British Sitcom History Podcast

Here at Britcompod, we are ardent Ghosts fans so we were in the cinema on opening night for the new film, Ghosts: The Possession of Button House. This is a pretty quick review with no spoilers but basically we loved it!

You can't talk about Only Fools and Horses without getting stuck in to one of the many christmas specials. We've chosen a fan favourite in To Hull and Back, which involves our boys getting involved with diamond smuggling. We also take a closer look at the career of John Challis.

This week we delve further into series 4 and 5 of Only Fools and Horses as well as everybody's least favourite special, A Royal Flush. We also take a closer look at some of the major supporting characters like Trigger and Mickey Pearce.

We are back in Peckham! Having previously looked at the "Grandad Years", now we take on Uncle Albert and some of the other players who are starting to populate the world of Del and Rodney. Are these the peak years of Only Fools and Horses?

This week we are following on from our Simon Nye connection to take a look at a much more obscure sitcom. 2001's The Savages is a pretty basic domestic sitcom but has some interesting elements, including Marcus Brigstocke as the lead and Geoffrey Palmer as his dad.

Here is Part 2 of our look at Simon Nye's Is It Legal? starring the great Imelda Staunton. This week, we take a close look at Patrick Barlow and have good things to say about the physical comedy in the show.

This month we are looking at the somewhat forgotten mid nineties sitcom Is it Legal? Coming from Simon Nye while still riding high on the success of Men Behaving Badly, the show features theatre star Imelda Staunton in a relatively rare lead role.

As part of our look at early Last of the Summer Wine, we came across the name of James "Jimmy" Gilbert, who was a big cheese at the BBC for many years. He played a big part in the satire boom of the sixties, brought The Two Ronnies together, and commissioned some of your favourite sitcoms. I found an in depth interview with him and listened to it all so you don't have to! But if you want to anyway...

This week we're having a look at one of the episodes from Seven of One, an anthology series designed to find sitcoms built around Ronnie Barker. The series spawned two huge successes, Porridge and Open All Hours. But this one didn't. Written by Roy Clarke at the same time he was birthing Last of the Summer Wine, Spanner's Eleven sees Ronnie Barker as the incompetent manager of an incompetent lower...

Part 2 of our look at just the tip of the long-running Last of the Summer Wine. We finish our analysis of the episode, marvel at the technical set dressing of a church, and take a closer look at the work of Michael Bates.

This week we begin an epic journey into the world's longest running sitcom, Last of the Summer Wine. We'll start by looking at just the first two series, after which Michael Bates left. Here, we talk about the meandering and pointless nature of the first series, and we get a closer look at the careers of Peter Sallis and Bill Owen.

This month we've been looking at Ideal so what better opportunity to take a look back at an early acting appearance from Johnny Vegas in the infamously bad Sex Lives of the Potato Men. Co-starring Mackenzie Crook, hot off The Office, and featuring surprisingly large supporting roles from Dominic Coleman and Mark Gatiss, this film is also packed with other Britcom cameos. It's also pretty crap and...

This week we continue our in-depth investigation into what exactly Ideal is and what it became as it carried on for several years. We also look at the career of Johnny Vegas and try and parse the blurred line between comedian and comedy character. And to top it all we have a report from the Ideal 25th Anniversary live stage show, which Allen went to see last year.

This week we find ourselves in the 21st Century to take a detailed look at cult favourite Ideal. Written by Graham Duff and starring Johnny Vegas, Ideal enjoyed a surprisingly long run for a slightly weird little show with more interest in music than story structure. This is definitely one of the more interesting shows we've looked at and it sparks off discussions on the nature of art versus comme...

Writer David Scott has just released a new book looking at the career of Caroline Aherne so we got him into the virtual studio for a discussion. We go on at length about how much we love The Royle Family but also take on Mrs Merton, The Fast Show, The Fattest Man in Britain, and Dossa and Joe. Caroline Aherne: Rebel in Disguise is available in all good book shops, and some bad ones as well.

Released in 1974, the Man about the House film drops right in the peak of seventies Britcom film spin-offs. Usually that means reworked material and a few pairs of Bristols but that's not what we get here. Join us on a journey of discovery to see Robin and Chrissy getting closer than ever before and a deep dive on the history of Hammer Films.

It's part 2 of our look at Man About the House and this week we're focusing on Richard O'Sullivan and what happened as the series progressed. In a fairly unusual move for a sitcom, the show has a definitive ending, not that we necessarily like where it goes. We address the "Norman Eshley problem" and have a side by side comparison with the American remake, Three's Company.

Now in video! We're back and it's a soft relaunch as we go full time into the sitcom game. We start up with an absolute classic of the early seventies in Man About the House. Ostensibly about the absolute scandalous idea of two birds living with a fella, the series soon becomes a will they/won't they between Robin and Chrissy, played by the sitcom powerhouses of Paula Wilcox and Richard O'Sullivan...

Allen has been to see the latest sitcom related stage show - I'm Sorry, Prime Minister. An updated look at the characters from Yes, Minister, the play is written by the show's original creator Jonathan Lynn and stars Griff Rhys Jones and Clive Francis. Is it a faithful addition to the canon or a Fawlty Towers style cash-in?

It's christmas so we're heading back to Button House for a family get-together. Julian finds that the true meaning of christmas is learning to love again and Mike's family have come round to wind him up. All this and more in our special festive edition looking at Ghosts!

We promise this is our last venture into the world of Grace Brothers but this 2016 reboot was too good to miss. Loads of top comedy actors and a seemingly genuine attempt to recreate the magic that actually works pretty well. But at the end of the day, what's the point?

As we recently looked at series 2 of Blackadder, we thought we'd go over it in a bit more detail and see just how historically accurate it all is.

To get even further into the Are You Being Served universe, we take a look at the frankly unnecessary retooling that was Grace & Favour, getting the band back together for one last tour. But before that, we take a quick look at the failed pilot for an American remake, entitled Beane's of Boston, and a slightly more successful Australian remake.

If you had a successful sitcom in the seventies then the only logical thing to do was to send your characters on holiday for the silver screen version. Are You Being Served was no exception and in the 1977 film spinoff we get all our favourites enjoying the baking hot sun of Elstree Studios. Okay, it's not a great film overall but is it true to the spirit of the show?

This week we pop into Valco in Warrington for a big shop that includes Carl Rice and Beverly Rudd. We also take a look at what happens in the later series as the show goes from sketch-like o soap-like. But we still like it for some reason.