Comfort classic

For more than half a century, film and television makers have been drawn to the novels of John le Carré. The 2016 serialisation of The Night Manager, soon to re-emerge as a co-production between Amazon Prime and BBC TV, was the latest in a long line of TV treats inspired by le Carré’s prose.

Alec Guinness’s portrayal of George Smiley, the donnish, bespectacled spook who wouldn’t look out of place in a rural rectory, remains a defining performance of the television age.

From Till Death Us Do Part to The Royle Family, family life in all its wonderful and woeful iterations has proved fertile ground for the British television sitcom. Few, however, have been as innovative as BBC One’s Outnumbered, which subverted conventions and moved the genre on.

If you can judge the success of a comedy show by the ubiquity of its catchphrases, The Fast Show was “Scorchio!”. That one was courtesy of Caroline Aherne’s weather girl on Chanel 9, the Euro telly spoof. And they kept on coming on TV’s greatest sketch show: “I freely admit I was very, very drunk” (sozzled QC Rowley Birkin, Paul Whitehouse); “Does my bum look big in this?” (Arabella Weir’s Insecure Woman); and “… which was nice” (Patrick Nice, Mark Williams).

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.