Why doesn’t Britain make great comedy sketches any more?
Four candles. A dead parrot. Ronnie Corbett knowing his place. Suits You. Numberwang. Vicky Pollard. You can chart the decades (as well as tell someone’s age) by the great comedy sketches. From Monty Python in the 1960s right through to Little Britain in the 2000s, the sketch show, that grab-bag of characters and ideas, catchphrases and pay-offs, whopping hits and clunking misses, has been a staple of British comedy since the beginnings of mass television.
Yet at some point in the last decade, the nation that brought you The Goodies, Victoria Wood As Seen on TV, Not the Nine O’Clock News, Smack the Pony and Big Train has gone sketchy on sketch comedy. The last sketch show even to be nominated for a comedy Bafta was Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse’s Harry & Paul, and that was in 2015. Sitcom, narrative and character comedy like Fleabag, This Country or Catastrophe has entirely replaced skits. When you do get a group of disparate comics together, it’s likely to be on a panel show. New comic voices such as Rose Matafeo or Jamie Demetriou go straight from stand-up or Edinburgh to writing scripted series such as Starstruck or Stath Lets Flats.
And in one sense that’s fine – read back through that list and our overall comedy output remains first-rate. But it is a different type of comedy, and that does merit a pause for thought. Many of our best performers – French and Saunders, Steve Coogan, Ricky Gervais – started out in sketch comedy. If stand-up is comedy’s gym, where comics go to get battle-hardened, a sketch show is comedy’s laboratory: a place where character actors and comedy writers alike get to experiment.
Sketch comedy, of course, hasn’t died out completely. With their reams of user data, Netflix more than anyone knows what customers like to watch, and so a second series of the unhinged American sketch show I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, beginning this week, suggests that sketches can still drive subscriptions. Likewise, Natasia Demetriou and Ellie White’s Ellie & Natasia has been given a full series on the BBC, as has Freya Parker and Celeste Dring’s offbeat double-act Lazy Susan.
But panel shows and stand-up comedy specials are cheaper to make and easier to do. On a series like Would I Lie to You the set is the same every week, the format is well-established. All the producers have to do is cram as much well-known talent behind the desks and the ratings will follow.
A new sketch show is much higher risk. A series of sketches is, by its nature, hit and miss. Written by a small number of people in isolation it’s not until it’s shown to an audience that it becomes apparent which jokes fly and which die. As a series, or ideally several series, goes by, the writers can drop the duffers and work up the doozies; the performers can hone their timing and their act. (Not the Nine O’Clock News, for example, ran for a series with Chris Langham as part of the team. It got just enough viewers to be granted a second run, whereupon Langham was replaced with Griff Rhys Jones and the series became a huge hit.)
This is anathema to the everyone’s-a-critic age of social media. Anyone who’s glanced at a Twitter timeline when a new comedy is broadcast these days knows there’s a lag of roughly four nanoseconds before even the best joke will be labelled as a dud by someone. Sketch shows can be crucified practically before they’ve reached their first punchline, let alone their second sketch. Channel 4’s The Morgana Show put the then-newcomer Morgana Robinson on a pedestal and within minutes it was being hammered on Twitter for being – you guessed it – hit-and-miss. The show was cancelled after one series.
The lack of current sketch shows is also, in part, due to a slight contempt that has emerged from overfamiliarity. Blame catchphrase comedy, if you like. Little Britain, in particular, was huge, moving to arena tours, books and a US spin-off. As a result, much of Big Britain was full of pub bores shouting “I’m the only gay in the village”, or “Yeah but no but yeah.” This type of karaoke comedy soon became tiresome. Sketch shows as a whole have been tarnished as a result.
As so often, it’s easy to blame all of this on the internet. One argument goes that these days all of the good jokes, the great writers and the star turns are on YouTube already – why would anyone bother trying to pull a sketch show together when essentially a half-hour of good YouTube links back-to-back is a better compilation of funnies than anything two or three of this year’s Footlighters might come up with.
Another digital doomster thesis says that the prevalence of memes, emojis and gifs as the lingua franca of comedy has made anything that requires a set-up and pay-off redundant. To the younger generation, all comedy is visual and instant – cat falls off skateboard? Like, click, share. Ronnie Barker-style wordplay, Victoria Wood’s songs or Terry Gilliam’s surrealist animations require too much intellectual investment.
And yet the irony is that the sketch show – quick cuts, soundbites, fast laughs – should be the ideal format in the age of Instagram and Twitter. When Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson first pitched The Fast Show in the early 1990s, it was a comedy for what they then called “the MTV generation”. What that meant was comedy for the age of the short-attention span. It was a precursor for precisely the stuff that every kid is watching and sharing on their smartphone these days.
In America the message has sunk in – their late-night talk shows are now riddled with small segments such as Carpool Karaoke that are designed to be clipped and shared online. They’re sketches, basically. It’s a marvel no one has thought to string some of them together.
I Think You Should Leave is on Netflix on Tuesday
