FRIENDS LIKE THESE

"High costs, tight budgets and a demand for fast results are making it more difficult to get - and keep - good comedies on television."

True, but these are age old questions. Wouldn't it be easier if we just stopped copying the Americans?

The front page of Monday’s MediaGuardian is taken up with Stephen Armstrong's article about the difficulties of securing mainstream primetime comedy hits. Like a lot of views coming from inside the media these days, it addresses many issues from within the walls of the castle, without seeing what's as plain as the nose on its face outside the moat.

With regards to Sky's latest attempts to corner the comedy market, a quote:

"'If they developed the new Friends, they'd get women buying set-top boxes like crazy,' said Lorraine Heggessey, chief executive of Talkback Thames."

Though Heggessey goes on to acknowledge the cynical nature of such a move, the pro-American mindset is clear.

What do I mean by "American comedy"? I refer to what British broadcasters have been trying to imitate for years - the team-led, aspirational, wisecrack-fuelled superhits of Friends or Will & Grace.

It all appeared to start in the nineties, when writers Laurence Marks & Maurice Gran spent a brief period working in the States and came back with an idea to copy the team-writing format. They tried it out on a series they'd created, Birds Of A Feather, which ran quite happily this way before finally peetering out.

There was one problem - it was poor quality. Partly because the pressure cooker atmosphere of the writers room generates a frantic comedy smorgasbord and partly because this approach works brilliantly in America but not here. America is a relatively young country and as such its powerhouse of an entertainment industry has dominated the market in bright and breezy product where the zinger line is all, played against the backdrop of spacious, chronically unaffordable apartments.

It's a shame our writers didn't look sooner to US shows like Cheers or Seinfeld, where the characters were a little darker, the edges a bit frayed behind the killer deliveries. They had more in common with British culture than something like My Family ever did. Now, as Ricky Gervais recently complained, we have to make do with variations on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Britain is class-driven, blinkered and sarcastic. We are now so more than ever, after the aspirational culture promoted partly in these shows led us to the rancid financial bathchair we now sit in.

A wider concern is to see the BBC behaving like an American TV network. It made sense for ITV or Sky to behave this way, with programmes abruptly cancelled and shunted about, the channels seemingly distracted in the scrabble to cram revenue into every available orifice. The BBC has less of these worries and yet, as the Guardian article explains, it pulled Not Going Out despite climbing ratings. Are we to see further schedule yankings from a public service broadcaster?

The shift to this way of thinking is increasingly apparent across the board, with the hiring of Friends scribe Adam Chase by BBC 3 to write sitcom Clone and Andrew Newman of Channel 4's commissioning of a comedy pilot for American comedian David Cross. It seems producers are hoping some comedy sheen will rub off. That's quite aside from the stars of The Wire cropping up in dramas. Clarke Peters and Dominic West are British, but they wouldn't have been given the time of day had America not made them famous.

Comedy is always fast-paced with a rapacious schedule, but it wouldn't do much harm to look back at mainstream hits of the past, such as Only Fools & Horses and see what made them popular to a mainstream audience - a) They were funny, b) They were British and c) As the article explains, they were given time to develop. John Sullivan once remarked that when he was stuck on a Fools & Horses script, he would think what the writers of Frasier would do. Strangely enough, though unaware of Del Boy's existence, Dr Crane's writers cite British comedy as an influence on their output.

When British broadcasters stop trying to run away from the place that made them what they are, only then will you see a stronger sense of identity that is the cornerstone of not just television comedy, but good output in general.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/03/television-comedy-commissioners