British Sitcom History Podcast

This week we are following on from our Simon Nye connection to take a look at a much more obscure sitcom. 2001's The Savages is a pretty basic domestic sitcom but has some interesting elements, including Marcus Brigstocke as the lead and Geoffrey Palmer as his dad.

Here is Part 2 of our look at Simon Nye's Is It Legal? starring the great Imelda Staunton. This week, we take a close look at Patrick Barlow and have good things to say about the physical comedy in the show.

This month we are looking at the somewhat forgotten mid nineties sitcom Is it Legal? Coming from Simon Nye while still riding high on the success of Men Behaving Badly, the show features theatre star Imelda Staunton in a relatively rare lead role.

As part of our look at early Last of the Summer Wine, we came across the name of James "Jimmy" Gilbert, who was a big cheese at the BBC for many years. He played a big part in the satire boom of the sixties, brought The Two Ronnies together, and commissioned some of your favourite sitcoms. I found an in depth interview with him and listened to it all so you don't have to! But if you want to anyway, you can find it here: https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/james-jimmy-gilbert

This week we're having a look at one of the episodes from Seven of One, an anthology series designed to find sitcoms built around Ronnie Barker. The series spawned two huge successes, Porridge and Open All Hours. But this one didn't. Written by Roy Clarke at the same time he was birthing Last of the Summer Wine, Spanner's Eleven sees Ronnie Barker as the incompetent manager of an incompetent lower league football team. Expect weak football puns and a surprising amount of seventies smut!