By TJ Worthington

First published March 2003

The undisputed highpoint of television comedy in 1994 was BBC2′s The Day Today, a slick, stylistically accurate and utterly plausible pastiche of television current affairs broadcasts. The production team behind this series and its radio precursor On the Hour were certainly very prolific at this time, but having mainly worked their way up through BBC local radio and topical satire shows, they remained tied to the Corporation and Channel 4 seemed set to miss out on this sudden explosion of comedy talent.

However, two of the writers who worked on the series were also hawking around an idea for a sitcom, and Channel 4 were quick to commission it. Paris certainly had a promising pedigree – written by Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews and performed by two comedy veterans with proven ability: Alexei Sayle as Alain Degout, a hopeless painter working in 1920s France, and Neil Morrissey as his dimwitted foppish benefactor Paul Rochet. Paris should have been a huge success, but for some reason – while certainly well written and performed and diverting and watchable as a whole – the humour failed to gel to the extent that might have been expected, it perhaps being a little too literate for a lot of viewers to fully connect with. Paris may have fallen slightly wide of the mark, but Linehan and Matthews had a foot in the door at Channel 4, and their next offering was to prove to be a much greater success.

Late in 1994, Michael Grade was shown the pilot Linehan and Matthews’ next sitcom. He didn’t much care for it personally, but was so impressed by the enthusiasm of Channel 4′s comedy department for the concept that he gave the go-ahead for a series. No doubt he was later thankful for his foresight, as Father Ted was soon to establish itself as one of the most popular sitcoms ever seen on the channel, and arguably the best that they have produced to date.

First broadcast in 1995, the key strengths of Father Ted were Linehan and Matthews’ excellent scripting, which took full advantage of the laid-back nature of the setting to fashion some refreshingly light and gentle but simultaneously thoroughly unhinged humour, plus the superb interplay and comic timing that existed between the three leads. In total, three series and a Christmas special of Father Ted were aired between 1995 and 1998 – the memorable adventures of the troublesome clerics leading them into increasingly bizarre situations. All in all, Father Ted was both charming and brilliant from start to finish, and the fact that lead player Dermot Morgan died shortly after completing work on the third and final series is one of the most genuinely sad losses of modern comedy.

But while Father Ted was as strong as any of the successful late 1980s/early 1990s Channel 4 sitcoms, and probably superior to most if not all of them, other sitcom ventures launched around the same time did not quite enjoy the same level of success. The “ladette” sitcom Dressing For Breakfast almost came close, proving surprisingly durable, running for three series between 1995 and 1998 – despite the fact that it could barely be described as a classic of the genre. In contrast, the sobering Life After Birth, which charted the events in the life of a single mother who had fallen pregnant by accident at the age of 20, got the balance exactly right but failed to find favour with a substantial audience. Meanwhile, One For the Road, a spoof travelogue starring Alan Davies as a travelling businessman, was a reasonable idea on paper but fell somewhat flat on the screen. Ironically, these much-publicised new offerings would all be overshadowed by a hastily conceived spin-off from an existing Channel 4 sitcom. But before that, we were to be witness to an alien invasion …

Anarchic puppets Zig and Zag had been popular fixtures on Irish television since the late 1980s, but it was with their move to Channel 4′s populist morning show The Big Breakfast for its launch in 1992 that they became household names. Popular with adult viewers as well as children, it was only a matter of time before Zig and Zag were given their own full series, and the pilot Zig and Zag – Entertainment Cops arrived on Christmas Day 1994. The wild tale of the puppet’s desperate attempts to stop Eammon Holmes’ Country Christmas Spectacular from being broadcast made for superb viewing, and a full series followed in 1996. Zig and Zag’s Dirty Deeds was not entirely dissimilar in set-up to the BBC’s fondly remembered and vastly underrated 1970s series The Goodies. Featuring Zig and Zag accepting unpleasant assignments on behalf of celebrities and walking straight into madcap slapstick events as a result, it nevertheless didn’t quite manage to scale the same heights as The Goodies, although it was well above the usual level that might be expected of comedy shows were aimed primarily at a child audience.

