AUDIENCE COMMENTS ON THE STATE OF BRITISH

COMEDY

BRITISH SITCOM TO BE SAVED BY ESTATE

AGENTS, BANKERS AND FAKE
Independent, The (London) , Apr 29, 2001 by JANE ROBINS
MEDIA EDITOR
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20010429/ai_n14388726/

ITV, THE BBC and Channel 4 are launching a dozen new sitcoms in a bid to find
the elusive holy grail of television - a new comedy classic to match Porridge, Only
Fools and Horses or Dad's Army.

The broadcasters are hoping that a star show will emerge from the bunch to rebut
those critics who say the British sitcom has been in decline since the 1970s and
1980s, and is now totally eclipsed by American hits such as Friends, Frasier and
Seinfeld.

ITV's High Stakes, starring Richard Wilson as a banker, is the first of the new
sitcoms to reach the screen, along with the BBC's The Savages by Men Behaving
Badly writer Simon Nye. The next, ITV's Sam's Game, will be broadcast within a
few weeks. The show stars Big Brother host Davina McCall, and has a familiar
"twenty-something friends in a cafe" theme.

ITV has commissioned at least three further pilots, including a black British show
called Juggling - and the BBC is similarly busy. Its head of comedy Geoffrey
Perkins is currently promoting a new wave of sitcoms at the international television
festival in Montreux. His repertoire includes another Richard Wilson comedy, this
time about an ageing journalist married to a hyperactive former head mistress
played by Stephanie Cole.

Channel 4's offerings are mostly still in development, but a channel spokesman
admits particular excitement a show called Roy Dance is Dead, which will be set in
an estate agents' office. Over the past few years television critics, the BBC
governors, and the ITC have all bemoaned the sad state of the British sitcom, and
broadcasters have resolved to do better.
However, they are split on the way forward. Geoffrey Perkins at the BBC is
commissioning programmes which include techniques used in modern "new wave"
sitcoms such as Caroline Aherne's The Royle Family and Paul Whitehouse's
Happiness.

A number of his projects will be shot without a studio audience and with no
background laughter. They will then be tested out on BBC2 or the youth- oriented
digital channel BBC3 in the hope of building mass market BBC1 potential.

ITV's approach is more traditional. Sioned Wiliam, the controller of comedy, argues
that critically acclaimed shows like Channel 4's Spaced and BBC2's Happiness
"are wonderful and ground-breaking, but are not popular". She believes them to be
suitable only for minority channels where they attract what are, in ITV terms, low
ratings.

Instead, she favours familiar, old-fashioned characteristics, such as studio

audiences. "There is still a huge appetite for programmes like The Likely Lads,
One Foot in the Grave and Porridge," she says. "Frasier is the most traditional
sitcom you could find, and it's still going strong." She puts emphasis on the
"rhythm of performance" of actors, who time their lines both for studio audiences
and the camera, and cites Richard Wilson, David Jason and Geoffrey Palmer as
masters of the craft.

Most British broadcasters exhibit some irritation at the much- repeated criticism
that Britain is trailing America, and failing to come up with megashows like Friends,
Seinfeld and Frasier. Andy Harries, controller of comedy at Granada with
responsibility for The Royle Family, points out that the British had a huge debate
over whether a single-camera, no- audience programme could ever be shown in
peak time. The BBC took the risk, and won audiences of up to 10 million when The
Royle Family switched from BBC2 to BBC1.

Only now, he points out, are American broadcasters having the same argument.
They have shot a pilot of the US version of the programme with no audience, but
are still to take a decision on whether it would work as peak-time viewing.

"If you went to America and went on about how better American sitcoms are than
British they would look at you in a bewildered way," says Perkins. "You have to
remember that we see the best of their shows and they see the best of ours. They
rate Only Fools... highly, for instance, as the show that brought Bill Cosby back to
television because of the quality of the writing."
The sitcom offensive, though, is bound to produce some turkeys. ITV is said to be
particularly concerned at the risk it has taken in casting Davina McCall in Sam's
Game. The last time the network tried to turn a television presenter into a sitcom
actress it came up with Denise Van Outen in the much-derided Babes in the Wood
about three dippy blondes sharing a flat. The show bombed so badly that it was
criticised for poor quality by the Independent Television Commission.

