Sinclair McKay
Robert Sellers
The History Press, pp. 308, £25
The foundations of all British situation comedy were laid by Charles Dickens. If you were to remove that tiresome fun-sponge Little Nell and her wholly meaningless death from The Old Curiosity Shop, for instance, you would have before you, in more pleasing proportions, a rich array of recurring comic characters in a variety of scenarios. There are Kit Nubbles and his oyster-adoring family; Abel Garland and his anarchy-prone pony; the preposterous boulevardier Dick Swiveller; and of course the monstrous Daniel Quilp, at war with his wife, his mother-in-law, and the boy who walks on his hands outside the wharf window. The point is that you look forward to seeing them all; it’s not so much about wit as about foibles. Situation comedy goes beyond the reflexive laugh and invites glowing affection. You see it today in those doting fans who continue to worship the Trotter family and their illimitable knocked-off goods from Only Fools and Horses.
Robert Sellers has previously explored 1970s sitcoms. The lustre of these chronicles of decline – Rising Damp, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and the melancholic Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? – never fades. But the sitcoms produced in the 1980s had a rather more inventive range.