Desmond’s had ended abruptly with the death of Norman Beaton in 1994, but creator Trix Worrell decided that there was still some mileage left in the format, and in 1995 managed to interest Channel 4 in a spin-off featuring the undisputed star of the original series – Porkpie. At the start of Porkpie, the titular character (played once again by Ram John Holder) was a desperate loner, his sense of purpose having disappeared after his only real friend Desmond had died. With a pound borrowed from Desmond’s son Michael, he buys a lottery ticket and – to his amazement – wins the jackpot. The subsequent series dealt with the avowed layabout’s attempts to come to terms with his new-found wealth and the awkward feelings that it brought with it, caught between the conflicting advice of Michael, who wanted him to invest the money sensibly, and his new best friend Benji (a welcome return to television by Derek Griffiths), a former shifty conman who ironically proved to be the one person that Porkpie was able to trust absolutely. At the end of the series, a compromise that pleased all parties was finally reached as Porkpie opened the Desmond Ambrose Memorial Community Centre, which became the setting for a second run in 1996. Like Desmond’s, Porkpie was relentlessly upbeat and positive (something that was reflected in the delightful theme song) and certainly worthwhile comic fare, some even arguing that it was actually superior to its parent series. There were no further outings for any of the Ambrose family or their hangers on, but between them Desmond’s and Porkpie had clocked up eight years and 83 episodes of consistently good comedy – a rare and genuine achievement, in which Trix Worrell can take considerable pride.

Channel 4 also scored highly with more experimental forms of comedy at this time. Former Absolutely performers John Sparkes and Pete Baikie created the delightful Squawkie Talkie, in which they adapted the long-established format of redubbing stock footage of animals with human voices to create soap operas, commercials and operas. Meanwhie, employing several different kinds of animation in the name of topical satire, The Strip Show was an attempt by the production team behind ITV’s long-running puppet satire show Spitting Image to experiment with new vehicles for their output.

From overseas cames You ANC Nothing Yet, a thought-provoking piece from South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys that offered his views on his home nation’s days under Apartheid rule (which he had actively challenged through the medium of his comedy), and the corresponding inadequacies and deficiencies that he saw in the post-Apartheid regime. And from Canada came the sketch show The Kids In the Hall which had been running for five years by the time Channel 4 decided to buy the series in April 1994. Although, like many of the best imports seen on the channel, it was placed in a relatively inaccessible timeslot. The show’s mixture of Monty Python-style surrealism and grotesque imagery drew wildly enthusiastic audience reception, and in retrospect it’s amazing that only 13 episodes (of a grand total of 110) were ever shown over here.

Despite these niche successes, and with Frasier aside, Channel 4 had lacked a strong imported sitcom for several years by this point. They had passed on Seinfeld, The Larry Sanders Show and 3rd Rock From the Sun, all of which enjoyed considerable success on BBC2 despite the channels’ ludicrous scheduling policies, whilst reasonable fare like Empty Nest and Herman’s Head (and the exceptional Funky Squad, a superb parody of “hip” 1970s detective shows) suffered from inconsistent and inappropriate scheduling and failed to catch on. Others, such as Big Wave Dave’s, The Five Mrs. Buchanans, and the excruciating Dweebs, got awful slots in the schedules and thoroughly deserved them. Despite its strong cast, Baghdad Cafe did not match up to the impressive feature film that it had spun off from, and audiences were quick to pick up on that fact. Brothers, a sitcom that at least attempted to deal with homosexuality in an honest and realistic fashion, was given only tentative screenings and even Bakersfield PD, an underrated fusion of sitcom and action drama, the incredibly daring South Central which followed the life of a single mother in a crime-ridden neighbourhood, and All American Girl, an extremely likeable sitcom that had the distinct advantages of an atypical set-up (based around Asian-American stand-up star Margaret Cho and the culture clashes that she encountered in her day to day life) plus a much-publicised guest appearance from Quentin Tarantino, could not win over British audiences.

