Tag: Festivals

Gold TV has polled the professionals about their favourite comedy. But even the funniest of the funny can’t easily be reduced to scenes and one-liners

Surveys of Britain’s favourite comedy – and indeed, Britain’s favourite anything – are 10 a penny; the more so in our click-bait era. The Radio Times ran one last August, which found Mrs Brown’s Boys to be the nation’s best-loved sitcom of the century so far. Now here comes another from the TV channel Gold, in which “comics reveal their favourite British TV comedy moments and characters” of all time. What’s new is that this is a poll of professional comedians, and so more insightful, we assume, than those vox-pop efforts elsewhere. And so it is, to the degree that the sophisticate’s bete noire Mrs Brown’s Boys doesn’t get a sniff of glory. But beyond that, not so much.

The headline winners here are firmly from the drawer marked “usual suspects”, as Fawlty Towers is named best sitcom, and Alan Partridge the favourite male comic character. “Don’t mention the war!” features in the top three best-loved scenes, a category that includes – look away now, Stewart Lee – Del Boy falling through the bar in Only Fools and Horses. The best one-liners in UK sitcom history are “Don’t tell him, Pike” from Dad’s Army and “A pint? Why that’s very nearly an armful!” from The Blood Donor episode of Hancock’s Half Hour. (Given how closely these results mirror conventional wisdom since the days of shillings and pence, we probably didn’t need professional comedians to tell us that.)

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