When is a Sitcom not a Sitcom? When it's a Novel, says Griselda Heppel

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Comedy, we’re told, is the hardest thing to write. 

Well it must be, because frankly there’s so darn little of it around nowadays. And while I await outrage from the Edinburgh Fringe and the innumerable standup comedians and their audiences up and down the country (all eager readers of this blog, obvs), I’ll try and explain what I mean. 

Dark comedy there is. Self-deprecating individuals telling their difficult life stories on stage, one wise-crack after another at their own expense (because no one can have a go at them if it's their lives, after all)… legion. Witty, cleverly written TV ‘sitcoms’ centring on a tortured heroine’s hapless attempts to negotiate some way of living… yup, those too, ever since Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s groundbreaking Fleabag. Which, I maintain wasn’t a sitcom, as the Guardian dubbed it, at all, nor even a comedy-drama, but a novel. A novel released in 12 instalments, perhaps the modern equivalent of how Dickens’s works first found their readership. 

For proof, I give you the fact that Fleabag’s two series are structured as one whole story, beginning with the mystery of a beautiful young woman (Fleabag) dealing with some dreadful event that has left her with flashbacks, zero self-esteem and an inability to form close relationships. Gradually over the episodes, and through hilarious but agonising contretemps with her spiky sister, useless father, poisonous stepmother and other classic comic creations, clues pile up to the cause of her pain, culminating in full revelation and a kind of resolution at the end of Series Two. If that’s not a novel, I don’t know what is. 

Wanted: sitcoms that make me roar with laughter.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev from Pexels


And while Fleabag is brilliant as a work of art, as laugh out loud, uproarious, delightfully silly, escapist comedy, it doesn’t cut the mustard. 

I long for sitcoms whose only aim is to create absurd situations with stock characters and well-crafted scripts to make you roar with laughter, without having to take on board a wealth of emotional baggage as well: Dad’s Army, ‘Allo ‘Allo, Up Pompeii, The Good Life, Are You Being Served, Some Mothers do ‘Ave ‘Em, Last of the Summer Wine and of course the incomparable Fawlty Towers and Blackadder. Yes, many of these will contain attitudes and assumptions people nowadays find Problematic (of course they do, some of them are well over 50 years old); but in that case, write new ones, please! 

In the last 30 years the only sitcoms I can think of that are true inheritors of this kind of humour are Dinnerladies by the late, great Victoria Wood, and Miranda Hart’s delightfully hearty, accident-prone Miranda. (Significantly, Hart acknowledges her debt to those geniuses of original stand-up and send-up comedy, Morecambe & Wise.) Sadly Dinnerladies dates back to 2000 and Miranda came out in 2009. Since then, comedy, whether stand-up or television series, seems to me to have become sharper, edgier, frequently political and just not as much sheer, you know, fun. 

Now you're talking. Er, laughing. More like this please.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev from Pexels


Prove me wrong by directing me to a comedy series I haven’t yet discovered and I’ll be forever in your debt.


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