I'm not going to write one HB, but one of the lads in my writing group is. Been investigating the format anew with him. Interesting discipline. Pilots are intriguing to tackle.

There's a bit in the Porridge scripts notes where the writers are talking about Fletcher and the moment they knew they'd nailed his character and really knew him.

They wondered what he would say if another convict rushed into his cell and told him the world was about to end.

Fletcher would look up from behind his newspaper and say "Oh yes?"

I love stuff like that.

Helen, I'd forgotten about Outnumbered! I loved that.

Ah, but Outnumbered isn't exactly scripted, so maybe that shouldn't be allowed in the list. But I agree, it's brilliant.


- NaomiM

Outnumbered is not scripted? Do tell!

Basically the children are given a topic to talk about and are then left to ad-lib their lines.

Wow! That's extraordinary. I thought their delivery was good but I had no idea that they were making it up as they went along.

Fawlty Towers, Only Fools and Horses, In the Thick of It.

Woke up this morning and realised we'd missed out the brilliant "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin" and "Rising Damp." How could we?

Also loved Outnumbered but what happened to this last series? There only seemed to be about three eps.

Rising Damp I loved, but watched again recently and was shocked at how racist - painful. Not in a nasty way, it's just that our sensibilities have change a lot in 30 years.

Loved Game On, Peep Show, Coupling, Bottom.

Yes, I was going to add that, SB, but then the phone rang. LR and the delectable Miss Jones in full flow were a tour de force and that hasn't changed, though.

Woke up this morning and realised we'd missed out the brilliant "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin" and "Rising Damp." How could we?

Cough. I mentioned both of those, Jem!

R x

I know this is supposed to be about Britcoms, but has anyone been following the new US comedy, Couger Town lately? Starring Courtney Cox, off Freinds fame. It is superbly written. Fast, Sassy, Sexy, and above all funny.

Rising Damp wasn't racist, just the character of Rigsby. He was also mean, treacherous, sly, cowardly and vain. But still we loved him. The genius of the writing was the way it revealed his sad inadequacies beneath the bluster.

I wonder how many production companies these days would have the nerve to have such a potentially dislikable character on screen?

Norman Stanley Fletcher wasn't exactly an angel, nor were any of his fellow inmates of HM Prison Slade. The writing made them likeable, though, by showing that none of them (with the possible exception of Groutie) were 100% despicable. Even Groutie managed to be funny, in a rather dark way.

Alex

It's a shame the subject here is 'sharply written' British sit coms, because I think that's the very quality that's often missing from even the best of them. Blackadder's a good case in point: very funny in bits but also let down by lazy and predictable passages. And much as I liked Red Dwarf for its inventiveness and great characters, it wasn't consistently sharp in the way the best US comedies are. I'd say the sharpist and most consistent Brit writers are Clement and La Frenais; and it's probably no accident that they make their living in the US now.

I find it remarkable how much slack the British cut their sitcoms when even the best of them fail to deliver consistently. Similarly strange is how snotty a lot of Brits are about US sitcoms, despite the fact so many of them are much funnier and better written. Barry Cryer summed this up on I've Never Seen Star Wars, when he had to watch Friends for the first time. He admitted he wanted to hate it, because the actors are all good-looking and largely up-beat, but in the event he found himself admiring just how good the writing was. By contrast, John Cleese said on the Graham Norton show recently that the reason they didn't write more than 12 Fawlty Towers was because they couldn't possibly hope to maintain such a high level for any more than that. Put that against over 200 episodes of Frasier which, for my money, were written at an even higher level and you see a very wide quality gap between the US and the UK without much sign we'll ever bridge it. Not when we keep putting stuff like the Life of Riley on prime time TV.

Terry