Waiting for God was relatively popular. I do remember Honey for Tea. But I like to think it's a bad dream. Next of Kin was not a terrible sitcom by a long way. Just a bit of a grim synopsis for a sitcom. Joint Account got two series' and was not a flop by todays standards. The Liver Birds didn't work because it was unbelievable and contrived. Grace and Favour was badly executed.

However there was also:

The Brittas Empire
Vicar of Dibley
Men Behaving Badly
Keeping Up Appearances (until 1995)
In Sickness and in Health
Last of the Summer Wine
Only Fools and Horses
You Rang M'Lord
The Thin Blue Line
As Time Goes By
One Foot in the Grave
Waiting For God
Birds of a Feather
Two Point Four Children
Sitting Pretty
Bread
On The Up
Goodnight Sweetheart

Many of these were running alongside each other. It is hard to create a list of three now! How many new sitcoms have aired on BBC1 this year? Is it really just Outnumbered and Blandings and those awful comedy pilots?

There were as many failures as there is today. Your memory just chooses to select the best. Some of the titles were 30 years ago that you are talking about.

I'm sorry to bring this up again (although if it distracts from Tumble chat, maybe it's a good thing), but if the whole point of the argument is to decide which of 'stEnders and Emmerdale does better when they're shown at the same time, you cannot include +1 figures because if you're watching it on +1 you are blatantly not watching it at the same time. Yes, people are perfectly within their rights to include +1 figures, but if you're arguing "which show did better when they were shown simultaneously?", you clearly cannot.


They'd be better off doing hour-long Emmerdales on Wednesdays so they could show Corrie at eight and try and dent Bake Off a bit, rather than just waste them on Tuesdays were they achieve nothing.



I dunno about this, I think it's very hard to suggest this type of format was unfamiliar when they launched The X Factor, we'd already had two series each of Popstars, Pop Idol and Fame Academy. Pop Idol in particular had been an enormous series, everyone in Britain was talking about it, Simon Cowell was the most famous man on the planet and The X Factor was seen very much as Pop Idol III. And of course in those days Saturday night programmes as a whole rated much, much higher because most people were still only on analogue.

I think the Strictly figure is an interesting one because I would suggest it probably had about as much publicity as Tumble did when it started, and given it was in May rather than August and ten years ago I don't think it's too mad to say Tumble has perhaps launched a little bit better (I say a little bit) than Strictly in comparison.


Having spent the summer watching Helen Skelton, Matt Baker and Ore Oduba presenting the Commonweath Games, and Jake Humphrey and Simon Thomas currently going head to head as we speak, I think it's a total myth to suggest kids TV isn't still creating new talent.


I would pretty much disagree with most of this, I'm afraid. Certainly there are have been plenty of BBC quizzes that have excelled since Bob's Full House, The Weakest Link and Pointless are obvious examples. Yeah, they were first invented for daytime BBC2, but they became part of primetime BBC1 so they count. Even Big Break was a reliable show for a long time. And you can't write off the lottery quizzes either because the lottery itself rates very poorly and the bad ones flop, so it's not like the lottery is propping them up. The good ones like Who Dares Wins and In It To Win It work on their own merits.

I think it's wrong too to suggest it was the Beeb alone who were relying on talent because ITV had just as many in the shape of Benny Hill, Mike and Bernie Winters, Tarby and so on, and famously they poached Morecambe and Wise, Brucie and Mike Yarwood from the Beeb and threw money at them. Exhibit A is the first episode of Bruce Forsyth's Big Night on YouTube, if ever there was a case of star first, format much later it's that. There was that dreadful period in the nineties when they were sticking everyone on golden handcuffs deals and so shoving them in a host of ropey formats. You can look at the mid-nineties when ITV were shoving out endless crap like The Shane Richie Experience and Turner Round The World. And even now their light entertainment is totally dominated by a handful of names.


