Last Thursday, BBC2’s all-new sit-com The Persuasionists was dropped unceremoniously from its prime time 10pm slot to the graveyard shift halfway through its debut series. Starring Adam Buxton, Iain Lee, Jarred Christmas, Simon Farnaby, and Daisy Haggard and set in ripe-for-mocking the world of advertising, its stilted dialogue, childish, laboured gags and excruciatingly unlikable, stereotypical characters has caused a reaction that stretches all the way from disappointment, bemusement, to downright outrage from comedy fans. The Guardian dubbed it “the eighth circle of sitcom hell”, and the Mirror proclaimed it to be “so imbecilic you had to see it to believe it”.
The subsequent barrage of abuse saw Iain Lee threatening to flee the pitchforks and torches of Twitter. Adam Buxton’s brilliant video response, meanwhile, packs more genuine laughs into four minutes than the entire series of the show has managed so far.
And yet, gormless as The Persuasionists undoubtedly is, it’s nowhere near the nadir of knuckle-biting, toe-curling comedy pestilence lurking in the archives of British humour. Here, we don the necessary protective clothing to plunge into the murkiest end of the sitcom pool, before celebrating the utter genius the best of the genre has given us.
[God, I’d love to stab Iain Lee with rusty garden shears, Ed]
TEN OF THE WORST
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CURRY AND CHIPS
With his biggest success, Till Death Us Do Part, writer Johnny Speight always insisted that Alf Garnet’s racist ranting set out to lampoon small minded, right wing Brits. But he got it spectacularly wrong with Curry And Chips, which sees a blacked-up Spike Milligan as Pakistani factory worker Kevin O’Grady (known to his colleagues as ’Paki Paddy’) taking a barrage of racial abuse so casually and dumbly vitriolic that even 1969’s audiences found it outrageous. It was cancelled after six episodes and remains one of Milligan’s most shameful moments. Still, if Nick Griffin ever feels like putting a dictionary together (assuming he can write, what with the lack of opposable thumbs and all), there’s a steady stream of suitably offensive nouns available here to get him started.
HEIL HONEY, I’M HOME!
In the mind of creator Geoff Atkinson, this must have seemed like a daring, irreverent attempt to satirise the Third Reich in the same way Mel Books did with The Producers. It failed on every level. A spoof of ‘50s American sitcoms like I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, it saw Hitler and Eva Braun living a suburban existence next door to Jewish couple the Goldensteins, Adolf’s dislike for his neighbours shrilly matched by Eva’s attempts at one-up-manship. Astonishingly self-satisfied in its attempts to find the humour in the world’s most evil man, it was about as funny as a bunch of drunk sixth form drama students trying to shock their tutor, only marginally less successful – it was pulled from the schedules after the first episode was roundly panned.
UP THE ELEPHANT AND ROUND THE CASTLE
Two words for you. Jim. Davidson. What the word ‘bellend’ was invented for.
TWO PINTS OF LAGER AND A PACKETS OF CRISPS
When Ralf Little appeared on Never Mind The Buzzcocks, Simon Amstell pointed out that, while The Royle Family was known for its quality, Two Pints was very much known for its quantity. Little replied “There’s quite a lot of people that seem to like it. I’ve never actually met any though.” Such is the mystery of Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps – eight series in with the threat of a ninth in the works, reason suggests that there must be thousands of people out there lapping up this peek into the lives of four certifiable knobheads in Runcorn, to whom nothing of interest ever really happens. The characters are too thick to wisecrack, and the cast deal with this by chewing scenery, rightly crediting their audience with the intelligence of a small, damp, piece of chamois leather left to rot in a driveway.
ARE YOU BEING SERVED?
In the 13-years that it ran, Are You Being Served? managed to deliver two jokes, neither of which were funny. One was Mrs Slocombe (Slocombe! Ha! Sounds a bit rude!) talking about her pussy (she meant her cat! But we all know it also means vagina! Hilarious!) The other was John Inman’s limp-wrested, effeminate whoopsie Mr Humphries chirruping “I’m free!”, which is only funny if you’re so terrified of homosexuality you need to distil it into its most basic stereotype. This was the show that made the art of innuendo about as much fun as a massive fire ripping through a sold-out panto.
BIG TOP
The British Comedy Guide voted this circus-based mess the worst new sitcom of 2009. When you take into account the magic mix of the never knowingly charismatic Amanda Holden, a bunch of clowns, and gags so painfully obvious a three year old would find them insulting, even the most rational thinker might start to wonder if the Daily Mail might have a point about the BBC.
As the ever wonderful Caitlin Moran pointed out in The Times, “at the end of the first half hour, a quick burst of data into the standard issue Viewer’s Calculator reveals that, were the awfulness of Big Top to be rendered into miles, we could use it as a bridge to the moon.”
MIND YOUR LANGUAGE
Because foreigners talk funny!
COME BACK MRS NOAH!