All that changed, however, when the channel started to broadcast Friends in 1995. Friends was a well above average offering, borrowing stylistic devices from Cheers and Frasier (most episodes taking place in the cafe, Joey and Chandler’s flat or Monica and Rachel’s adjoining flat), and concentrating on the interplay between the characters and their tendency to trample carelessly over each other’s problems. Blessed with some astounding one-liners (“ah, it’s the lesser known ‘I don’t have a dream’ speech”), Friends did suffer slightly as the series progressed and relationships between the characters became more complicated, but it remains superior to much of the competition, and the accomplished performances – notably those of Matt LeBlanc and the outstanding Jennifer Aniston – are always worth watching. The success of Friends has subsequently led to Channel 4 treating their imported Stateside sitcoms more seriously, and although none have proved to be quite as successful, a fair amount have been worth watching; among them Caroline in the City, Ellen and Spin City (an exceptional light-hearted political satire starring Michael J.Fox). However, the tradition of buying in dismal garbage still continues regardless, as the terminally dull Will and Grace will attest.

Echoing the arrival of Absolutely, Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out and Drop the Dead Donkey in 1989/1990, 1996 saw the launch of three new Channel 4 shows that towered over much of the rest of their output, and powerfully affirmed their dedication to supporting non-mainstream comedy; starting with The Mark Thomas Comedy Product. A popular stand-up performer for many years, Mark Thomas had reached a wider audience through the Radio 1 comedy shows The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Loose Talk in the early 1990s, not to mention his regular slots on Channel 4′s Saturday Zoo and Viva Cabaret, and as the decade progressed the already strong political leanings of his act gradually assumed dominance and became the driving force of his seemingly unstoppable comic momentum.

Mixing live stand-up performance with Thomas’ own heavyweight investigative journalism, The Mark Thomas Comedy Product represented a startling approach to current affairs programming, with passionate investigations into serious political topics (covering everything from ministerial corruption to the poor security at nuclear installations, the latter exposed in literally breathtaking style as Thomas and his team hijacked a train carrying nuclear waste) conveyed through the medium of his intense stand-up style. Later retitled The Mark Thomas Product to reflect its more serious intentions, later editions were of variable quality – and indeed sometimes dubious intent, taking in well-established causes that others had been fighting for years as well as an infuriating “anyone in a suit is wrong, even if they agree with me” stance. It seemed that Thomas eventually outgrew the limitations of the format. To be fair, a weekly half hour slot could never really do his act proper justice anyway, as evidenced by his tremendous live shows that can often spiral out to two furiously passionate hours on a single topic. During this time, Thomas also presented three specials for Channel 4 – the superb Thomas Country, in which he posed as a right-wing farmer who infiltrated genuine farming conferences to investigate the true aims and ambitions of the Countryside lobby, and in contrast the dismal Secret Map of Britain, seemingly devoid of a point created with the intent of exposing the location of classified buildings (most of them kept secret for patently obvious reasons) purely to prove that he could – and a short series called The Lie of the Land, scheduled as if it were a “proper” current affairs show, in which he investigates stately homes and art collections that are closed to the public. The odd weak episode aside, The Mark Thomas Comedy Product was never anything less than compelling viewing, with its agenda generally argued and presented with a sense of purpose rarely witnessed on television.

Late in 1996, Channel 4 broadcast the first edition of The Adam & Joe Show, written and presented by Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish. The pair had reputedly been commissioned to produce the series after having recorded a pilot show in their bedrooms, and this unusual and distinctive series was careful to retain the makeshift and anarchic flavour, even tailoring the studio set to resemble the bedroom setting down to the finest detail. Deceptively simple and often derided as “cheap student humour”, The Adam & Joe Show was in fact a lot more sophisticated than it may have appeared on first glance.

Like Victor Lewis-Smith they were obsessed with mocking junk culture and archive footage, but in their case the targets were more easily recognizable to a mainstream audience, and thus they were able to draw in significant numbers of viewers while still retaining a healthy and unrelenting sense of cynicism. Regular features of the show included parodies of popular films and TV shows utilizing stuffed toys as performers (variable quality at best, but without question one of the show’s programme’s most popular features), “Vinyl Justice” in which the pair descended on the home of serious rock musicians and poked fun at their record collections, and a series of brilliantly ridiculous reports on youth culture fronted by Adam’s father “BaadDad”. Adam and Joe have also presented a number of other shows for the channel, including their own personal take on Channel 4′s history as part of the 15th birthday celebrations in 1997, the DIY film-making show Takeover TV, and a series following their investigations into the world of cult animation.

