BBC1's new controller has said he wants to see more working-class comedy
Is comedy a class issue?
The new controller of BBC1, Danny Cohen, has apparently decided there are too many middle-class sitcoms and not enough working-class ones. Sources say that he feels the Beeb is "too focused on formats about comfortable, well-off middle-class families whose lives are perhaps more reflective of BBC staff than viewers in other parts of the UK", and that we need more of "what he describes as 'blue-collar' comedies".
Blue-collar comedies, eh? Problem is, of course, it's never entirely straightforward what that means: do we mean comedy by the working class, for the working class, or about the working class?
But given this obvious cavil, the man does seem to have a point. Porridge, Bread, Birds of a Feather, Brushstrokes, Rising Damp, Steptoe and Son, Only Fools and Horses, Till Death Do Us Part . . . those were great comedies with working-class settings, except for Brushstrokes, which just had a working-class setting. Where are their equivalents now?
The simple thing to say is that since a working class doesn't exist in the form it did 40 years ago, sitcoms depicting it as if it did aren't to be expected. The notable successes in recent years ? The Royle Family and Shameless ? both portrayed a working class unrecognisable to the Galton and Simpson generation.
Perhaps what Cohen's trying to do is caution against comedy that forgets class exists and assumes We Are All Middle-Class Now: not because it's unrepresentative, but because it's less funny. The best British sitcoms have tended to probe the deepest British anxiety: that is, class itself.
Hancock's Half Hour, maybe the greatest sitcom of all time, was marinated in class anxiety ? as were Keeping Up Appearances, The Good Life, Rising Damp, Are You Being Served? and Fawlty Towers. Snobbery and inverted snobbery, aspiration and pretension, the struggle of the individual against a collective destiny: these are great engines of comedy. From Malvolio mincing cross-gartered to Del-Boy Trotter dreaming of a big score, we recognise ourselves in the snobs brought low and the wide-boys thwarted of class-based comedy.
So we can concede Cohen's point; while suggesting, too, that he turns his eye to a far greater imbalance in the programming of another TV genre. What everyone with an earldom and a grouse moors will wonder is: where are the non-working-class soap operas?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/jan/24/working-class-sitcoms
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