Don't make me laugh...

The BBC has acquired a new attitude to comedy. It now needs to be funny.  Ah yes, I hear you cry, gentle reader, but it always was, wasn't it?

No.  It wasn't.   It was, however, up to the start of the '90s, when the Powers That Be in the BBC decided in their collective wisdom that comedy was out, cutting edge, alternative stuff was in. You know, the stuff that gets a small collection of obscenely over-paid, dubious-substance-sniffing financial acolytes in a hot, sweaty converted basement club in the West end guffawing nosily, usually to try to impress their mediocre peers with their imagined ability to spot a joke that didn't exist in the first place.

For some inexplicable reason, the Beeb promotes people who have little knowledge of or contact with ordinary intelligent folk, and puts them in charge of things like comedy. Thus, the cretinous opinions of an ex-public school failure determine the comedic fare for the whole BBC audience.

Now, that's not to say all modern, cutting edge, alternative stuff is bad. Some is bearable, some almost good but most is dreadful.  That's partly because stand-up comedy is the hardest form of entertainment and writing it is only slightly less difficult. But think of the shows that actually made the entire family laugh, appealed to the intelligent, astute and thoughtful, were skilfully written, brilliantly crafted and worked like a charm in the hands of the experts.  Braben writing for Morecambe and Wise, Jay and Lyn writing Yes Minister and its even better successor, Yes PM, Fawlty Towers, the Good Life and - crossing the pond - the inimitable Frasier and the outstanding MASH;  the list goes on. That not one of the Bright Young Things at the Beeb could comprehend that by filling comedy with post-watershed vocabulary that had a limited appeal, even to male adolescents, would systemically disenfranchise  an entire generation from TV and comedy in general is staggering;  and only slightly less staggering than that they did so in the full knowledge of the complaints being made on a daily basis about the lack of comedic family fare.

But the new head of BBC comedy says we need more family comedy.  As though this was news.  But hey;  let's encourage the man, and hope that we haven't completely lost the genius of writers such as Jay, Cleese, Braben and many more.  And maybe we'll start seeing things that not only make us laugh, but challenge us and provide multi-layered fare for the whole family.