Equally late in 1996, any doubts that Channel 4 had “gone soft” in their commitment to provocative, cutting edge comedy were bluntly smashed aside. Chris Morris had courted controversy of both minor and major variety in several of his previous professional engagements – as a pop music DJ in local radio, producer and presenter of Radio 4′s current affairs parody On the Hour and its televisual equivalentThe Day Today. In 1995, he had made a pilot for the BBC for a solo television series spoofing heavyweight current affairs shows like Dispatches. The Corporation turned it down, ominously suggesting that they felt the format and content were too strong for broadcast at any time – and so Morris went to Channel 4.

Working without the tempering influence of his former collaborators, Morris had – to put it simply – run riot. He staged a series of elaborate hoaxes based around various topical concerns such as drugs, sex, crime, religion and animal rights. In doing so he duped a selection of celebrities and politicians into voicing opinions on the non-existent matters. When the completed and edited tapes were finally delivered to Channel 4, the station authorities panicked and withdrew the series with literally less than 24 hours left before broadcast, fearing that it contravened several broadcasting guidelines and regulations. However, early in 1997 the series duly did appear, albeit with heavy cuts having been made before it was allowed anywhere near the transmission heads (and indeed made after that point – a sketch concerning a musical about the life of the “Yorkshire Ripper” Peter Sutcliffe was dropped at the last minute, and not reinserted until a repeat run almost five years later), and proved to be worth every single word of the hype and controversy that had surrounded it.

It’s hard to convey just how much impact Brass Eye seemed to carry with it at the time, but it was the first television comedy show in many years to make people sit up and pay attention, sparking off all manner of furious debate that increasingly spiralled away from the main thrust of the programme itself. In the simplest terms, in addition to being extremely funny, Brass Eye was a compact and forthright statement on the state of the media in the present day, which made its point in no uncertain terms before simply walking away from the “debate”.

The post-Brass Eye television comedy landscape was not quite the smoking battlefield that many of Morris’ more obsessive fans would have you believe, but it’s certainly true to say that all eyes were on Channel 4 at that point, and they played up to this attention well with a raft of new programmes and new talent that ranged between interesting and very good indeed.

Later in 1997, almost 10 years after his contributions to Club X, during which time he had presented an excellent Radio 1 show and made a couple of underrated forays into television for the BBC, Victor Lewis-Smith returned to Channel 4 with a new series called TV Offal. The content of the show was exactly what the title suggested – an unpalatable combination of the putrid abattoir scrapings of television, culled from dusty archives, technicians’ tapes, untransmitted pilots, amateur broadcasts and many more rancid offcuts of the televisual world, all served up with Lewis-Smith’s gloriously sardonic disembodied narration. To all intents and purposes, this was the humour of television’s technical insiders given an unexpected airing – what you don’t normally see, presented in the form of what you do.

Although bashed by some who inexplicably labelled it a “rip off” of Brass Eye (presumably they had never actually seen Brass Eye, as that is the only way that this conclusion could really be reached), TV Offal was a great series with a genuinely original premise. The pilot was followed by a full series in 1998. Since then, Lewis-Smith has all but retired from comedy, preferring to concentrate instead on his backroom role as one of the directors of the production company Associated Rediffusion – and the small screen is a poorer place for his absence.

Since the early 1990s, Channel 4 had been staging theme nights, which joined together disparate examples of programming unified by a common theme. Initially these were simply collections of existing programmes, but by 1997 they were regularly commissioning short comedy inserts to link the main programmes, and occasionally this gave rise to worthy but overlooked examples. Broadcast as part of the disability awareness strand Access All Areas!, A Date With … featured Tony Slattery as a game show host in a sketch that mocked television’s frequently patronizing and exclusionary attitude towards the disabled. Meanwhile Wrath, part of a Sins night, cast Paul Kaye as indie musician and spoilt brat Seamus Webb in a worthwhile spoof documentary in the tradition of The Comic Strip‘s “Bad News Tour”. Klinik!, from the Doctors and Nurses evening, was a complex tale of a Dutch physician attempting to take advantage of the inadequacies of Britain’s National Health System, told through redubbed footage courtesy of the same team that had been responsible for Pallas.

