What would you call a television channel without a sitcom, Jona-than Ross asked mock-rhetorically at the British Comedy Awards one year. "ITV," he answered (which was ballsy given that ITV hosts the event). Yet it was not always so. The Army Game, created by Sid Colin in 1957, was one of the network's, and television's, earliest hits. Eric Chappell's Rising Damp of the mid-1970s still easily makes it into any list of television's funniest programmes. Oh No, It's Selwyn Froggitt, of the same era, was written by Alan Plater no less. LWT was once a little comedy factory, producing Please, Sir!, various Doctor series and the demotic On the Buses, capable of spinning off the top-earning British film of 1973. The strange death of situation comedy on ITV is a mystery indeed. Suffice to say that the last attempt by ITV that I bothered to review, Duck Patrol in 1998, did not need my torpedoing to ensure it sank without trace.
Yet now, like snowdrops in January, there are signs of life. With Dead Man Weds (Wednesdays, 10pm), ITV is finally looking in the right direction for new talent. Having been humiliated by the alternative comedy of the 1980s, the northern club comic has returned a stronger breed. Stand-ups such as Peter Kay, Johnny Vegas and Dave Spikey infuse crude working-class humour with satirical knowingness. The humour is not, as with the graduate Pythons, at the expense of proles. It is merely about them. It is class observation without the snobbery but with a surrealist edge, and it permits plenty of jokes about shagging and farting. My guess - an educated one, given the huge venues Kay fills on his tours - is that his Channel 4 hit sitcom Phoenix Nights would have gone down a storm on ITV1, delighting both the channel's traditional northerly skewed viewership and a more advertiser-friendly demographic.
With Dead Man Weds, ITV has acquired the services of Phoenix Nights co-writer Dave Spikey, who played the club compere, but not Kay. In compensation, it has hired the bloated self-hating stand-up Vegas, hailed by Steve Coogan as the finest comedian of his generation. Spikey's subject matter, life on a small-time local paper, is rich enough. Local journalism is intrinsically funny: the need each week to make a "splash" out of the parochial; the reporter's professional cynicism struggling to survive in proximity to the community he reports; and simply the smallness of it all (on my first paper, actually a thriving northern evening, the editor once gave us permission, on a big story, to "ring London, if necessary").
The premise of Dead Man Weds is that an ex-national journalist, played by Spikey, has been appointed editor of the Fogburrow Advertiser somewhere in the godforsaken north. This is a not uncommon fate for any failed national hack, and his fate is usually far from funny. In a wonderful 1972 BBC play, The Reporters, by the late Arthur Hopcraft, Robert Urquhart played a Fleet Street exile with considerable pathos. This is comedy, however, and Gordon Garden, formerly of the Daily Telegraph, finds an unexpected horror awaiting him. Where once local journalists might have aspired to be Woodward and Bernstein, the highest ambition of the Advertiser's staff seems to be to work as the splash sub on the Daily Sport.
The show's best jokes are generally the front-page headlines that accompany their non-stories: the punning education lead "Head loses face"; the bathetic "Some trains may be late"; and the sensational "Dead man weds" (well, the groom's heart had once stopped briefly in hospital). The twisted genius who coins them is the paper's chief reporter, Lewis Donat, played by Vegas in, I thought, subdued form. Donat would genuinely prefer to write a story about inflatable policemen than about pollution turning drinking water blue because the former allows the headline: "Rubber policemen erase crime".
Like Urquhart's returning hack, Garden finds himself back north after a descent into alcoholism. In his case, it has been provoked by his belated realisation that the giant conspiracy theory he was investigating was a hoax. Ironically, Fogburrow is a small town chocker with conspiracies, and Spikey could perhaps do more with Gordon's "just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me" mindset. A darker, more despairing tone would help, too, as might a live audience: the absentee laughter track leaves a weird emptiness.
Nevertheless, ITV comedy makes critic laugh shock. But it is not as good as Max and Paddy's Road to Nowhere, Channel 4's last vehicle for Peter Kay, which in turn was not as good as Phoenix Nights. Incidentally, I was recently told off for not praising the second series of Peep Show, the comedy Channel 4 scheduled to follow Max and Paddy. Starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb as Mark and Jeremy, two ex-student flatmates who, in their late twenties, find themselves cast untimely into the adult world - one with no idea about sex and the other with none about work - Peep Show has, unlike its protagonists, matured wonderfully in its second run and produced some of the finest comedy of embarrassment since The Office. It poses every male viewer the key question: am I a Jeremy or a Mark? Nations divide upon less finely drawn lines. Never mind ITV's problems. That Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's creation was ignored by last year's Comedy Awards is a minor scandal.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times
