ITV axe sitcoms

A bit like watching anything with Ricky Gervais in it, then

BBC 1 have got 'This Time with Alan Partridge' coming up in a few weeks. It'll be interesting too see how Partridge does on BBC1.

That's another case of the Twitter echo chamber - how many people outside of Twitter have even heard about his Twitter activities?

I think we should take the Kevin Lygo comment with a pinch of salt. He is known for making those sort of quips without actually meaning them.

It reached the news when the police warned him for harrasment last year.

It's important to make the distinction that it wasn't a Police caution (which are sometimes called warnings by some people). It was a warning in the sense that the police arrived and spoke to him.

It was hardly prominent news in any case.

Well, indeed, and I remember in the Melvyn Bragg series to mark ITV's fiftieth birthday that someone from ITV said that they didn't have much comedy at the moment, but there was lots of comedy in their entertainment shows like I'm A Celebrity. And of course at the turn of the century Granada's comedy department, especially, were producing just as many comedy dramas as they were straight sitcoms - Cold Feet won dozens of prizes at the Comedy Awards (hence in 2001, Jonathan Ross was pointing out how many times Andy Harries' name was being mentioned in the acceptance speeches).

These things do come in cycles and it is a bit sad that there currently aren't any sitcoms on ITV, but I think comedy needs to be of a particular kind to succeed on ITV, it needs to be particularly brash. The example I always give of something that doesn't work on ITV is High Stakes, a hugely unsuccessful sitcom in 2001 where a second series was commissioned but never broadcast - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Stakes_(TV_series). It should never have been commissioned in the first place, a dull middle-class series about bank managers looked totally out of place on the modern day ITV. It's totally unsuitable for the audience. It's nice to have sitcoms but they can't be just any old sitcom.

Probably the best period for comedy on ITV in recent years was around 2003 when they had TV Burp, The Sketch Show, Baddiel and Skinner and Directors Commentary with Rob Brydon, a nice little set of shows, and all of them I think were well-suited to the channel and fitted well alongside the other programmes. You could argue it was a better comedy line-up than BBC1 at the time. That's the kind of thing that would work for ITV, something suitably brash and vulgar.

They had Hardware with Martin Freeman at the same time too. And Shane with Frank Skinner... which had a second series made and never broadcast.

Off the cuff remark taken as being official policy. Happens a lot in the reporting of the Edinburgh TV Festival

Though there won't be any sitcoms, don't forget Alien Fun Capsule will be on for a third series, one of the best comedy programmes on TV at the moment.

I dont know about that, the first series was outstanding and still is, but the second series don't live up to the first...

Although to be fair, it was a sitcom starring Richard Wilson straight out of One Foot In The Grave, so you can kind of understand why they went for it.