The best of these, however, were the astutely observed parodies of American comedy produced by Matt Lucas and David Walliams for Sitcom Weekend – I’m Bland … Yet My Friends Are Krazy!, My Gay Dads, A Puppet Lives in my House and most memorably Only Jerks and Horses, the pilot for a hideously reworked American adaptation of Only Fools and Horses featuring a hugely successful Del Boy (“good jubbly!”) and a severely misplaced Rodney played by “Nicholas Lyndhurst”.

A popular live attraction since the early 1990s, Eddie Izzard has always deliberately kept his television appearances as limited as possible, and the majority of his headlining small screen programme have simply been recordings of live shows. In December 1997, however, Channel 4 gave him an entire night’s scheduling to play around with under the blanket title Channel Izzard. In addition to screenings of episodes of some of his own favourite Channel 4 comedy shows (including The Kids In the Hall) and the Woody Allen film Sleeper, the evening also included some of Izzard’s live shows along with some specially recorded inserts, plus the mock documentary Lust For Glorious, which followed Izzard as he pretended to play the bad boy on an American tour. While Izzard’s act is definitely best experienced live, and his aversion to reliance on television work is worthy of applause, Channel Izzard was an entertaining and eclectic collection of television and it is a shame that Channel 4 have not really repeated this tactic with other performers.

Izzard was also responsible for Cows, a superb 1997 sitcom pilot that sadly failed to lead to a series, featuring a cast who performed in humanized cow costumes alongside Sally Phillips in human form, who caused ructions in the normally harmonious cow family when she started dating the eldest son (a great performance by Kevin Eldon).

Other new shows seen on Channel 4 during 1997 that failed to catch on with viewers to any great extent were the oddly anachronistic Captain Butler, which starred Craig Charles as a sea captain with a smutty sense of humour, the ambitious Coping With which presented a series of sketches on a different theme, all from the perspective of a child performer observing adult life, and the stand-up show Gas which gave some early exposure to Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding, later better known as The Boosh. Also made but not transmitted was Club Zarathrustra, a fantastic pilot show featuring Simon Munnery’s League Against Tedium character, which would have made for a very strong series indeed. None of the cast seem entirely sure of why it was never picked up, and it remains one of Channel 4′s great missed opportunities.

Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller graduated to their own Channel 4 show in 1997, having previously produced a series of shorts for the cable station Paramount Comedy. Although their humour took a while to find its audience (largely attributable, some would argue, to its initial timeslot of 11pm on Mondays), Channel 4 persevered with it in an admirable fashion and this eventually paid off with later series winning widespread acclaim. Although often hampered by a tendency towards identikit “weird” juxtapositions and pointless sexual references, when they hit the mark (for example a fantastic pastiche of costume dramas that cast BBC newsreader Nicholas Witchell as a romantic hero) their material towers over that of most other contemporary television comics.

Meanwhile, Phil Kay (once described by Lee and Herring as “the comedian least unlike Charles Manson on Prozac”) appeared in Phil Kay Feels …, a series of themed stand-up shows that saw him go off at wild tangents to the delight of the audience, who appeared to revel in his nervy, rapid-fire delivery. Another notable arrival on the channel during the year was King of the Hill, an animated sitcom from Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge. The focus of the series was Hank Hill, a quiet and well-meaning family man but thoroughly set in his ways and utterly uncomprehending of modern progressive attitudes. With the help and hindrance of his family (sensible wife Peggy, shy and effeminate son Bobby, and trailer trash niece Luanne) and friends (army sergeant Bill, right wing conspiracy theorist Dale and incomprehensible mumbler Boomhauer), Hank was capable of turning the simple act of buying a new hammer into an incident that required him to make a “stand” of some description, eventually twisting the ensuing events into some kind of indication of decline in American society.