The British comedy canon — where should a newcomer begin?

We’re coming to the end of our first season of our hubristically titled podcast All British Comedy Explained and we’re beginning the planning for season two. So this is the ideal time to look at the foundations of British television (and sometimes radio comedy) and build a family tree of related shows. If you’re curious about British comedy and how all of these shows connect to each other, this is a good place to begin.

The Goon Show (1951-1960) truly is our patient zero. Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan learned their trade in the armed forces and were soon exploiting the possibilities of radio for all kinds of surreal nonsense, delivered by an assortment of beloved comedy characters. Countless comedy legends who followed talk reverentially of their love for The Goon Show, and it is patient zero not least because the Goons themselves weren’t explicitly influenced by any of their immediate predecessors. This is partly because of the inevitable discontinuity caused by the War, but also because television was in its infancy and radio was mainly an audio-only version of vaudeville. If they were inspired by anyone, it was by American movie comedians like the Marx Brothers or WC Fields.

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From The Goon Show comes two strands. The first is the satire boom – kicked off by Beyond the Fringe in 1960, just as The Goon Show was ending – and carried on by various shows fronted by David Frost, most particularly That Was the Week That Was (1962-1963). Being stridently topical, many of the jokes would be meaningless to modern audiences, and perhaps why despite the fact that the great majority survives in the BBC archives, it is almost never repeated. But at the time, this was jaw-dropping, pub-emptying, era-defining television, felt too dangerous to be kept on the air once a general election was called.

But Peter Cook and Dudley Moore who had been at the epicentre of the satire boom took their own comedy in a warmer, sillier direction on their show Not Only But Also. Around the same time, another generation of graduates was leaving Oxford and Cambridge and getting jobs in television. John Cleese’s first television acting job was on The Frost Report. He got his own show alongside Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke Taylor in 1967 – At Last the 1948 Show – and the show he most enjoyed watching was the ITV kids show Do Not Adjust Your Set featuring Michael Palin and Terry Jones. This strand reaches its apotheosis with Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-1974) which casts an extraordinarily long shadow not least because its most famous sketches were endlessly repurposed for books, record albums, live shows and more besides.

Yet a third strand also emerges during this time, for which we have to go back to radio. One way in which The Goon Show was unusual was the way in which it hid the identities and personalities of its stars behind silly voices and crazy characters. Most radio comedies of the day were vehicles for the personalities of stars like Kenneth Horne, Frankie Howerd and especially Tony Hancock. Working with writers Galton and Simpson, the Hancock persona became more and more truthful and the situations more and more realistic. Over seven series, Hancock’s Half Hour (1956-1961) went from being a crazy comedy in which Hancock could fall out of an aeroplane and be boasting about his miraculous survival in the next scene, to a laser-focused character study of an ordinary bloke who dreams of rising about his station.

The real Tony Hancock, always a very troubled man, refused to continue working with Galton and Simpson, but the show they created next, Steptoe and Son (1962-1974) defined the essence of the television situation comedy for generations to come. Blessed with two all-time great performances from stars Wilfred Bramble and Harry H Corbett, every episode was brilliantly funny and yet shot through with genuine pain. This is the beginning of the golden age of British sitcom, with shows like Marriage Lines, The Likely Lads, The Liver Birds and Till Death Us Do Part exploring the reality of Britain’s class structure through the medium of social awkwardness, misunderstandings and ironic twists.

The peak of the social climbing sitcom was arguably scaled by the incredibly long-running and much beloved Only Fools and Horses (1981-2003) which ran for an incredible 64 episodes, many of them feature length. Writer John Sullivan had already had one hit with Citizen Smith starring Robert Lindsay, and would go on to create popular shows like Just Good Friends and Dear John, but Only Fools is his masterpiece.

What all of these amazing sitcoms have in common is that they focus on a small central cast, with the relationships between only a handful of characters driving the plots. But the writing team of David Croft and Jimmy Perry (or sometimes Jeremy Lloyd) was more interested in creating a bigger gang of characters, more like eight or nine, in shows like Allo Allo, Hi-De-Hi, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Are You Being Served? But it all started with Dad’s Army (1968-1977), which is endlessly repeated and still holds up, when some of the attitudes in other shows (rightly or not) are often the subject of criticism nowadays.

But the golden age of sitcom eventually led to stagnation. For a while it seems as if every new sitcom simply wheeled another middle-aged theatre actor into essentially the same set consisting of a sofa in front of a set of French windows. Two shows broke the mould. First, with a biting disregard for polite society which recalled That Was The Week That Was came Not the Nine O’Clock News (1979-1982). Like earlier sketch shows, this was an essential proving ground for a whole generation of comedy writers. And it gifted us four incredible comedy performers, who all went on to have prodigious careers – even if Pamela Stephenson did retire from acting in the 1990s.

The other was thought of as a sitcom but its roots lay in sketch or even vaudeville – The Young Ones (1982-1984), which was dreamed up by anarchic actor/comedian Rik Mayall, prolific writer Ben Elton and ambitious producer Paul Jackson. It was an incredible break for all of them, as well as fellow performers Adrian Edmondson, Nigel Planer and Alexei Sayle, although not for the third credited writer Lise Mayer. Christopher Ryan, as the fourth flatmate Mike, never quite fit in and hadn’t worked with the others before. The intention had been to use Peter Richardson, who was Nigel Planer’s double act partner in cabaret, just as Mayall and Edmondson had worked as a duo. But Richardson fell out with Paul Jackson and ended up creating his own innovative series The Comic Strip Presents. While the best of these are incredible (“Strike” is my personal favourite), they didn’t have the same broad appeal or influence of The Young Ones.

From this generation of comedy talent we get Blackadder, Spitting Image, Bottom, Red Dwarf, Smith & Jones and suddenly a whole raft of comedy shows were made to look old-fashioned, out of touch and past their sell-by-dates. The Benny Hill Show which had been on the air since the 1950s finished in 1989. Cannon and Ball finished in 1988. The Two Ronnies called it a day in 1987. But although no longer making more shows, one team of variety-inflected, shiny floor styled, vaudeville comedians were still being lionised, including by this brash new team. There’s never been another comedy pairing quite like Morecambe and Wise, especially in their BBC years (1968-1977).

And let’s not forget the Queen of British television comedy, who rose from working class northern routes, to writing every episode of her own sketch show by herself, at a time when she could not possibly have had any female role models – the indefatigable and much-missed Victoria Wood whose BBC sketch show (1985-1987) is still one of the most consistently funny ever broadcast.

Where to draw the line? Comedy keeps evolving and developing and the new kids on the block rejected (at least some of) what came before is as natural as breathing. What today seems shockingly original will become tired and stale in its own time. But there’s one more team I want to single out, who first shot to prominence on radio in 1991 with On the Hour, but whose defining incarnation is probably the single series of The Day Today (1994). Featuring at least three men each of whom could have revolutionised British television comedy on their own, the sight of all of them working together is truly remarkable. Mad genius Chris Morris, alongside visionary producer Armando Iannucci and with an incredible cast led by Steve Coogan, this is an absolute masterpiece, combining the acute social commentary of the best of Galton and Simpson with the surrealism of Monty Python and The Goons and a satirical lens as focused as anything David Frost or Peter Cook ever did.

The history of British comedy doesn’t end here, nor is this overview in any way comprehensive, but if you’d like to hear more, why not check out the podcast. If you’re completely new to British comedy, I’d suggest starting with one episode each of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Dad’s Army, The Young Ones and Victoria Wood As Seen on TV. Together they give you a remarkably good sense of the sheer breadth of British comedy over the years.