Peep Show: The curtain is coming down on television comedy – and it’s no laughing matter

The Media Column: Picking up the remote and scanning the schedules for laughs is an increasingly mirthless exercise

David Mitchell, left, and Robert Webb, right, with Tim Key, who appears in the third series of ‘Peep Show’ (Angus Young)

The ninth and final series of the excellent Peep Show, starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb, begins on Channel 4 this week, just as it feels like a curtain is coming down on British television comedy.

Picking up the remote and scanning the schedules in search of laughs is an increasingly mirthless exercise because, while the live comedy circuit is booming, it’s a struggling art form on the box.

The focus of big British broadcasters is on drama. The genre has become synonymous with modern viewing habits, where audiences binge-watch multi-episode shows on demand. Drama promises global sales and production budgets boosted by international partners. But comedy feels like the poor relation. It looks back in search of inspiration. Witness BBC2 ordering a new comedy about how the writers of Dad’s Army created Captain Mainwaring and co.

The BBC is also planning to mark next year’s 60th anniversary of Hancock’s Half Hour by commissioning writers to rework a number of classic British sitcoms. With “Del Boy” Trotter releasing his “autobiography” this Christmas, nostalgia buffs might welcome a refreshed version of Only Fools and Horses, Fawlty Towers or Porridge, when current sitcom fare feels so much less substantial. The success of Mrs Brown’s Boys is phenomenal, if inexplicable. Citizen Khan has returned to BBC1 with strong ratings but – as creator Adil Ray told me in a recent interview – the show is written to appeal to children. It breaks down barriers but not many comedic ones.

For the comedy industry, the biggest body blow has been news that Live at the Apollo, which has offered stand-ups a gateway to the mainstream since 2004, is being downgraded from BBC1 to BBC2. The BBC is trying to spin this as an opportunity to give a platform to performers who are a bit more “edgy”. Now there’s a word that’s often used in desperation. It’s hard not to think that the BBC – where relentless budget cuts are starting to have an effect on output – is becoming too risk-averse.

The organisation that most underpins the British creative industries is free from the commercial pressures that might inhibit other channels from giving a break to our more innovative comedians.

But the planned axing of BBC3 as a television platform has caused a slowdown. This was the BBC’s innovative comedy channel which incubated shows such as Little Britain and Gavin and Stacey before they were exposed to bigger audiences on BBC1 and BBC2. As BBC3 goes online-only, the risk is that shows such as the smart pirate-radio spoof People Just Do Nothing will become more marginal than Kurupt FM, the tower-block broadcaster depicted in the comedy.

Making successful TV comedy is notoriously hard. Steve Bennett, editor of comedy website Chortle, believes that audiences are more patient with new drama productions than with shows that have been billed as funny. “If something is supposed to make viewers laugh and it doesn’t, they will hate it.”

Channel controllers have become afraid of a genre in which shows are rarely instant hits and can suffer a long period of painful overnight ratings before finally coming good. This slow burn doesn’t sit well in an era of instant gratification and almost unlimited entertainment choice.

“Most broadcasters are run by people who came out of factual television backgrounds where programme ideas can get made in a couple of months and their success or otherwise is judged in the first episode,” says Jon Thoday, co-founder of the Avalon comedy stable. “They see comedy as a problem, rather than a solution; and the time it takes for a comedy to succeed can often exceed the length of time that they are in the job.”

This is a long-running structural issue in television. Channel bosses happily take the credit for hit shows inherited from a predecessor while being quick to dodge responsibility for a network’s low audience figures on the grounds that their own commissions have yet to go on air.

A failed comedy, especially one scheduled in prime time with a prominent comedian, is more of a black mark on a controller’s copybook than an underperforming drama or factual series. Why risk it?

