The Comedy Downturn – Part One

The state of comedy on Telly at the moment is pretty terrible, and it must be enough to make Ronnie Barker spin in his grave at the thought of it. It’s not because TV is ‘dumbing down’ like a lot of people think it is, it’s because good comedy costs money, which no one seems to have, and therefore all good comedy is on hiatus, while the unfunny comedy rules the comedy scene. It’s not just new comedy shows which are awful, but also the old classics are now beginning to date and are becoming less funny, and yet television bosses continue to commission them.

It was reported widely last week that people are not laughing as much as they did last year. It’s not because of the credit crunch or because we’re all going to drown in the next 10 years, it’s because the new series of ‘My Family’ is on BBC again, for its 9th Series. I personally think it has had its time as a popular Sitcom, and is now beginning to drift down the comedy river with a hole at the bottom, which is causing it to slowly and painfully sink, taking Robert Lindsey (Who I quite like) with it.

Another comedy show which will be wreck on the bottom of the metaphorical comedy river (hopefully) soon, is ‘Horne and Cordon’. On paper I should like this show. It’s a fast paced comedy sketch show, which is unfortunately on BBC 3, and not a lot of successful comedy comes from there. It is basically just half hour of recycled jokes which other comedians have done, and frankly, done much better than they did.

Another show, which again, on paper I should like, is ‘Al Murray’s Multiple Personality Disorder’. Again, it is a comedy sketch show (although not very fast paced) with Al Murray, one of my favourite comedians, which even in the sketch show, pokes fun at people of different social classes and countries. Shame is though, it’s awful. Although the show does show that Al Murray can do other things other than be the Pub Landlord, it is unfortunately, predicable rubbish. The sketches are not very good, with the Homosexual Nazi being an utterly awful creation with lots of sexual innuendo’s and ‘Prudent Dad’ is basically Al Murray putting on a Yorkshire accent and mentioning sex a lot, in a way that doesn’t even make me (a sex obsessed teenager with an incredibly dirty mind) laugh.

Then we come onto Red Dwarf. In its past, it is widely known that not every series of Red Dwarf is considered to be brilliant, with other series being more entertaining than others, and luckily, the new series shown on Dave kept to that formula. Even though it was still quite entertaining and funny, it didn’t seem to have the same chemistry as the old series'. Although, it is widely known that comebacks don’t tend to really work unless Gary Barlow is involved. It was never going to be as good as the classic Red Dwarf which we now watch on Dave, but I was disappointed with it. Although I’m not going to go as far as to say it was awful, because I don’t think it was that bad.

There is a lot of comedy these days which is purely ‘Crap’. Gone are the days when Richard Curtis wrote comedy Sitcoms that made the whole family laugh and gone are the days when duo’s done cleaver comedy with each other while wearing trademark glasses. It also seems the day of the catchphrase has got just as rubbish. I remember the days when everyone went around saying ‘I Don’t Believe It!’ whereas the school playground now is full of people wearing Burberry and saying to each other ‘Yeah, but, no, but, yeah...’ Trash, that’s what comedy seems to be these days, trash.

Not all comedy is trash though, there is some good old fashioned comedy still alive today, and tomorrows blog will be the second part of ‘The Comedy Downturn’ blogs, but it will be (slightly) more positive and will look at more successful comedy shows which have been on the Television recently and in the past, and why the hell some of them haven’t been commissioned for another series by the BBC, to make room for this ‘new talent’ as they seem to call it.

Toodles m’dearys
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