The 'sit' in 'sitcom' stands for 'situation', but you could be forgiven for
thinking it stands for 'sitting room', since the situation in so many TV sitcoms
has been a family home. Like radio before it, television brought entertainment
into the domestic space. And while one task the new medium set itself was
bringing the outside world into our homes, its position in the corner of our
living rooms meant it was perfectly placed to act as a mirror to our domestic
lives.
The early television schedules responded to this challenge awkwardly,
although the mode of address, in line with radio's, was from the start carefully
pitched to a domestic audience (slightly, but not excessively, informal). But as
TV began to enter more homes following the 1952 Coronation, so the programming
grew to reflect more closely the domestic space, not least in comedy.
It is to radio, too, that we can trace the ancestry of the British TV sitcom.
Hancock's Half-Hour (BBC, 1956-) - the escapades of a frustrated, single man -
is often cited as the first such programme to cross the divide from radio to
television. But in fact, it was beaten to the screen by more than a year by a
family sitcom, Life With the Lyons (BBC, 1955-56; ITV 1957-60), which had been
entertaining radio audiences since 1950 and already spawned two feature films. Unusually, the
Lyons were a real-life family - Americans Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels had settled in London during the war and appeared together in popular radio show Hi Gang!.
On radio and screen alike, the Lyons (completed by children Barbara and Richard)
acted out a succession of humorous events largely exaggerated from their own
experiences, but they were never less than a warm and loving family, as,
generally, were their working-class equivalents, the more boisterous The Larkins
(ITV, 1958-64).
But the functional, happy and loving family was more the exception than the
rule in subsequent TV sitcoms. The template for the warring sitcom family was
established as early as 1962 with the birth of Steptoe and Son (BBC, 1962-74),
which showcased the perpetual conflict of father-and-son 'rag and bone men'
Albert (Wilfrid Brambell) and Harold Steptoe (Harry H. Corbett). The ambitious dreamer Harold's ceaseless - and ceaselessly thwarted - attempts to escape his
shifty, manipulative father's clutches and make his way in the world made for
hilarious and poignant comedy.
If the rivalry between the elder and younger Steptoes could be brutal, there
was at least a sense, underneath the bickering, that the two both loved and
(above all) needed each other. By contrast, the Garnetts, the family at the
centre of Till Death Us Do Part (BBC, 1966-75), rarely showed much sign of
mutual affection. Patriarch Alf Garnett (Warren Mitchell) was a monstrous bigot,
a deluded everyman whose every pronouncement dripped with ignorant prejudice.
His despairing adult daughter and her 'randy Scouse git' husband fought
valiantly, if hopelessly, to expose the fallacies and inconsistencies in Alf's
beliefs, while his put-upon wife, invariably dismissed as a 'silly moo',
struggled to keep up. History has remembered the controversy generated by Alf's
forcefully expressed racist views, but the Garnetts' relentless civil war was
arguably the series' more innovative feature.
Both the Steptoes and the Garnetts broke ground in representing working-class
families on television, in tune with the new on-screen visibility of the working
class following the 'new wave' of British films in the late 1950s and early 60s
- though neither could be considered a complimentary portrait. But as the genre
developed, British sitcom more typically represented middle-class families, as
with the newlyweds of Marriage Lines (BBC, 1963-66). George (Richard Briers) and
Kate Starling (Prunella Scales) argued frequently from the outset, though love
always won through in the end. But Kate's increasing frustration with the
housewife's lot marked her out as a prototype for Wendy Craig's Ria in
Butterflies (BBC, 1978-83). The sitcom was by now something of a barometer of
social change.
Craig was the harassed housewife in a string of middle-class sitcoms: Not in
Front of the Children (ITV, 1967-70), was soon followed by ...And Mother Makes
Three (ITV, 1971-73), and its sequel, ...And Mother Makes Five (ITV, 1974-76),
in which she played a widowed, then remarried, mother. Bigger than both was
Butterflies, in which Ria stood for a generation of married women
questioning their burden in the light of the growing feminist movement. The
series charted Ria's frustrations with her emotionally distant husband Ben
(Geoffrey Palmer) and two wayward sons, her many domestic failures - typified by
her 'experimental' cooking - and her hesitant steps to independence happiness
with amorous businessman Leonard. Ultimately, however, family always came
first.
This was the age of adolescent rebellion, and Sid Abbott (Sid James) and his
wife Jean (Diana Coupland), the parents of two teenagers in Bless This House (ITV, 1971-76) would
have related to Ria's maternal anxieties, even if they wouldn't have recognised
much else about her apparently comfortable suburban life. The working-class
Abbotts were more in the mould of the Larkins or the Garnetts, though gruff Sid
was, by and large, a more benevolent figure than the cantankerous Alf.
Perhaps such alarming examples were the reason why some sitcom marrieds
declined to have children at all. The mismatched Ropers (Brian Murphy and Yootha Joyce) of George and Mildred
(ITV, 1976-79) were childless, as were both Tom (Richard Briers) and Barbara
Good (Felicity Kendall) and their neighbours Jerry (Paul Eddington) and Margo
Leadbeatter (Penelope Keith) in The Good Life (BBC, 1975-77). The Goods'
decision to drop out of the rat race and become self-sufficient may have been
interpreted as a declaration of war against suburban conformity, but they were
seldom at war with each other for long. The titular pair of Terry and June (BBC,
1979-87) were altogether more conformist, and much of the comedy emerged from
Terry's (Terry Scott) frequently desperate attempts to impress his social peers
to the exasperation of the long-suffering June (June Whitfield).