TEARS BEFORE BEDTIME

First published in
Issue 67, May 2002

by Michael Bracewell

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/tears_before_bedtime

And yet it is these precursors of the last decade’s TV comedy - the so-called
‘Golden Age of British Sitcom’, stretching approximately from 1970 to 1985 - which
have been the leading informant of contemporary television comedy.

But the history of the British sitcom, as a response to the national mood, is both
convoluted and at times self-contradictory. What endures in the current
rehabilitation of ‘classic’ sitcom melancholy, misanthropy and frustration, seen in
recent shows such as Stella Street (1997) or The Office (2001), is the sense of
cosmic struggle played out in microcosm.

The template of this dynamic can be seen in such Ealing Studios comedies as
Passport to Pimlico (1949) or The Titfield Thunderbolt (1952). Here was a world of
cheerful stoicism in response to the threat of oppression. This world formed the
basis of the early ‘Carry On’ films made by Anglo-Amalgamated, such as Carry On
Cabby (1962) and Carry On Nurse (1959), the latter concerning the patients on a
male hospital ward uniting to overthrow the dictatorial matron, played with
effortless ferocity by Hattie Jacques. This is an England in which the new civic
services put in place by the postwar government - such as the very council estate
that Big Jim and his mates are building on the edge of their seaside town - have
inherited a certain militarism, to which the local population present the classic
ambivalence of Englishness: thinking in terms of class (Us and Them), yet deeply
resenting anyone who
gets above themselves.
But if this is the founding premise of postwar British comedy, so too is its collapse -
the abandonment of a common struggle. Its replacement by a more contemporary
sense of cynicism, failure and alienation was pivotal in the development of the
British sitcom. The sense of the genre studying the dregs of a life revolving around
the plughole of existence reached its apotheosis towards the end of the 1970s with
a run of depressive sitcoms including The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976)
and Carla Lane’s long-running Butterflies (1978), with its soft Folk theme song,
‘Love Is Like a Butterfly’.

By the time of Britpop, and comedy’s increasing involvement with a Pop cultural
comedy of recognition, many of the sitcoms from the 1970s and early 1980s
existed only as ciphers for an idea of the recent past: as the landscape of baby-
boomer adolescence, like the memory of Marc Bolan or the unmodernized interiors
of the London Underground. Pulp had only to source the colours of the 1970s (a
washed-out blue to orange blandness) in order to make an unspoken statement
about the inheritance of domestic memory. Somewhere on the edges of recent
recollection the older sitcoms were reminders of a comedic revolt against the
claustrophobia of daily routine way before broadband media.

Two of these earlier situation comedies took as their opening premise the leading
character’s lament for a life gone wrong: Leonard Rossiter’s suicidal office worker
Reggie Perrin and Wendy Craig’s deeply depressed suburban housewife Ria, tired
of life but unable to change it, in Butterflies. Ever Decreasing Circles (1984), the
third in a triptych of ambiguous despair, presented the situation itself - a kind of
Über-suburb of suffocating order and pettiness - as neurosis made landscape, like
a middle-class version of the brooding terraces and canal-side bomb sites of
kitchen sink films such as A Taste of Honey (1961). Another shuffle of the deck,
though, and Ever Decreasing Circles could have been a side project by David
Lynch - right down to the spookily normal neighbours Howard and Hilda, who
always dress in identical anoraks. This is suburbia as Munchkinland, but without
the Yellow Brick Road to the big city. All three comedies were laments for failed
potential, revolving around the constitution of domesticity and routine - a trait
recalling Larkin once again. In his poem ‘Home Is So Sad’ (1958), responding to
the aged familiarity of familial domesticity, Larkin refines the complex abstractions
of sadness to the two words of its final image: ‘That vase’. This is a quiet, forceful
closure to an account of the family home, which has somehow failed in what he
calls its ‘joyous shot at how things ought to be’. You might also be reminded of
Morrissey, name-checking the school in Carry On Teacher (1959) in his lyric about
leaving the family home, ‘Late Night Maudlin Street’ (1988), with its elegiac line ‘A
half life disappears today’.
As the sitcom explored existential themes of suburban torpor (a kind of Kafka with
cupcakes), presenting the modern world as a place of neurosis and spiritual
loneliness, it often seemed more at home in the stylized world of the 1940s and
1950s, before the common struggle became ingested as individual malaise.
Through Dad’s Army (1968), Hi-De-Hi (1981) and It ‘Ain’t ‘Alf Hot, Mum (1974),
screenwriters turned their comic brilliance to evoking that ‘better place’ mourned by
the narrator at the start of Big Jim and The Figaro Club. This trio of sitcoms, happy
in the pre-modern world of the Home Guard, the holiday camp and National
Service in the last reaches of the Empire, described the reassurance of a simpler
society in which the hierarchies of social institution protected us from our own
capacity for disillusionment and disaffection. Wide open to accusations of
sentimentality, but more than armoured by the precision of their characterization,
the sitcoms of Perry and Croft remain in place as the fictional descendants of that
better world of the imagined English past. Like their own subjects, they seem to
belong to an older, less complicated society - one that the contemporary comedy
of League of Gentlemen or Stella Street would turn on its head in a dystopic
version of itself.

