Bean, The New Statesman, The Upper Hand, After Henry, Benidorm? Not sure if Men Behaving Badly counts

There are other examples, Thames had quite a few fairly long running sitcoms in the late 80s as well as After Henry. There were quite a few weekend sitcoms that did fairly well like Surgical Spirit, Second Thoughts

And later than that you had Barbara and Hardware - granted not the breakout laugh out loud hits the BBC were seeing but both had multiple series .

ITV2 has had some success too, most noteably with Plebs.

[XIII]

The Upper Hand must be one of the very few successful remakes of an American series. Did Who's the Boss ever air in the UK?

[Brekkie]

Talking of remakes of comedy interesting that The Cleaner with Greg Davies, which starts tomorrow on the BBC, is actually a remake of a German comedy.

[James2001]

Did Who's the Boss ever air in the UK?

It was on Paramount Comedy for years!

[Steve Williams]

Depends how you term a 'comedy hit' but what about Mr Bean, The New Statesman, The Upper Hand, After Henry, Benidorm? Not sure if Men Behaving Badly counts

There are other examples, Thames had quite a few fairly long running sitcoms in the late 80s as well as After Henry. There were quite a few weekend sitcoms that did fairly well like Surgical Spirit, Second Thoughts

Yeah, up until about the mid-90s, ITV did alright for comedy, and we would happily watch them as we would BBC sitcoms. The Upper Hand, as you suggested, lasted for ages (obviously it was a US adaptation, which meant there were umpteen episodes to adapt and they could do proper long runs of it) and there were others that did alright even if they haven't really had much of a legacy. I remember the Gwen Taylor sitcom Conjugal Rights getting over ten million viewers in 1994, but nobody remembers it now.

It was the late 90s where ITV comedy started to get a poor reputation. One problem was that the 9pm hour was increasingly colonised by drama five nights a week, and the old Sunday 10pm slot was colonised by prestige two hour dramas, so pretty much the only slot for comedy, unless you went after News at Ten which was a dead slot, was 8.30, which massively limited the kind of shows they could do. So everything got very conservative, and the increasingly few shows they did were very bland and didn't catch on.

They never had anywhere like the Beeb had with BBC2 or 10pm slots on BBC1 to try out new things, so stuff was either thrust straight into primetime and canned if it didn't immediately do ten million viewers, or was dumped at 10.40 where it made no impact at all. One example of that was in 1995 when there was Jack Dee's Saturday Night which was a huge flop, the idea being they would mix Jack and some current stand-ups with veterans like Freddie Starr in an attempt to appeal to everyone, but instead it appealed to nobody. There was Babes In The Wood as well, which felt like it should have worked because it was suitably big and brash for ITV - what really didn't work on ITV was middle class sitcoms that may as well have been on Radio 4 - but because it was in such a prime slot it was focus grouped and micro-managed to within an inch of its life and it wasn't very good at all.

Alan Davies used to tell the story too about Get Real, the sitcom he wrote for Carlton in 1997. They did a pilot and that worked out but he had so many arguments with ITV over it, he resigned and his co-writer wrote the series on his own. He said the last straw was when they had a joke about drugs and ITV told him they absolutely could not do any jokes about drugs but if they got a second series they could do a whole episode about drugs, and he said they didn't want to do that, they just wanted to do that one joke, and that happened all the time. So that was the kind of cautious and conservative commissioning on ITV at the time. When it was finished ITV then sat on it for a year and then flung it out at 10.40.

Of course the main reason moved News at Ten in 1999 was because BBC1 was getting ten million viewers at 10pm with shows like They Think It's All Over and Frank Skinner, and loads of those were advertiser-friendy ABC1 males, so they absolutely desperately wanted something similar, but they were too late to the party and none of their equivalents really caught on, and in the end they ended up just poaching Frank Skinner.

Actually about twenty years ago ITV had quite a nice little collection of comedy shows with Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, The Sketch Show, Rob Brydon's Directors' Commentary and of course TV Burp, which were all good shows and sort of illustrated where ITV should be going I think in that they felt like they actually belonged on ITV and weren't just poor attempts at copying the BBC. But TV Burp aside, they all just seemed to peter out, and again ITV were incredibly commercially-minded. So even thought The Sketch Show won a BAFTA, because the second series didn't do all that much for its first two shows it was immediately dumped into a late night slot and then dropped before the end of the run. Because they needed hits now.

[Steve Williams]

The Upper Hand must be one of the very few successful remakes of an American series. Did Who's the Boss ever air in the UK?

One of the other things that didn't help ITV comedy was that because The Upper Hand was a hit, they kept on trying to replicate that with adapatations of other US sitcoms, to increasingly diminishing returns. So we had The Brighton Belles, which was a disaster, and then a remake of Married With Children which actually didn't seem such a bad idea because I think the original show is the nearest thing US TV had to a British sitcom, much ruder than most of the things you'd see on the US networks, but it was so badly done. They also did a remake of Mad About You which was just the blandest and most forgettable sitcom ever made.

Then they did Days Like These and the idea was that this would be different because Carsey Werner, the US producers of That 70s Show, were making it themselves, and there was a clause in the contract that said the original would never be shown on British TV so nobody could make comparisons and the cast were told not to watch any episodes, so as far as everyone was concerned it was a brand new series. But it turned out to be the worst of the lot, and despite all that, they kept it things like the little sketches used in the US break bumpers, which made no sense here as they weren't used for break bumpers. And of course within a year it had long been axed and Channel Five showed the original series. It was adapted by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, now very successful writers indeed of course.

