On paper, it shouldn’t work. The show is set in a seedy boarding house run by a bigoted, sexually frustrated, resentful man who looks like he rarely washes or changes clothes. His wife has left him, and he is a fantasist who makes up stories of heroic wartime deeds. He treats his boarders with contempt, apart from the one he’s hopelessly in love with – college administrator Ruth, played by Frances de la Tour, later known to millions from the Harry Potter films.
It is neither subtle nor sophisticated but what would you expect from a sitcom written by and starring Ade Edmondson and Rik Mayall? Particularly one called Bottom and featuring Eddie Hitler, Spudgun and Dave Hedgehog as characters?
Bottom is childish and crude but also laugh-out-loud funny – and it’s the apogee of the famed Edmondson and Mayall double act. The pair met at Manchester University as drama students in 1975 and clicked immediately.
Imagine setting a television sitcom in today’s run-down, overcrowded British prisons. A non-starter or maybe the darkest of black comedies?
The Paris of French crime drama Spiral is not the Paris of Amélie or – mon Dieu – of Emily in Paris. There is barely a beret or bistro in shot as the cops fight crime in parts of the city that no tourist dares to tread.
Engrenages (“gears” in French) made its TV debut on Canal+ in 2005, crossing the Channel to BBC Four the following year as Spiral.
British TV viewers had never seen anything like Manchester’s Chatsworth Estate and its most infamous residents, the Gallagher family. Until Channel 4 premiered Shameless in 2004, working-class dramas had generally been po-faced, bleak and irritatingly worthy.
Prime Suspect is a police procedural, one of many over the past decades, and certainly not the first or last cop show to feature serial killers, dead naked women and mean city streets. So far, so what?
But, when Lynda La Plante’s uncompromising creation was first broadcast on ITV in 1991, a nation sat up and noticed, with more than 14 million people tuning in to watch.
Helen Mirren’s DCI Jane Tennison, appointed to head the Met’s murder squad after its boss suffers a fatal heart attack, is treated with contempt and worse by the all-male incident room.
British telly was a right old cockney knees up in the 1980s, with Peckham’s Only Fools and Horses bossing it on the BBC and Shepherd’s Bush’s Minder the guvnah on ITV.
Both drew huge audiences but the TV critics were a little sniffy about Minder, preferring John Sullivan’s sitcom to the comic tales of ex-boxer and old lag Terry McCann and wheeler-dealer Arthur Daley.
All sitcoms have something to say about the eras they are made in, but few sum up an era so definitively as Men Behaving Badly, the no-holds-barred slice of 1990s lad culture created and written by Simon Nye.
Today, looking at this raucous tale of two best mates making complete, often drunken, idiots of themselves, it is tempting to dismiss Gary and Tony, played by Martin Clunes and Neil Morrissey, respectively, as disgustingly sexist bores short on social graces and big on schoolboy humour.
When a new BBC Three comedy made its low-key debut in the spring of 2007, no one imagined that Gavin & Stacey would go on to become the comedic equivalent of a national treasure.
Despite its two writers’ utter lack of experience as screenwriters – James Corden and Ruth Jones had met as actors on Kay Mellor’s slimming club drama for ITV, Fat Friends – it soon became clear that here was a startlingly original show blessed by a group of fully realised characters, a script crackling with wit and an unusually brilliant cast.
Little, it seems, has changed in the 36 years since Edge of Darkness was first shown. Conspiracy and cover-up, environmental devastation and the threat of nuclear destruction were stitched into the fabric of the 1980s and are no less relevant now.
If this were all that Edge of Darkness had offered, however, it wouldn’t be so fondly remembered or, indeed, recognised by many critics as British TV drama’s finest moment.
