I do enjoy a good laugh like most people but actually making us laugh is a serious business. I attempted a comedy script a few years back. I liked it tho' unfortunately I was in the minority ! Point is, I have total respect for comedy script writers and a recent mention of Monty Python on SFN got me thinking about british radio & tv comedy series. I came to the conclusion that the Golden Age of british comedy was a 25 year span from 1965 - 1990 with a few exceptions.
An impossible task but I have tried to make my top three british comedy series on both radio & tv. I'm sure my lists will change as other, forgotten or misplaced series are mentioned.
Radio
1 - Round The Horne
2 - The Navy Lark
3 - The Men From The Ministry
tv
1 - Dads' Army
2 - Rising Damp
3 - Fawlty Towers
Later exceptions - The Detectives, Only Fools and Horses, The Thin Blue Line
Yes I think he bought PE when it was about 2 years old - needed cash-flow for court-cases etc etc. All that gang seemed to be acquaintances of my father's & I remember them from when I was little.
A very important player in the anti-establishment corner in the 60s of course. His contribution to the british satirical scene was immense. Derek & Clive remain classics of the uk comedy Golden Age.
The swearing trend seemed to have started round the Young Ones time if I recall, just about the time when the Golden Age finished. Alf Garnett used to use bad language for the time but Jonny Speight got it just about right I think. Like all good scriptwriters, he managed to gauge the social climate. Love Thy Neighbour was a successful series highlighting the woes of a white socialist bigot who usually came unstuck against his black tory neighbour. Pity PC has prevented this classic from being screened.
I used to enjoy Benny Hill, I recall seeing him on stage in Gt Yarmouth in the early 60s. His slapstick side probably made him France's most popular british import. Unfortunately the second most popular brit import is Mr Bean...
Porridge and open all hours i can remember dad and myself around the radio listening to the Navy lark and Round the Horn pretty sure that i have my dads CDs of the Goons somewhere and the box set of Dads Army ,dad loved it and said that was exactly how it was, a total fiasco. I can remember in the 70s men rushing home from work i could never get them to stop over as the Benny Hill show was on, probably more for Pans People than anything else. Plenty of innuendo but certainly no swearing now its not funny unless the conversation is littered with four letter words
For those of you (like me!!) who still remember Men from the Ministry, Round the Horne, Clitheroe Kid, the Navy Lark and so many others: download Tune-in Radio (free) and connect to ROK Radio - it is wall to wall, virtually 24 hours a day repeat of these old classics. (including Life with the Lyons :-( ). What amazes me is that most of the things we laughed at then are still topical! And, for those who remember what it was like to be living then, still funny! Just a Minute from 30 years ago still has be laughing out loud, and as for Kenneth Horne in his various guises......... Bentine and Kenneth Williams were geniuses!
Round the Horne was light years ahead of most comedy. Palari was an institution, at the same time some men got 10 years clink for actually doing what their double entrendres joked about!
Comedy has to date there is no choice. Life moves on so series like The Likely Lads or The Liver Birds for example remain as a kind of historical documentary. We of a certain age can easily relate to scenes from the 60s & 70s. It's a nostalgia thing too for me. Did I really wear the kind of garb shown on Man About The House and other comedy shows from the mid-seventies ?
Golden Age ? Well compared to the fare being dished up over the past twenty years I would say most definitely.
Interesting question. Because I was in foreign as a wee one, we had BFBS radio. Not comedy but almost religiously Two Way Family Favourites went on. Because she was the NAAFI manager and the radio centre was in 'her' building, she knew Bill Crozier, in fact to me he was Uncle Bill. Anyway, more to the point is that he had guests for other programmes as well, the most incredible being Kenneth Horne who later had Beyond Our Ken and the Round the Horne. The people who later spawned a lot of humour will tell you that the Goon Show (of course) and the richness of the double entendres in Round the Horne are the genesis of modern British humour. Certainly radio had a whole range of comedy, some of it banal and other things hilarious. Meet the Huggetts never did a thing for me and Hancock's Half Hour seemed repetitive, but then I was very young. But the Goons and Horne had me going. When TV took up humour Michael Bentine's It's a Square World hit the spot, the sketch where a Chinese junk sail up the Thames and attacks the House of Commons, that was originally banned by the BBC because it was deemed too political with an election coming up, is firmly imprinted in my mind. It was also derived from the Goons and Horne, after all Bentine was a Goon. Then came the Goodies, Python, Fawlty Towers, Blackadder and other things that were ultimately derived from the two. I loathed Mt Bean and other comedies built around a single ridiculous character as terrible. Yet 'Allo 'Allo I loved and we watch it now and laugh ourselves silly.
I totally agree with Véro about Zeitgeist and how things like comedy date, thus those that have an historic setting like 'Allo 'Allo and Blackadder work very well because they do not reflect a 'now' that is 20 or 30 years ago. I used to love HIGNFY but Hislop and Merton have been there too long, Angus Deayton's departure diminished it somehow. For political satire That was the Week that was with the young David Frost was super but that is a very dated format that could and should never be tried again now.
Was there a Golden Age? That is personal of course. Radio has lost the verve it had from the end of WW2 until perhaps the 1980s, comedy is now a rare species there. That is a pity because it had its place and could still so easily work. For me it would be the Goon Show, Round the Horne, ITMA, Much Binding in the Marsh and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
For me TV has got to be It's a Square World, Python, Fawlty Towers and 'Allo 'Allo. I have found others funny like the Comic Strip and the Goodies. Harry Enfield, Mr Bean, the Office and other recentish comedies leave me cold. I kind of like Simon Pegg and love Billy Connolly as comedians, but then I am odd and a Scot to boot.