But that was one of the issues with ITV comedy in that period, it all seemed to be done by committee - not usually a recipe for original and distinctive comedy.

[XIII]

The Upper Hand must be one of the very few successful remakes of an American series. Did Who's the Boss ever air in the UK?

One of the other things that didn't help ITV comedy was that because The Upper Hand was a hit, they kept on trying to replicate that with adapatations of other US sitcoms, to increasingly diminishing returns. So we had The Brighton Belles, which was a disaster, and then a remake of Married With Children which actually didn't seem such a bad idea because I think the original show is the nearest thing US TV had to a British sitcom, much ruder than most of the things you'd see on the US networks, but it was so badly done. They also did a remake of Mad About You which was just the blandest and most forgettable sitcom ever made.

Then they did Days Like These and the idea was that this would be different because Carsey Werner, the US producers of That 70s Show, were making it themselves, and there was a clause in the contract that said the original would never be shown on British TV so nobody could make comparisons and the cast were told not to watch any episodes, so as far as everyone was concerned it was a brand new series. But it turned out to be the worst of the lot, and despite all that, they kept it things like the little sketches used in the US break bumpers, which made no sense here as they weren't used for break bumpers. And of course within a year it had long been axed and Channel Five showed the original series. It was adapted by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, now very successful writers indeed of course.

But that was one of the issues with ITV comedy in that period, it all seemed to be done by committee - not usually a recipe for original and distinctive comedy.

It's always interesting to see how a show is adapted to different countries and culture. The Office and Shameless are great examples of how to remake a show properly although The Office in its first series was a bit of a disaster because it stuck too close to the original series whereas once they found their groove and made Michael Scott more likeable in series 2, it was able to carve its own identity.

I'm surprised ITV never adapted The Nanny although I admit it would be very hard for any actress to top Fran Drescher but it has been remade in several places like Poland and Russia and it's a simple premise that can work anywhere.

[Andrew]

The Upper Hand was like a 1990s My Family really, in as much as it was on for years and they made loads of episodes, but it’ll never be on anyone’s top 10 list of favourite sitcoms

[JK1985]

In one history book about TV, someone wrote that the reason why ITV sitcoms generally failed was that their running time was shorter than BBC sitcoms. They wrote that a half hour BBC sitcom like Only Fools would run to around 29 minutes, whereas any ITV sitcom had to run to around 24-25 minutes due to commercials. They said these vital 5 or 6 minutes less led to lazy writing, less expansion in character development and caused a lot of ITV sitcoms to not be big hitters.

Now I think that is unfair, as sitcoms such as Rising Damp, Bless This House, George and Mildred, New Statesman etc were all very good within the confines of the shorter half hour format for ITV.

[Joe]

I don’t buy that. If you can fit all of that into a John Lewis ad, you can fit it into a 25 minute episode, and a series’ worth of them. It also doesn’t explain the very many successful US sitcoms that are 22 minutes.

[JAS84]

2.9m would be considered a hit now. The value of repeat runs should not be underestimated though - I'd say both Gavin and Stacey and Mrs Browns Boys show that is still the case in recent years.

Worth noting BBC1 (with a bit of help from BBC3) actually have 5 new sitcoms a week on at the moment with Ghosts, Ladhood, Back to Life, Ladybaby and The Cleaner (replacing King Gary) on Friday. That must be the most in a week for quite some time - though of course all got put on iPlayer in full before airing on BBC1.

Ghosts is definitely a hit - it's actually got an American remake on CBS coming soon.

[XIII]

It’s a load of rubbish to say that sitcoms that are less than 30 minutes are bad. Aside from the American sitcoms, there have been plenty of successful sitcoms on the likes of ITV, Channel 4 etc Father Ted comes to mind as well as The IT Crowd and more recently things like Friday Night Dinner and Derry Girls.

[Steve Williams]

In one history book about TV, someone wrote that the reason why ITV sitcoms generally failed was that their running time was shorter than BBC sitcoms. They wrote that a half hour BBC sitcom like Only Fools would run to around 29 minutes, whereas any ITV sitcom had to run to around 24-25 minutes due to commercials. They said these vital 5 or 6 minutes less led to lazy writing, less expansion in character development and caused a lot of ITV sitcoms to not be big hitters.

This was generally accepted, though, within the industry. It was actually Galton and Simpson who first observed it, writers of some repute of course with Hancock and Steptoe, and who wrote many shows for both channels. They always referred to those extra five minutes as "integrity time", because that was where you could include character development and some more subtle humour which was always the first thing to go when you were cutting down scripts to fit, and it was those things that ensured a sitcom really cemented itself in the public's affections.

It's true that in America they were working wonders in 22 minutes, let alone 25, but it's also worth remembering that they also had many times more episodes than a British show. They'd have 26 weeks, not six.

I do know The New Statesman's scripts were particularly short by commercial TV standards because in the first series the audience laughed so much all the scenes went on far longer than they were anticipating and they had to lose loads of jokes, so in later series they only wrote about twenty minutes of material to leave more space for laughter. They could also rely on Rik Mayall making the most of anything he was given and improvising wonderfully, but I do remember an interview with Rik where he said he had a New Statesman script which said "B'Stard reacts - chance for a genius to improvise" and he was so terrified they were expecting something brilliant, he couldn't think of anything at all.