I would probably agree with this, it was a bit of a waste of a Pointless as well which could have done substantially more half an hour or so later. I suppose in the end it was justified because Mrs Brown was the most watched show of the night but that's already a hit and Tumble needed all the support it could get.


I would probably agree with all this, I think one of the main problems with Tumble for me was that it was a bit boring. It certainly didn't remind of Strictly, it reminded me far more of Dancing On Ice with the commentary, the judging (with half points) and the quality of the participants, and the look of the thing too. I found Dancing On Ice a bit dull and I found this a bit dull.

But I did like Alex Jones on it, I like Alex and I thought she did rather well, I thought she was pretty quick with the ad-libs and kept it all flowing nicely, and I didn't feel there were any awkward bits like there is with someone like Davina or Tess where they have to awkwardly go from ad-libbing to the autocue.


Well, even so, many people clearly do find it entertaining. Jonathan Creek is technically a comedy show but most viewers treat it as a drama. It doesn't matter where the ideas come from as long as they're good ideas. It's a bit like that argument on the ITV fiftieth anniversary stuff in 2005 when Melvyn Bragg tried to argue they didn't need as many comedy shows because the reality shows like I'm A Celebrity were so funny. It's a similar argument.

It's clearly the case that audiences engage with factual entertainment formats like Bake Off and The Apprentice in a way they used to with light entertainment, and as long as they're on BBC1 and getting big ratings, that's OK, isn't it? It's a bit of a shift but it's like how variety used to be a dominant genre in the sixties and seventies but then fell out of favour a bit. If people are now moving from straight LE to factual entertainment, that's the way the trend is at the moment.

I realise how old some of that list was but my point was that BBC1 never had a shortage of sitcoms to air. Whether they were failures or not was irrelevant, there was always another to follow swiftly behind it.

There's always kinda been a shortage of good sitcom. Way back in the nineties they were scrabbling around for good material. I think its goldust.

On a lighter note, are 20 per cent of its audience transgendered according to the pecentage split.
Also as a male, I would say channels like BBC Four with their more serious programming would skew heavily ABC1 and male. Although there are plenty of women who like more challenging programmes, there are far more who enjoy soaps, reality shows and light entertainment. As a male, I tend never to bother with reality shows, soaps, daytime gossip shows and Saturday night entertainment, although I also run a mile from football. My tastes, if you need to know, are drama, documentaries, old sitcoms, some sport and news.

I'm reminded here of some BBC executive being quoted a few years back, I think it might have been Wayne Garvie when he was in charge of entertainment, and he said they'd done a pitching session for new quiz formats, they got a hundred and of those only three were considered at all suitable for further development, and of those, two were found to have completely fatal flaws in their format that were impossible to correct when they piloted them. So you're looking at a 1% success rate.


Yes, at the time something like Bread was a big hit but it was bloody awful. French and Saunders said everyone told them Girls On Top was a big hit because it got ten million on primetime ITV but they knew it wasn't really because everything got ten million on primetime ITV in those days and they weren't happy with how it came out.

And people didn't stop slagging off these now much-loved shows when they were a going concern. There's the Boxing Day 1992 episode of Noel's House Party on YouTube which as we know was its highest rated ever - http://youtu.be/sNtfUUUtqWM - and in part three, Joe Longthorne performs with a singing dog.
http://youtu.be/wo7gOWg3Os4?t=8m19s
Makes Tumble look like Breaking Bad!

I'm not surprised, that's what I did, and a lot of people I know did. I watched S1-S3 before S4 started as I hadn't watched it and felt the need to watch it after everyone spoke about S3 after it finished, so it looks a lot did the same, hence the uplift for S4.

"Bread" was a massive hit but the writing for much of the time questionable. Many TV reviewers of "Bread" often asked if the series had outstayed its welcome. So sometimes we tend to forget how derided shows were back then.

The same is true of men. The top shows among overall viewers tend to be the same as the top chart for male viewing. More men watched Great British Bake Off last year than an England qualifier.

