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Don’t ever accuse terrestrial telly of failing to milk a successful format.
The BBC are running another of those “vote for the best British ... ever” series, this time focussing on sitcoms. They collected votes on the top fifty, which they revealed last weekend, and now each of the top ten gets an hour-long show, with a dubious celeb putting its case forwards.
Sitcoms, when done well, can be wonderful things. Unfortunately, they’re very rarely done well, and this list contained many of the worst offenders.
That top ten (in no particular order):
Open All Hours
The Good Life
One Foot in the Grave
Dad’s Army
Fawlty Towers
Blackadder
Yes, Minister
Only Fools & Horses
Vicar of Dibley
Porridge
I can only presume that the only reason The Good Life made it in was because of the constant repeats, although the psychologists from Big Brother’s Little Brother would, no doubt, attribute it to the viewing public getting fed up with sex and violence on the screen. Same goes for The Vicar of Dibley, the inclusion of which is utterly baffling.
Then there’s Only Fools & Horses, which will undoubtedly win, making the entire exercise even more pointless than it already is. The continued popularity of OF&H is a particular bug-bear of mine – as soon as the show went over to the 50 minute format it lost it’s appeal for me. Rodney is no longer Rodney – the character from the previous episodes no longer exists. We get huge dollops of schmaltz. There’s a vague attempt to introduce some kind of continuity, a change which eventually seems to become the main driving force behind the show. It’s downhill from there, a situation not helped by the BBC constantly reviving it because they feel the need to get a Christmas blockbuster. It’s the antithesis of what Cleese did with Fawlty Towers, and it’ll lead to the show becoming the wide-boy Last of the Summer Wine.
Which is what also happened to One Foot in the Grave.
The fifty included some more real duffers. Last of the Summer Wine, ‘Allo ‘Allo (on which I’m entirely in agreement with Tony Robinson) and Keeping Up Appearances were, thankfully, bookended by the twin peaks of genius that are Father Ted and Steptoe & Son. Why Steptoe didn’t make the ten is beyond me – it’s undoubtedly one of the crowning achievements of the form.
The one huge disappointment, though, was the low position held by The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. This, my friends, is one of the greatest television shows ever. It’s complex, it’s heartbreaking, it’s clever, and it’s brilliantly original, inventive and funny. It’s an attack on middle class values, and it works for the same reason that Yes, Minister works – because the attack comes from the inside. Perrin’s breakdown isn’t just a breakdown, it’s an awakening. The end has parallels with the final episode of Marion and Geoff, in that the main character ends up coming back to what he knows because, ultimately, what he needs in order to function is the same thing that eventually wears him down and harms him.
It’s Leonard Rossiter’s finest TV performance. Most people think of him as Rigsby (Rising Damp was about ten places ahead of this), but Rigsby, entertaining as he is, isn’t a huge amount more than a caricature. Rising Damp also pales into insignificance when put alongside RP because of terribly inconsistent scripts and contrived situations. Rossiter effectively has to carry that show on his own, whereas at least RP has Geoffrey Palmer’s Uncle Jimmy in the mix.
So yeah, disappointed that RP wasn’t higher up the list, but not surprised. Out of those that made the ten, I wouldn’t mind seeing Dad’s Army or Porridge win it.
Thoughts? Any obvious choices missing? Why does it seem so difficult for channels to commission decent ones? Does anyone care? |
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