Classy Comedy

Classy Comedy - Harold and Albert Steptoe

 The new controller of BBC1, Danny Cohen, has apparently decided there are too many middle- class sitcoms and not enough working-class ones. Sources say that he feels the Beeb is "too focused on formats about comfortable, well-off middle-class families whose lives are perhaps more reflective of BBC staff than viewers in other parts of the UK", and that we need more of "what he describes as 'blue-collar' comedies".

Off the top of my head - and in no particular order - here are the the 'working-class' British sitcoms I grew up watching: Hancock's Half Hour, Steptoe and Son, Til Death Us Do Part, Open All Hours, Porridge (criminal working class), The Likely Lads and Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads, On The Buses, Rising Damp, Only Fools and Horses and The Royle Family.

The middle-class sitcoms that stick in my mind are Yes, Minister/Prime Minister, Fawlty Towers, The Good Life, Are You Being Served.

There was also a high volume of American sitcoms but here I'm concentrating on class in the Britcom. 

Class has undoubtedly played its part in great sitcom writing; the struggle between the working man and his boss, the struggle between the working man and the system. What many of the earlier working-class comedies share are a) authorship - they were written by Galton and Simpson and b) characters that may have been low down on the ladder but who had mighty aspirations.
The Tony Hancock of Hancock's Half Hour lived in a run down house at 23, Railway Cuttings. He may have had delusions of grandeur but he was in many respects as common as muck. His pretensions were intellectual but the moment he spoke we knew he was all bluff - "Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?".

Harold Steptoe, from Steptoe and Son. was tied forever to his scheming father and yet was always trying to better himself. Yes, he was working class but he wanted to climb out of the mire, be a member of the tennis club, be center stage at the Amateur  Dramatics Society, read the philosophers and watch ballet on television. In one episode he bemoans how he could have been a doctor if his father hadn't held him back "I could have had a string of abortion clinics by now!"

When Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais brought The Likely Lads back to TV as Whatever Happened to The Likely Lads class was at the epicenter of the relationship between the two friends. Bob was middle management, with a  three piece suit, a company car and a sensible wife. Terry was downtrodden working class, bitter about years wasted in the Army. He was unemployed and lived with his mum, the only thing he took to bed was the Racing Post. Bob had aspirations, all Terry wanted to do was drag him back down to their working-class roots. If ever there was a dyed-in-the-wool, know-your-place character in British sitcom it was Terry Collier.

But these characters, and the list of working-class sitcoms above, all came from a different era. Britain has since had a spending spree. With easily available credit the working man could buy his own home, furnish it with middle-class trappings and jet off to Disney World. During the nineties and early years of this this century class struggle was off the sitcom agenda. Now the landscape has changed again, we're living through 'the new austerity', the struggle of the working man is back. But he has changed.

Victor Meldrew as a character is no more. David Renwick may have killed off his famous creation but he may show us the way to a new slate of comedies. I say this because Victor was a working man (albeit retired) who sat well in the contemporary landscape, an extraordinary example of an 'ordinary man'. He railed against life, as so many of us do, shaking our fists at next door's skip that has been dumped outside our door, shouting at the television and finding ourselves on the wrong side of council form fillers.

Rather than 'the working-class' I think a better word for the group underrepresented in TV sitcom at the moment is the 'ordinary' person. And there are plenty of stories to tell about them.

But anyone who thinks writing ordinary people means sinking to the lowest common denominator is wrong. Look at my list of working class sitcoms again. Some of the best written pieces ever to grace the box - and On The Buses. 

So I say bring back the ordinary man - and lets have some more aspiration.

If there is one genuine working class comedy on television today, standing head and shoulders above anything else it is Shameless. It may portray foul-mouthed characters from a sink estate but it sure as hell has the ambition to do it with a style and wit that some other comedy/drama could only dream of.