When sitcom pursues a ‘better’ world, it also raises the question of whether much
of the bland middle ground of the genre was written to be comfortingly familiar
rather than funny. This is the comedy of recognition as an anaesthetic - the Terry
and June (1979) factor of positing the ubiquitous, amicably cranky couples of
suburban sitcom as idealized neighbours. This is where, as old Marxists will point
out, the sitcom becomes softly political; in its world of runaway lawnmowers and
stunned milkmen, punctured pomposity and collapsing furniture, the 27 minutes of
the average British sitcom was a window on class. By extension, this made the
form perhaps more articulate of Britishness than almost any other popular medium
- a trait that is picked up by contemporary comedy’s deconstruction of
demographic ‘types’ in their mediated form.

When audiences of nine or ten million were tuning in to their favourite sitcoms,
they were relating above all to a comedy of social types: from Arthur Lowe’s
portrayal of Captain Mainwaring’s ravenous ambition to embody the officer class in
Dad’s Army (Mainwaring’s sombre musings on the nature of his unhappy marriage
to the unseen but dominant Elizabeth were a study in confession) to Leonard
Rossiter’s sublime creation in Rising Damp (1974) of Rigsby, the proprietor of a
gloomy, gothic boarding-house who shuttles at breakneck speed between cunning,
cowardice and an intimation of himself as the ultimate matinee idol. In a character
such as Rigsby the subsonic sadness has a kind of desperation to it, recalling
Graham Greene’s pronouncement in Journey without Maps (1936) that ‘seediness
has a very deep appeal; it seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for
something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back’. Which is the rot and
the sourness revisited, perhaps.

In a temporal sleight of hand the word ‘sitcom’ has become synonymous with an
idea of the past; it retains the capacity to sum up the old broadcasting notion of
television being ‘the nation’s hearth’, with us all taking our place on the collective
sofa to watch a miniaturized enactment of ... family life around a sofa. As a
reasonably terrifying idea, with regards to the exploded dynamics of the family, this
is a piece of cultural circuitry that re-routes our experience of sitcom back through
Larkin’s experience of familial domesticity.

Can sitcom play us back to ourselves, as potential Rias or Reggies, living - heaven
help us - in the landscape of The League of Gentlemen? This is a theme - sitcom
as life in a sitcom - that comedian Sean Hughes attempted, uneasily, to investigate
in his first series for Channel 4 in the early 1990s. This was a time when a gradual
disillusionment with sitcom possessed the programmers, as though they regarded
the genre as reactionary and an impediment to the quest for their Holy Grail of
‘youth programming’. Such a view resulted in a flurry of half-hour comedy spots
such as Sean’s Show (1992) and The Paul Merton Show (1996) - crypto-ironic
takes on traditional comedy playing to the knowingness of the audience. With less
contrived irony, however, the hit sitcom of the 1980s, The Young Ones (1982) shot
straight from prime time to cult status, with barely a pause for breath. But how did
this relate to sitcom’s precursors?

