BBC Sitcom season

Why aren't Porridge and Goodnight Sweetheart options in this poll? I would vote for them. Both excellent revivals that move the story forward rather than trying too hard to recreate the past.

I would have voted for Porridge and Goodnight Sweetheart as well lol

And, Hancock was on last night!

I think they all deserve a series, I have loved them all

I just wonder if those who moaned about young hyacinth & are you being served actually like those sitcoms in the first place? I thought these two were the best of the bunch.

I thought they were all respectful and actually funny while the new pilots were not bad.

I think the biggest missed opportunity was not to have a hi de hi sequel for Peggy, the best comic heroine a true mix of farce & pathos.

long live the sitcom, I will take them over cop, period & violence any day of the week.

and after a summer of tedious sporting events these are something I am happy to have my licence fee spent on......remember the BBC is a bus not a taxi a little of everything for all.

Yes, Are You Being Served just did exactly the same jokes as before - there's already 10 series of that, a movie and a spinoff. Can't see that making more of it wouldn't just be more of the same. The show never evolved and the pilot made it clear that Derren isn't interested in taking it further. So maybe the people that "moaned" about it did like the original but nearly 100 eps of the show is enough for them? That and the fact that of all the shows in this season that was the one that just seemed to refuse to believe it's not the 1970s any more and perhaps humour has moved on? There's nothing to be gained by making more, may as well show the old series. Since it's the same jokes anyway, may as well have someone like Mollie Sugden deliver them rather than Sherrie Hewson.

I disliked Gary in the original Goodnight Sweetheart by the end - he was a bigamist and a liar...but the show didn't let him off the hook which I really liked. It made it clear he was a real prig. It was bold for a sitcom and in premise along it was massively inventive. The new ep was a lot of fun - they did all they could with the WW2 stuff but now if the show comes back there's a load of material set in the 60s to have fun with as well as Gary trying to suss out 2016. You've also got the dynamic with the secret daughter and the future wife who knows about him now. Whether anyone likes the show or not, that's potential right there. That's somewhere to go. Any writer worth their salt in comedy could get another series or two out of that and Lyndhurst plays the role so well.

Porridge paid tribute to the original but again felt lie there's something new to do with it. Not sure the guards needed to be avatars for McKay and Barraclough but it worked, and seeing Mark Bonnar is always welcome. Have the protagonist be a young, vibrant character and the cellmate a total change from Godber was a good idea. Kevin Bishop was fantastic as Fletcher. He's always been a favourite of mine and I hope this gets picked up and gives him the true mainstream hit he's deserved for years.

Young Hyacinth was an odd one. I said in my thoughts above that Are You Being Served spent its whole run doing the same ep over and over, well, so did Keeping Up Appearances. This, surprisingly, did something very different with the pre-Bucket Hyanicth and her kin. That's to be commended but the problem is...it wasn't very funny. I liked the pathos, we're seeing Hyacinth's yearning to be a "better" person by just acting upper-class completely missing the fact that the snobs she's learning from are more dysfunctional and cold than her own family. That's good stuff. Again...problem is that there's nothing funny here though. Kinda a pre-requisite for a sitcom.  It also didn't feel like the same type of comedy. Routledge played it  very broad and grandiose wheras this was all quiet and gentle. It felt more like Last Of The Summer Wine than Keeping Up Appearances. A nice one off butt can't see me watching more. 

I'm looking forward to Steptoe next week if only to see the wonderful Jeff Rawle play Albert. Apart from that the only sitcom return that has me excited is Still Game which returns next month after a decade away.

It depends how they are done. If they're too much about trying to replicate past efforts then yes. If they're more like Goodnight Sweetheart's one-off special in that they look forward then no. Don't get me wrong, Goodnight Sweetheart did look to the past with the return of the original cast but they didn't dwell too long on it. It wasn't the main focus of the episode. Are You Being Served 2016's existence seemed to be purely to say 'Hey, this was cool in the past. Let's try to replicate that with the exact same humour in 2016!'



Nothing's wrong with old-fashioned comedy, it's how the comedy is done that's the problem. Miranda may take tips from past successes like Morecambe & Wise but it doesn't try to recreate the same humour. It does something new with it. You obviously wouldn't get jokes about mobile phones in 1968 but if you compare it to one of Are You Being Served's jokes, you wouldn't get gags about its main character being gay in 2016 either. That's not funny anymore. They should have used more modern humour than relying on a source that everybody has come to accept as not being a joke(homosexuality).

Camp-gay is more or less the same thing in my book. Still a tired old-fashioned joke that has no place in modern comedy. Comedy in my view is something that tends to fluctuate based on current society values; that's why trying to recreate jokes that worked in the 80s is never going to provide a satisfying experience compared to jokes like Gary Sparrow performing the 2016 song Hello in the 1960s.



If the point of the comedy in the show is that it's old-fashioned, then it's a rubbish comedy show. It's old hat and the kind of cringe you experience from watching children on Britain's Got Talent telling jokes that have been passed down to them by their parents.


If you take something like Love Thy Neighbour though, the comedy at the time was funny because the society deemed it the norm to be so. If you remade that now in 2016 with the same kind of humour 90% of the audience would find it offensive and 10% would use it as an excuse to push for free speech in a post-brexit environment. Nobody would find it funny. Whereas if you took Love Thy Neighbour and made the humour more about the rivalry between the two neighbours rather than casual racism with gags about social media and political correctness it would be a more accurate reflection of the world of 2016 rather than the world of 1972.



Oh, there is life in the sitcom. Just not in the retread of what was funny in the 70s/80s rather than what is funny now.

I don't think there's anything more worth doing with "Are You Being Served?" or "Young Hyacinth", accurate though they both were. One a remake, one an explanation of sorts, but neither really leaving much needing developing further.

"Porridge" could work, as there were strong elements, but it needs rethinking. The episode they did was trying to do too much in one episode (remember how the original series began, stretching out a gradual introduction of situation and characters) and there were no strong supporting characters amongst the convicts. (Also a shame that Nicholas Lyndhurst's character was recast, bearing in mind he was doing "Goodnight Sweetheart" for the same season).

"Goodnight Sweetheart"... I think this might be the most tempting opportunity, but I'm not sure there's necessarily much they can do with it. Changing the romantic storyline to a parenting storyline, perhaps? And as I recall, they often struggled with the 1990s side of the storylines anyway.

"Hancock's Half Hour" we know they can do. Galton and Simpson planned a remake in the 1970s with Arthur Lowe and James Beck, there was a partial remake in the 1990s with Paul Merton (alongside various other things), and the TV episode was essentially a spinoff from Radio 4's recent series of remakes of lost episodes. Whether it can get the audience - drama on BBC4 is supposed to have been abolished, after all - is another matter, but the fact they used the same stagey setup as "Till Death Us Do Part" did without actually playing it as a theatre production as Simon Day was, indicates it could be done cheaply. (Come to that, both "Porridge" and "Steptoe and Son" have been done on stage with a new cast. As, indeed, has "Fawlty Towers").

"The Coopers vs The Rest" was a strong first episode, although personally I wouldn't watch a series. "Home from Home"... well, I lasted twenty minutes. Not seen the other pilots yet.

"Steptoe and Son" is still to come, and there's still rumblings that "Up Pompeii" might go ahead next year. Apparently they had identified the cast they wanted but it turned out some of them weren't available.

Liked Young Hyacinth purely on the performance of Kerry Howard. I wasn't sure if I'd like her portrayal but it was superb!

Chriss C.