To be fair, back in the 80s and 90s, a lot of awful shows got pretty good ratings. These days, such shows would barely scrape 4 million. Didn't Shane Richie's Caught in the Act get 12 million?

It was achieving 18 million viewers at its height in 1986. However, it turned into yet another vehicle for Carla Lane's obsessions with menopausal women and green issues and viewers became increasingly bored. Also her biggest success, The Liver Birds, has dated very badly and became another outlet for her views on vegetarianism and animal rights.

It's a tragedy how far comedy and entertainment have fallen at the BBC. In the 70s, 80s and early 90s it was propping up BBC1. It doesn't help how they're scheduled either. Everything on BBC1 in the 9pm hour and at 10pm on BBC2.

For me, putting an Entertainment man in charge of BBC One and even Television, would go a long way to improving the situation.

At the moment the balence is skewed towards Factual and Drama. Thats it.

I don't think we can compare TV shows now to back then. Back in the 1980s, something getting 8m would probably have been seen as a flop? Put any of those hit shows on now, they'd struggle with 4m I reckon. BOAF did well though; maybe they should bring back more sitcoms and British comedies? We have decent dramas, but are lacking in the comedy; sitcoms are being ruled by the US at the moment with things like Big Bang Theory and all of that doing well on E4. It's probably why MBB and Miranda do so well, they are the only two shows I can think of which makes an impact in the ratings.

I'd say 5m nowadays is the same as 10m back then considering now looking at shares, around 40%-50% watch the multichannel combined.

But ITV managed to find them. Maybe people didn't want to pitch to The BBC or The BBC couldn't spot a hit?


Bread had fans. Humour is subjective. It clicked with the public and took off.

Noel's House Party was always knocked in the sneery upmarket newspapers. When that series won the BAFTA for Best Light Entertainment Programme virtually no broadsheet mentioned it. But House Party also had its fans and defenders plus people tuned in. Mrs Brown's Boys gets slated and people tune in. When you get slated and people don't tune in you are screwed.

Mark Linsey would probably not have made a good choice for controller though. He didn't have enough success stories in his department. How could he have been promoted.

Shows are often derided but there are popular derided shows and unpopular derided shows. Bread still managed to get 20m and a BAFTA nomination. Some critics hate everything, don't like popular culture and think everything is rubbish unless Dennis Potter wrote it.

He would have been a terrible choice as BBC1 Controller. He's bad enough as Head Of Entertainment.

Exactly. Saturday night telly was so much better when no new programmes on BBC1 lasted longer than 50 minutes, and no new programmes on ITV lasted longer than 60 minutes. I know they would show crappy old films in the summer, but that's beside the point.

Long running-times work for Strictly and Factor, but that doesn't mean they'll work for anything else.

Did ITV find them? What quiz hits have they had in the past decade, other than The Chase?

Joint Account rated very well for its first series, though. 13m if I remember correctly. And Waiting For God did well for its second, third and fourth runs.

Even Next of Kin hit 10m in its first series, but it never really got over its unpleasant premise. I think the ratings were that high at first due to viewers' affection for Penelope Keith and William Gaunt.

I'm a product of the seventies and eighties and Bruce's Big Night was considered a big flop because it was only getting 9 million. These days this is similar to what IAC gets and that's classed as a big hit. Very few shows now break the 10 million barrier and if this was the case in the seventies, ITV would probably have gone bankrupt and the BBC director general would have resigned.
Also the name Salv, does this suggest an Italian link in your family as it looks like a shortened version of Salvatore?

Bread was a great watch imo when it was fresh, its a classic example of a comedy that was done to death -it became like a soap with too many episodes(74 over 7 series -the first two UK regulation 6 but series 3/4/5 each had 13) and the laughs couldn't be sustained. It actually hit 20.95 million at its peak but had drifted down to 10 million and less 3 years later, by which time it had become a bit of national joke for all the wrong reasons.

Yep! I don't even look upon Blandings as a sitcom. It's just a bit of light drama whimsy.