During the 1970s, in sitcoms such as Man about the House (1973) and Are You
Being Served? (1973), the genre’s study of failure became a high camp exercise in
dignity outraged and masculinity disempowered, reaching a high point of slapstick
with Michael Crawford’s Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em (1973) and its catch-phrase
‘Oo, Betty!’. In Man about the House George and Mildred Roper (the latter played
by Yootha Joyce, who would ‘star’ on the sleeve of Ask, 1986, by The Smiths)
depicted a middle-aged couple attempting to come to terms with retirement. Their
frustrations became fixed on George’s excuses for avoiding sex and Mildred’s
long-suffering endurance of his slippered retreat into impotence. Similarly, the staff
of Grace Bros. department store in Are You Being Served? played out a hugely
complex algebra of sexual and social status, the tensions of which could turn a
slightly raised eyebrow into the equivalent of a hurled ashtray. Innuendo, itself a
consequence of archaism, is everything in this branch of sitcom, a veneering of
gentility across plainly sexual banter. Innuendo denotes a repressive society in
which formality is the constraint on feelings. Hence, in Are You Being Served? Mrs
Slocombe’s glorious riposte to Captain Peacock, who has got hold of her cat
during the pitch darkness of a power cut: ‘Captain Peacock! Will you please
remove your hand from my pussy!’
Unlike their American counterparts, such as Bewitched (1964), The Dick van Dyke
Show (1969) and later Cheers (1982), Taxi (1978) or Rhoda (1974), there was very
little feel-good factor within the British sitcom of the 1970s and 1980s - no
achievement of an independent life in the heart of the bustling city or sunny
domesticity amid the hissing summer lawns in an idealized suburbia. In the UK
sitcom land went from prisons to bed-sitting-rooms, and even the temperate
suburbia of Terry and June was held in place by a rigid formality that made the
rather weak jokes arise from outraging outmoded conventions. The manner in
which the British sitcom was steeped in fatalism and bounded by formality meant
that its humour was ill suited to the strategies of funky Postmodern comedians.
Like Blackpool or Las Vegas, sitcom confounds irony. In recent years the most
successful sitcoms have maintained the traditional formula of failure within
banality: the 1990s were dominated by One Foot in the Grave(1990), a hymn to
misanthropy, and Keeping Up Appearances (1974), Patricia Routlege’s reworking,
as Hyacinth Bucket (’pronounced “bouquet“‘), of Penelope Keith’s defining role as
Margot, the suburban snob brought low, in The Good Life (1974). Similarly, Father
Ted (1995) and his entrapment on a remote Irish island, the kitchen-centric
mayhem of Absolutely Fabulous (1992) and the sofa-based claustrophobia of The
Royle Family (1998) were all, like their miserabilist precursors, concerned with
class and frustrated ambition within the oppression of a daily routine. It could have
been 1974.

Sitcom generally fails when it attempts the Postmodern trope of making television
itself the ‘situation’ of the comedy - spoofing video diaries, docu-soaps or the
actual televisual format of sitcom. The knowingness of the conceit - a presumed
sophistication of media literacy - all but suffocates the script and the acting, as well
as robbing the form of the basic plot device which make a 27-minute drama
sustain its force. Most recently, however, The Office achieved a seamless blend of
classic sitcom miserabilism with the technical devices of a documentary - renewing
for a new generation the ambiguous comedy of a dead-end job in a boring town.

The classic ‘situations’ of the sitcom - the boarding-house, the suburb, the corner
shop, the holiday camp or the department store - provided an instant social
landscape that maintained the idea of a Britain where everything was still in its
place within an accepted social order. By the time that Postmodernism, as a
rearrangement of intentionality and context, had ploughed its way through the
fringes of comedy to the desks of commissioning editors, many of these classic
‘situations’ had found their place as the subjects for docu-soaps and reality TV.
Here was a reversal of the sitcom, away from comedy of recognition into the
anxiety of recognition. At the same time many of the characters and catch-phrases
that typified the earlier age of sitcom found their way into the soaps - with Dot
Cotton of Eastenders (1985) becoming a Mildred Roper comic character, for
example. In the mid- to late 1990s, the cultural insistence on authenticity had
become the single peg upon which many of television’s hopes were hung, and the
world of the sitcom - beyond a zappy, ironic version of itself - was allowed to
decline. This state of affairs prompted an address on the Internet by veteran
sitcom writer Vince Powell, who maintained that the ‘ban on old-style British
sitcoms ignores viewer-needs’.

