{"id":7977,"date":"2025-09-10T19:37:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T19:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/7977\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T19:37:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T19:37:09","slug":"john-cleese-is-wrong-the-bbc-sitcom-isnt-dead-its-not-even-resting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/7977\/","title":{"rendered":"John Cleese is wrong \u2014 the BBC sitcom isn\u2019t dead (it\u2019s not even resting)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Comedians can be a punchy bunch and there are few more plain-spoken practitioners than the great John Cleese. This week one of the nation\u2019s greatest funnymen gave an interview in which he vowed never to work with the BBC again, citing a recent lunch he had (I don\u2019t think we can say \u201cenjoyed\u201d) with \u201ctwo BBC people\u201d. <\/p>\n

\u201cOne worked for the comedy department, and he had to leave early,\u201d Cleese said. \u201cHe obviously thought he couldn\u2019t learn anything from someone who\u2019d appeared on The Frost Report and worked on Monty Python. And the other one was a complete idiot.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 85-year-old\u2019s bad blood with his former colleagues seems to go back to a press event in 2018 when the head of comedy at the time, Shane Allen, said that the BBC wouldn\u2019t commission a comedy show made by \u201csix Oxbridge white blokes\u201d<\/a>, which many took to be a dig about Monty Python, one of the glories of our comedy world (which was conceived, written by and starred five Oxbridge white blokes and Terry Gilliam).<\/p>\n

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Cleese\u2019s annoyance was also evident when I spoke to him earlier this year, when he happily sounded off against the \u201cjoyless f***ers\u201d that he believes continue to police comedy. His main concern was what he called the \u201cwoke element\u201d, which he said was creeping into an art form he cares about with a profound passion. \u201cThere\u2019s no question that people having a creative meeting will sound more \u2018are we allowed to say that?\u2019, and the moment that kind of extrinsic factor comes in, it kills it,\u201d he told me. \u201cAnd the trouble is, a lot of the people who are objecting to humour are people with almost no sense of humour.\u201d<\/p>\n

On that score, he probably has a point. In our more sensitive age, comedy producers and broadcasters can be excessively alive to offence, as the trigger warnings<\/a> (or what the BBC prefers to call \u201cguidance\u201d) that appear on many of the BBC\u2019s archive shows on iPlayer demonstrate. Episode one of series two of Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash\u2019s gentle comedy The Royle Family<\/a> comes with an iPlayer warning about \u201cdiscriminatory language which some viewers may find offensive\u201d. It is not the only such notice. But it is the way of the world. <\/p>\n

However, I don\u2019t think Cleese\u2019s reasonable gripes and his feelings about BBC management mean we are facing a full-blown crisis in TV comedy, nor that everyone at the BBC is a complete idiot. Allen is not an idiot. I was at the press event in 2018 when he made his remark and it was slightly throwaway and not (as I saw it) intended as a dig against Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones et al. Around this time the BBC was showing Hold the Sunset<\/a>, the amiable comedy in which Cleese plays the boyfriend of Alison Steadman\u2019s Edith, so clearly the broadcaster admired his work \u2014 as well it should.<\/p>\n

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In fact, few backers of comedy (and admirers of Python) can be more passionate than Allen, now an independent producer and architect of many great recent shows on the BBC, including Daisy May Cooper\u2019s<\/a> fabulously dark and funny Am I being Unreasonable?<\/a> as well as The Power of Parker, an excellent Nineties-set caper starring Conleth Hill<\/a>. If six Oxbridge white blokes came to Allen now with a comedy as brilliant as Monty Python, I suspect he would bite their hand off.<\/p>\n

\"Scene<\/p>\n

Daisy May Cooper and Jessie Dave in Am I Being Unreasonable<\/p>\n

BOFFOLA PICTURES\/ALISTAIR HEAP<\/p>\n

And there are other excellent British comedies to be found in the BBC schedules. The second series of the Bafta-winning Such Brave Girls<\/a> has just aired (a third series is under way); Kat Sadler\u2019s<\/a> examination of her own very real struggles with self-harm and mental illness is breathtakingly daring and funny. If people think Gen Z cannot laugh at their neuroses they should skip past Auntie\u2019s warnings about the show\u2019s \u201cstrong language, adult humour and some sexual content\u201d and watch this. <\/p>\n

As one producer says: \u201cCleese often lights this touchpaper by saying comedy has been lacklustre for the past 25 years, but it\u2019s an insult to all those amazing writers and performers who created Fleabag, Detectorists, Peter Kay\u2019s Car Share, Derry Girls, Friday Night Dinner, This Country, Inside Number 9, Mum and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Everybody said sketch shows were dead<\/a> and too expensive, but David Mitchell and Robert Webb<\/a> have proved in their pretty good new Channel 4 show Mitchell and Webb are not Helping<\/a> that they aren\u2019t. I hear it\u2019s not the last sketch show in the pipeline either.<\/p>\n

In private, comedy producers will tell you that they are slightly hamstrung by changing times and sensitivities but say that one major problem is technological: viewing has become fragmented, people stream in their own time and the watercooler moments that many of us enjoyed in the 1980s the morning after an episode of The Young Ones or Blackadder will not be repeated. But that\u2019s not to say there aren\u2019t good shows out there.<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

Kay Sadler and Lizzie Davidson in Such Brave Girls<\/p>\n

BBC\/VARIOUS ARTISTS LIMITED\/VISHAL SHAMA<\/p>\n

This autumn Alan Partridge will make a welcome return to the BBC, after four years away from the small screen, with a new six-part series called How Are You?<\/a> In it, Steve Coogan\u2019s character tries to integrate back into British society after spending a year living and working in Saudi Arabia. This time, the man from Norwich is doing his best to understand the nation\u2019s mental health. Obviously he gets it painfully wrong but, as always, the joke is on Alan, who claims that comedy doesn\u2019t examine these issues. It really does.<\/p>\n

I love Cleese and would love to see him back in a BBC comedy because he remains as lively, passionate and funny as ever. When we spoke he said that he and his daughter Camilla \u2014 who he told me was his \u201cthird great writing partner\u201d after Connie Booth and Graham Chapman \u2014 have written an episode-and-a-half of their Fawlty Towers reboot. In it, Basil\u2019s long-lost daughter (and how extraordinary it is to imagine he once had sex, he joked) is running a hotel in the Caribbean and asks her estranged dad to help. It is, he tells me, \u201cvery funny\u201d, and I believe it, though it\u2019s been put in abeyance because he is so busy. He probably won\u2019t take it to the BBC when it\u2019s finally finished. But maybe he should give it a go. Even if only for old times\u2019 sake.<\/p>\n

Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix<\/a>, the best Prime Video TV shows<\/a>, the best Disney+ shows<\/a>, the best Apple TV+ shows<\/a>, the best shows on BBC iPlayer<\/a>, the best shows on Sky and Now<\/a>, the best shows on ITVX<\/a>, the best shows on Channel 4<\/a> streaming, the best shows on Paramount+<\/a> and our favourite hidden gem TV shows<\/a>. Don\u2019t forget to check our critics\u2019 choices to what to watch this week<\/a>, and browse our comprehensive TV guide<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Comedians can be a punchy bunch and there are few more plain-spoken practitioners than the great John Cleese.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7978,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-7977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}