And just like that, comedy catchphrases are dying out
THINK of Victor Meldrew in One Foot In The Grave, and one line springs immediately to mind: “I don’t believe it!”
Many of the great sitcoms and sketch shows have spawned similarly memorable catchphrases, from Only Fools and Horses (“Lovely jubbly”) to Blackadder (“I have a cunning plan…”) and The Catherine Tate Show (“Am I bovvered?”).
But a former head of BBC comedy has warned that catchphrases are on their way out, leaving children with nothing to copy in the playground. Jon Plowman said the BBC and other broadcasters were so focused on bigbudget drama such as Bodyguard and The Handmaid’s Tale that they now cared little for comedy.
“When was the last time you guffawed at something on the telly that wasn’t on a cheap repeat channel?” he writes in this week’s Radio Times. “The fact is that British comedy is no longer a priority for the main channels – any of them – and it’s no longer the force for fun that it once was.
“This is a pity because if we ever needed a laugh, it’s now. If new young writers don’t see good BBC One or BBC Two comedy then they will never learn how to write it themselves.
“Actors never discover how to make an audience laugh, or how to create a character the viewers recognise and love. Playgrounds and canteens are denied catchphrases. When viewers sit down for an evening’s telly, we must remember they might have had a hard day and just want to laugh. Make some comedy because if you don’t, the art will be lost. Spend some money on it.”
During his time at the BBC, Plowman was responsible for commissioning Absolutely Fabulous, The Office and Little Britain, among others. He is now an independent programme-maker.
He claimed that broadcasters regularly tell him that British comedy “doesn’t sell abroad” so it is hard to secure foreign investment. By contrast, many television dramas are international co-productions.
‘British comedy is no longer a priority for main channels and it’s no longer the force for fun that it once was’
The dearth of television comedy, says the man once responsible for it on the BBC, robs children of catchphrases to quote in the playground, we report today. Comic catchphrases are a mystery. They need not be funny in themselves (“You dirty old man” or “Just like that”), but audiences borrow them to indicate their own wit. In this way they are like exclamation marks, added to prosaic sentences to show they are meant as jokes. No source is too low for the catchphrase harvest. Even (unsuccessful) authors of letters to this newspaper sometimes end their thoughts with the word “Simples!” At best, catchphrases, like clichés, are the poetry of the people. In the absence of comedy, we’ll find them elsewhere. Maybe even the Prime Minister, with “Brexit means Brexit”, coined a catchphrase of surreally comic appeal.