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Christmas Sitcom Advent Calendar Day 5

We’re taking a nostalgic trip to Grace Brothers department store for a festive feature of ‘Are You Being Served?’.

We’re unwrapping the classic Christmas special ‘Christmas Crackers’. Get ready to join the staff as they navigate the chaos of Christmas costumes. So, let’s see what’s on offer!

Christmas Sitcom Advent Calendar Day 2

For the second day of our ‘Christmas Sitcom Advent Calendar,’ we’re re-visiting a timeless classic: ‘Last of the Summer Wine’.

Over its record breaking 31 series, ‘Last of the Summer Wine’ had 28 Christmas related episodes, including a short special for the BBC’s ‘Funny Side of Christmas’ show in 1982. So, grab a cuppa and get ready to join Compo, Clegg, and Foggy as they bring their unique brand of Yorkshire mischief to the most magical time of the year!

Christmas Sitcom Advent Calendar Day 1

This is my little Christmas gift to all of you: the videos in this series are completely free of ads so we can show you some great clips.

To kick things off, I wanted to go back to the very beginning. While the first ever sitcom with a Christmas episode was Pinwright’s Progress back in 1946, that entire series is lost to time. So, for our first day, I’ve picked a truly legendary BBC show, ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’. The episode was titled ‘Hancock’s Forty-three Minutes’ as it was 43 minutes, not half-an-hour! It was broadcast live from the BBC Television Theatre on Monday, 23 December 1957.

Mabel Constanduros and the Birth of Sitcom

On a dismally wet February morning in 1925, a 45 year old woman walked along the Thames Embankment, anxious about the meeting she was about to attend.

The nervous figure was Mabel Constanduros.

Despite what she thought at the time, Mabel, as we will discover, would become a pioneer of British sitcoms and soap opera – oh, yes – she pioneered soap opera in the UK too. She was incredibly important to the evolution of broadcasting, yet few remember her, or have even heard of her.

ITC’s British – American Co-productions

Lights, Camera, Transatlantic: The ITC Sitcom Story

From the mid-1950s through the early 1970s, ITC Entertainment (Incorporated Television Company), led by the formidable Lew Grade, pioneered lucrative American syndication alongside British broadcast. ITC became famous for its slick action-adventure series like ‘The Saint’ and ‘The Persuaders!’. They also had a fascinating foray into sitcom and light entertainment co-productions and distribution deals. Join me as we explore the rarely-discussed comedy side of this transatlantic empire, examining how these early British and American co-produced or co-distributed tv comedies attempted to find a common comedic language across the Atlantic.

The UK’s Least Funny Sitcoms – Viewers Top 3

Now, it’s time to settle a debate as old as British television itself. I asked the community to vote on the least funny British sitcom of all time.

You voted in your hundreds, and the results are in. In the previous videos of this series, I sorted the sitcoms into chronological order as they all had a fairly similar number of votes, but the three shows in today’s video stuck out like sore thumbs. Get ready to count down the three shows that you think are the least funny British sitcoms ever made.

UK’s Least Funny Sitcoms 1985 – 1990

The late 1980s. A time of big hair, shoulder pads, and for many people, the golden age of British sitcoms. Or so we thought.

I put a question to the channel recently, asking you to nominate some of the sitcoms that, frankly, left you with a straight face. The votes are now tallied, and we’re about to take a look at the sitcoms that your collective memory has deemed the least hilarious between 1985 and 1990.