III.

Innovations

The face of television comedy changed in 1962 with the creation of That Was The Week That Was, a ground-breaking satirical show produced by Ned Sherrin. It was the earliest made-for-television comedy, the first programme without any perceptible theatre background. It proved hugely influential. After the relative innocence of the previous decade, television comedy took on a more subversive hue during the 1960s. Inspired by the anarchic humour of Spike Milligan as manifested in The Goon Show on BBC Radio and the seminal television sketch programme Q (1969), Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969), which drew on a rich seam of Oxbridge revue graduates, was the most important of a raft of surrealistic-satirical sketch shows—Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life (1964), ITV’s At Last the 1948 Show (1967), and Do Not Adjust Your Set (1968).

Sitcoms, too, were moving away from comfortable set-ups into more challenging areas in the 1960s. Although they continued to work along the same principles of showing the same characters and locations from week to week, often in familiar settings, shows such as Sykes (1960), Steptoe and Son (1962), The Likely Lads (1964), and Till Death Us Do Part (1966) were not afraid to show the darker side of life. During the late 1960s and 1970s, more obviously mainstream sitcoms emerged—witness the chirpiness of The Liver Birds (1969), Last of the Summer Wine (1973), The Good Life (1975), To the Manor Born (1979), and Terry and June (1979). There was still a place for less sympathetic characters, however, such as Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army (1968), Fletcher in Porridge (1974), Rigsby in Rising Damp (1974), Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers (1975), and Reginald Perrin in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976). All of these characters have since become archetypal sitcom figures, demonstrating the maturity of a comedy genre that can effortlessly accommodate unpleasantness.

Comedians who interspersed stand-up routines with sketches also came to prominence in the 1970s. Dave Allen at Large (1971) and The Two Ronnies (1971) were both enormously popular—though both had to compete with the continuing brilliance of Morecambe and Wise.