It’s worth recalling that The Office, the game changer of modern British television comedy, was not immediately popular when it launched on BBC2 in 2001. These days there’s not much comedy at all on BBC2, despite its history as a crucible of funny ideas. Cradle to Grave, the Danny Baker biopic starring Peter Kay, Boy Meets Girl, the transgender sitcom, and Inside No. 9, from the writing team behind The League of Gentlemen, are all praiseworthy exceptions but Live at the Apollo arrives on the channel like a large sticking plaster.

We have a situation where comedies rarely feature in the top 10 most popular programmes on any of the big channels. That was not the case 20 years ago, before the arrival of reality TV and the recent vogue for long-running drama series.

Peter Fincham, director of television at ITV, is one senior broadcast executive with a background in comedy, as the former boss of Talkback Thames. But ITV, with its commercial imperative, has made little progress in the genre since the hit Benidorm, aside from ITV2’s Celebrity Juice, featuring Keith Lemon. Sky, the home of Stella, claimed to have become the new champion of British comedy three years ago but now seems focused on drama and entertainment shows.

What is to be done? It’s hard to imagine comedy being given the tax credits that allow drama to enjoy such budgetary advantages. But something needs to change to help the funny stars of YouTube move beyond their slapstick routines and bedroom cameras to a more creatively ambitious environment.

The editor of the web-based British Comedy Guide, Mark Boosey, identifies comedy gems in the schedules, such as Mackenzie Crook’s BBC4 show The Detectorists, and Channel 4’s Catastrophe, which stars Irishwoman Sharon Horgan alongside American-in-London Rob Delaney and has also found success in the US.

Boosey points out that British comedy is less suited to binge-watching than long-running American shows such as Modern Family. “It’s harder to get into a box set of British comedy because they tend to be only six episodes long.”

Brave commissioners might consider giving comedies a 10-episode run to help them find their feet. But this would endanger the long British tradition of a single writer – as opposed to the team approach favoured in the US.

Either way, broadcasters must learn to be as innovative as the best stand-ups and comedy writers. Because, never mind the box sets, there’s enough dark drama on the news to leave us all in need of a good laugh.

Twitter: @iburrell

Manoeuvres in the dark at the Beeb

There may be change afoot at the top of the BBC. The departure of the corporation’s director of television, Danny Cohen, alongside the growing status of its production arm, BBC Studios, could signal a shake-up of director-general Tony Hall’s senior management.

Although Mark Linsey will take on Cohen’s job on a temporary basis beyond Christmas, the role is under review and may not be continued.

Where does this leave BBC creative director Alan Yentob, a close ally of Cohen’s? After the high drama of his appearance before MPs over the collapse of Kids Company, the charity that he chaired, Yentob was spotted last week in the company of News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks.

The BBC man was in the tycoon’s private box at the O2 arena in London, to watch a U2 concert. Yentob, who has been harangued in the Murdoch-owned Sun for his role at the charity, is an innate PR man and a consummate networker. Jerry Hall – Murdoch’s new squeeze – is part of his crowd.

Don’t expect Yentob to take a role at News UK any time soon – he intends to be part of the shake-up discussions and no one at the top of the BBC thinks he should leave. Whether The Sun’s editor, Tony Gallagher, will go any easier on him is another thing altogether.

Investigation puts fear into US advertising

Jules Kroll, the most famous name in corporate investigations, has been called in to work on a corruption inquiry that has sent a tremor through American advertising.

The inquiry is into the powerful media agencies, which make the decisions on where big companies spend their advertising budgets. The largest in the sector – WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, Interpublic and Dentsu – are global operations with headquarters or offices in London, though there is no indication so far of a British dimension to the investigation or allegations of wrongdoing.

The US Association of National Advertisers has called in Mr Kroll’s K2 Intelligence and the UK-based marketing analytics firm Ebiquity to examine allegations that rebates are being hidden from advertising clients and pocketed by agencies. It follows claims by Jon Mandel, a former chief executive of the agency MediaCom, that members of his industry were demanding such “kickbacks” from media owners in order to place large amounts of advertising with them.