Terry and June was a particular target for the rising 'alternative comedy'
generation, which emerged in the early 1980s with the express objective of
putting to the torch such cosy bourgeois comedy. The first alternative sitcom,
The Young Ones (BBC, 1982-84) presented a grotesque facsimile of the sitcom
family, radically recast as brattish students in a squalid flatshare. You have
to squint to see it, but the unsavoury quartet were a kind of parallel universe
take on the template of Butterflies, with lentil-burning hippy Neil (Nigel Planer) as neurotic,
put-upon mother, self-styled 'cool' lothario Mike (Christopher Ryan) as remote father, and Rik (Rik Mayall) and Vyvyan (Ade Edmondson)as squabbling sons. The less well-remembered Happy Families (BBC, 1985)
offered an equally subversive take on the genre and its representation of the
family, with an elderly matriarch assembling her four dispersed grandchildren
(all played by Jennifer Saunders) with the objective of harvesting their organs
to cure her mortal illness.
But if the alternative generation thought they could kill the suburban family
sitcom, they were fooling only themselves. Terry and June outlived The Young
Ones, while the succeeding years brought us Richard Briers'
obsessive Martin Bryce and his ever-tolerant wife Ann (Penelope Wilton) in Ever Decreasing Circles
(BBC, 1984-87), the retired Meldrews - saintly Margaret (Annette Crosbie) and her permanently
outraged husband Victor (Richard Wilson) - in One Foot in the Grave (BBC, 1990-2000), and
Patricia Routledge's über-snob Hyacinth Bucket and embarrassing relatives in
Keeping Up Appearances (BBC, 1990-95).
Better examples of a 'post-alternative' school of sitcom family were to be
found in the alarmingly dysfunctional Nesbitts, presided over by drunken
philosopher Rab C Nesbitt (BBC, 1989-99) - the only sitcom family whose
arguments regularly turned violent - and in Jennifer Saunders' own Absolutely
Fabulous (BBC, 1992-2003), in which Saunders' decadent, selfish Edina was a
perpetual worry to and burden on her daughter and her mother (the latter played
by Terry and June's June Whitfield).
But more successful than all of these was Only Fools and Horses (BBC,
1981-96). The all-male Trotters - Del Boy (David Jason), younger brother Rodney (Nicholas Lyndhurst and granddad (Lennard Pearce)
(later replaced by Uncle Albert (Buster Merryfield)) - resembled an updated Albert and Harold
Steptoe, with their low-status business (a Peckham market stall) and
ever-faltering hopes of social advancement. But while the trio frequently fell
into disputes over the collapse of yet another hair-brained moneymaking scheme,
there was no doubting the strength of their familial bonds. Just as tight-knit
and downtrodden were the Boswells of Bread (BBC, 1987-91), who responded to the
challenges of Thatcher-era economics in their own way, but always together,
presided over by forceful matriarch Ma (Jean Boht).
Family has been at the centre of each of Britain's small number of black and
Asian sitcoms, from The Fosters (ITV, 1976-77) on, although whether this
reflects a greater attachment to family among black and Asian Britons is open to
question. Still, with intergenerational conflict already offering such enduring
comic potential, the very different experiences and outlooks of parents born
overseas and their British-born children were presumably too rich in possibility
for writers to resist. Much of the comedy in Tandoori Nights (Channel 4,
1985-87) and Desmond's (Channel 4, 1989-94) stemmed from just these sorts of
differences and misunderstandings. ITV's earlier No Problem! (1983-85), however,
took an unusual approach, focusing on the struggles of the five kids of the
Powell family to get along with life and each other after their parents have
retired to Jamaica. More unusual still was The Kumars at Number 42 (BBC,
2001-03), in which Sanjeev Bhaskar's budding chat show host contends with
constant humiliating interruptions from his ever-present elders and betters.
Sitcom innovation has been a feature of the 1990s and 2000s, as in the fusion
of sitcom and 'mockumentary' that was The Office (BBC, 2001-03). But the
conventional family sitcom has survived in the form of 2point4 Children (BBC,
1991-99) and My Family (BBC, 2000-), both of which returned to the time-honoured
image of the bickering middle-class family. Less conventional was The Royle
Family (BBC, 1998-2000), which, like The Office, jettisoned the studio laughter,
but also allowed the humour to emerge from the working-class Royles' casual
banter more than from elaborately concocted situations. This approach, coupled
with an unobtrusive style more redolent of documentary, suggested a more
'truthful' representation of the interactions of an ordinary family, no more
united or divided than any other, and certainly no less loving. Another approach
to realism was taken by the more recent Outnumbered (BBC, 2007-), in which
semi-improvised performances from the three child actors supported the overall
impression of the difficulties faced by middle-class parents Pete and Sue
Brockman in attempting to control their unpredictable offspring.
Throughout its more than fifty-year history, TV sitcom has offered us a
bewildering variety of families, reflecting the changing shape of the family.
Sitcoms have given us families both middle- and working-class (and,
occasionally, aristocratic), extended families, nuclear families, childless
families, single-parent families, families that are broken and families that
ought to be - and found something to laugh about in all of them. On the way they
have shown us something about society's - and our own - attitudes to the great
but always fraught institution of the family.
Mark Duguid
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