The belief that the traditional sitcom embodies reactionary values prompted
cultural commentators in the 1990s to take exception to the very history of the
sitcom, regarding it as the ambassador of suburban values that by definition were
demonized. Andy Medhurst, in an essay in Visions of Suburbia (1997), attempts a
near-Marxist reading of the British sitcom, by finding the entire premise of
suburban England to be offensive to his political orthodoxy. ‘The suburban sitcom
represents British comedy’s most sustained attempt at embourgeoisement,’ he
snarls, ‘its plots often concerned with the maintaining of genteel values against
threats from outside or below.’ Butterflies comes in for particular criticism as being
offensive to both women in particular and society in general. Championing the
cause of Ruby, the programme’s comedy-cockney cleaning woman, Medhurst
states, ‘the programme’s tentatively feminist critique of suburban domesticity is
thus undercut by its hugely retrogressive presentation of class.’

And yet ‘class’ itself, within much of British sitcom, is seen as a ludicrous,
lumbering and deliquescent construct - with the characters’ dependence on it
serving only to emphasize its fragility. Think of Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part
(1965) railing against absolutely everyone except the Queen and West Ham
United, or of Harold Steptoe in Steptoe and Son (1962) - that poète maudit of the
rag-and-bone yard - lamenting his true calling as a Fellini-esque bohemian,
discussing existentialism over cocktails rather than mucking out the horse. Here
then, is an individual struggle in a world of struggle, the history of which is the
accretion of a particular temper. And it is this spirit - or, rather, the perceived
disappearance of this spirit - which seems to prompt the mournful observation at
the start of Big Jim and The Figaro Club. Perhaps ‘the world turned rotten and
sour’ when the streamlining modernity of the 1960s began to do away with the
ethos of austerity Britain and to bury its common morality beneath a brand new
culture of supermarkets and Pop music, miniskirts and power stations. This sense
of mourning for a period, and, more importantly, for an ethos of Englishness that
has somehow passed, is crucial to the melancholy in British sitcom as both a
genre and a form.

With this in mind, Big Jim and The Figaro Club can be seen as a definitive work for
the very reason that it admits its predisposition to embitterment from the outset,
and that its characters have not so much failed within society as been failed by
society. The fact that their adventures are presented retrospectively by a nameless
narrator (an elderly Big Jim perhaps, looking back on his life) adds a further
sadness in our collective placing of sitcom somewhere on the sun-faded edges of
current memory; a phenomenon caught between history and nostalgia. Today the
whole idea of British situation comedy seems to represent not only an archaic
world but an archaic form - Greene’s ‘stage further back’ - in a manner not
dissimilar to one of Martin Parr’s Boring Postcards (1999), or a featureless civic
centre from the early 1970s, or the ketchup-coloured Formica of a service station
café - or ‘that vase’.

WOULD THEY STILL WORK TODAY? WHICH

OTHER COMEDY CLASSICS WOULD YOU
LIKE TO SEE REVIVED?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/1480428.stm

Friday, 10 August, 2001, 09:33 GMT 10:33 UK

REACTIONS:

1. For those of us in the autumn of our years who are either fed up with or
incapable of watching the rubbish now on television, how about the Beeb
creating a radio version of UK Gold and giving us some repeats of the good
old classic radio programmes such as Round The Horn, Beyond Our Ken,
The Navy Lark, The Goon Show and the Glums to name but a few. We keep
being advised that the average age of the country is increasing and soon
there will be more pensioners than workers. Why is it then that the majority
of programmes on TV and radio cater for the young?
Len, UK

2. Why not revive Steptoe and Son, with Richard Briers as Albert and Steve
Coogan as Harold? These two great actors could do justice to the
performances of Wilfred Brambell and Harry H Corbett.
Liz, England
3. Most British sitcoms from the sixties, seventies and eighties were, let's be
honest, mediocre at best. 'Allo, 'Allo, Hi de Hi, On The Buses et al - like most
British sitcoms from that era - were bordering on pantomime (from the wrong
side of the border). They were terrible then and they're terrible now. This is
why, outside of Britain, few people class British sitcoms up there with the
likes of Cheers, Seinfeld or the brilliant Simpsons. As for Only Fools and
Horses well, Only The Easily Amused would class that as classic comedy,
But then again people in Britain still insist that Tony (a pint, a pint, that's very
nearly an armful) Hancock is the funniest guy to ever read his lines on live
TV. Kick the Terry and Junes into the bargain bin of nostalgia TV where they
belong and learn how to make proper sitcoms from the Yanks.
Ian Crawford, Australia

