The great British sitcom is not dead

The BBC’s comedy chief thinks the format needs ‘saving’. But it’s the stereotypes that are dead: the sitcom itself is thriving

Just as we could most do with a laugh in the painful run-up to the election, last week the BBC’s director of comedy commissioning, Jon Petrie, told a festival audience that the mainstream UK comedy scene needs “a couple of Berocca and a black americano”. At the BBC Comedy festival in Glasgow, he appealed for programme-makers to “save” sitcoms. Mournful reports of “the death of the sitcom” followed. What are we Britons supposed to laugh at now? Surely not content by … the Americans? Or – even worse – “comedy drama”?

But how on earth can sitcom be dead when we live in an age of constant new content, endless streaming and easily accessible reruns of old and new material? And what does it matter what we call comedy, as long as we are getting a laugh? My kids – in their teens and early 20s – watch Derry Girls, Ghosts, Outnumbered and Friday Night Dinner on a loop, all nominally sitcoms and hardly ancient.

Viv Groskop is a comedian and author of Happy High Status: How to Be Effortlessly Confident