Approach anything with an exclamation mark in the title with extreme caution, as chances are you’ll be gnawing your own face off five minutes into whatever follows – see also Oh! Doctor Beeching, Hi-De-Hi! and Sorry!
This one sees British housewife Mollie Sugden accidentally shot into space. Tragically, they spend the rest of the series trying to bring her back to earth rather than shooting her through the nearest airlock.
BABES IN THE WOOD
ITV has a terrible hit rate with comedy, but this took the biscuit. You know how the Boots ‘Here Come The Girls’ campaign makes women look like vacuous predators hunting in packs before savaging each other to death for the alpha male? That was Babes In The Wood, in which Denise Van Outen, Samantha Janus and another slack-jawed blonde share a St John’s Wood (geddit?!) flat next door to him from the Flash ads, swear a lot, and deal gamely with a script as wooden as Pinocchio’s pants. No wonder Ronnie Mitchell always looks so pissed off.
BORIS! MAYOR OF LONDON
A whimsical, fantastical farce in which a priapic, racist buffoon in the Mr Bean mould inadvertently becomes one of the most powerful men in the capital. A work in progress.
And, on the plus side…
TEN OF THE BEST
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STEPTOE AND SON
It’s been repeated a million times, but the excruciating desperation of this father and son, bound together in their rag and bone business in Oil Drum Lane remains both hilarious and terribly, terribly sad. Poverty doesn’t seem like the most obvious seam to mine for comedy gold, with the socially unsatisfied Harold torn between caring for his father and frustrated enough to wring his neck, but somehow Harry H Corbett and Wilfred Brambell redefined gallows humour.
BLACKADDER
If there was one thing guaranteed to get early -90s kids interested in history, it was Blackadder. Shining a light on the utter stupidity of the ruling classes through the ages, its razor sharp script, jet-black, politically charged subject matter (the Somme, the death penalty, regal privilege) was matched only by the mean, selfish but weirdly loveable performances by one of the greatest ensemble casts ever put together on television. And if you don’t get even a little bit choked up by the last episode of series 4, set in the trenches of World War 1, then you’re probably not quite wired up properly.
SPACED
The situation – Tim and Daisy pretending to be a couple in order to rent a flat – was traditional sitcom fare. But the cast, and crucially director Edgar Wright, pushed the boundaries of what could be achieved by shooting the scenes as if they belonged to a blockbuster film. It captured the imagination of a generation of viewers brought up on comic books, Star Wars and George Romero’s zombie movies, and paved the way for Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz. Tim and Daisy were you and me, only much cooler and much shitter at the same time, which is why we loved them.
THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN
Like The Wicker Man with laughs, The League Of Gentlemen was the most grotesque, disturbing, insanely clever of sitcoms. Like Coronation Street directed by David Lynch, it took us through the looking glass into a world that looked like any boring small town, and threw in psychotic clowns (Papa Lazarou), sociopath Jobcentre staff (Pauline), and genetically linked spouses (Edward and Tubbs). The Christmas Special remains one of the most unsettlingly brilliant pieces of television ever.
PEEP SHOW
Six series in, and the writers of Peep Show are making things worse and worse for Mark and Jez, the socially inept flatmates whose eyes we see the world through. Every time there’s a glimpse of happiness – a chance of love, a dream job – Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong dump another pile of manure on their endlessly disappointing existence. The existence of the wonderful Super Hans (“this crack is really moreish”) doesn’t hurt matters either.
I’M ALAN PARTRIDGE
Again, pain is power as we follow the ever decreasing successes of the most daytime TV man alive. Having seen recent decisions made by television executives, it’s tempting to believe poor Alan’s desperate attempts to stay on the air (Monkey Tennis! Inner City Sumo! Cooking In Prison!) have gone beyond parody and made it, as he always dreamed, into the mainstream.
FATHER TED
The adventures of the amoral priest of Craggy Island, accompanied by the idiot Father Dougal and the aged, drunken, lecherous Father Jack was a curveball that could only have come from someone born and bred in Ireland, with a love for his home as huge as his willingness to mock it. Clumsy housekeeper Mrs Doyle is still an all time hero.
FAWLTY TOWERS
The British stiff upper lip has never exploded so spectacularly as it did when John Cleese blew his top as the henpecked, bored, frustrated Basil Fawlty. Lanky and physical, his anger at petty everyday annoyances shames us all for letting the little things in life matter quite so much.
PORRIDGE
A tough situation was made surprisingly tender thanks to Ronnie Barker’s Fletcher taking doe eyed young lag Richard Beckinsale under a fatherly wing in chokey. Both are completely believable as loveable rogues with a sentimental streak – and it’s a testament to such well rounded characters that the villains are prison guards, not the criminals.
THE FALL AND RISE OF REGINALD PERRIN
Interesting that a complete mental breakdown leading a man to fake his own death should offer up so many laughs, but thanks to the brilliant Leonard Rossiter, this tale of suburban despair and the British pursuit of failure did just that. The execrable Martin Clunes remake, on the other hand, didn’t.