4. Being an ex-pat living in Chicago and getting BBC America on cable, I am

appalled that I cannot even see the original Fools and Horses over here, let
alone the new stuff to come. All I get is British Men Behaving Badly and
some idiot and very strange talk show host that thinks he is funny by being
gay, crude and rude. Please repeat the old stuff and give us the new
classics. By the way, repeating Dad's Army was great! Blackadder is
wonderful, but over and over and over and over etc is boring. You have so
much classic comedy in the archives, use it! Love The Fast Show and Harry
Enfield. If it's new and good, put it out in the USA along with repeats of the
classics! Suit You!
Barry Taylor, USA

5. I don't watch British comedy any more as the quality is so poor and they're
so bland. American comedies are far better than British ones nowadays [I
never thought I'd ever say that!]. Trying to revive old shows with new casts
will not work with the exception of Dr Who.
Steve, Australia

6. There is always the danger that the longer you drag out a sitcom, the worse
it may become. But with the best like Only Fools and Horses, that theory has
proved fruitless. The 1996 trilogy contained arguably some of the best
moments in its history and I think David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst love
the show so much they would never let it slip. Plus, John Sullivan never fails
 to provide the unexpected in his scripts and Del Boy will forever remain the
best-loved character in sitcom. But the real key to reviving a sitcom is
whether it is relevant to today. For example, Fawlty Towers could exist today,
but its 12 episodes were so superb any efforts at a re-make would destroy it.
Steve Carley, England

7. Forget this pointless exercise in nostalgia - you should be ashamed of

yourselves. Look for and nurture new talent.
Nick, England

8. Learn from Hollywood's favourite mistake. Rerun them but don't try to
remake them; even with cloning it can't be done.
T.J. Cassidy, USA

9. Although for me Hancock will always remain the master, the way should be
kept clear for new talent. I don't agree with 'new issues' of old shows with a
fresh cast. It simply does not work for me. Comedy to an extent reflects a
period. I don't want to see Fools and Horses back. I want new talent to make
me laugh.
Andy, UK

10.There is a saying in showbiz: "Always leave the audience wanting more".

That way, you create a work of art that MEANS something special to a lot of
people. Don't kick the old classics to death for the sake of banalities.
Ian, Hong Kong

11.I always loved Ever Decreasing Circles and it's never repeated anywhere. I
agree these should be left in the past but repeated on UK Gold as often as
possible. I believe there's definitely a market for a TV channel called 'Repeat
TV' or something, which showed nothing but requested old programmes
including kids' programmes. I'd love to see Champion The Wonder Horse
again!
Sara, England
12.Although Steptoe and Son was fantastically funny, I feel that with both of the
main stars having died starting afresh with new actors would be too strange.
All the major characters from Are You being Served? are, however, still with
us and with this programme also being popular in the USA it might make
sense to make some new episodes.
Angus Gulliver, UK

13.No more Only Fools and Horses please! It's on all the time and I'm fed up
with it. The series finished on a high - leave it there. I love Blackadder,
Fawlty Towers and many other classics but leave them as classics - don't try
to 're-make' them with new scripts and cast. It won't work. They will never
match up to the original. Repeats (of shows which haven't been shown for
ages) would be welcome - on the BBC - not all of us have Sky/Digital - and
at a reasonable time!
Liz, UK

14.Whilst there are a few exceptions at present, the 70's and 80's were an
outstanding era for British comedy (most of which was made by the BBC).
Much as I love all the classics, they were generally products of their time and
should be appreciated from that standpoint. To try to recreate the situational
humour of say, Dad's Army, The Good Life or Are You Being Served, would
run the risk of appearing out of date, and trying to update them would
destroy some of their charm. We have plenty of wonderful comedy moments
to view again and again, thanks to video and DVD. Let's leave the old stuff
on the shelf (but take them down and watch them frequently!) and try to write
stuff which will be as well-loved and remembered in 30 years time as the
classics are now.
Matthew Salter, UK

15.No! None of them. Classics are classics because of the time and space they
occupy. It is always best to let them rest, and if we feel the need to revisit
them we can do it via video or repeats. No shows are improved by exhuming
them. Let them die in the blaze of glory they deserve. Only Fools and Horses
has already been raised from the dead too many times and is beginning to
leave an unpleasant smell whenever it returns. Leave it alone, or the
entertainment it once gave will be lost.
James, UK