BBC Comedy - A Very Old Joke

I do like a good comedy. Whenever I go onto sites like BBC iPlayer or Channel 4 On Demand, I always click the Comedy option and scroll through the best that these sites have to offer. In my book, Channel 4 is ahead of the BBC in terms of the comedy it produces. The likes of 10 O'Clock Live and The IT Crowd are amongst some of the best new comedy around.

IT Crowd - Brilliant, and on C4

The BBC can produce good comedy too, but with one subtle difference. What they produce, they repeat and repeat and repeat. Now comedy works if it is well written and well produced, but it starts to lose its shine when you have seen it many many times before. I was having a look at what was on the schedules for last week:

The first two are genuine BBC titles - I am not making them up...

• Have I Got Old News For You - a repeat
• Mock The Week Again - another repeat

You need to remember that these two programmes are 'topical' news programmes and they are both repeats. Then there is:

• Never Mind The Buzzcocks - a repeat
• Lead Balloon - a repeat
• Reggie Perrin - a repeat
• Dad's Army - a repeat
• Two Pints of Lager... - a repeat
• Mrs Brown's Boys - first screening

So that's it. One screamingly awful sit com being screened for the first time and everything else being repeats. Is that really it? Is that the best that the BBC can offer us?

Very Old News

This is appalling. It's bad enough that virtually their entire comedy output is nothing more than repeats, but it takes the biscuit that two of them are topical news programmes that are now out of date. Pathetic!

Still - I did leave out that the BBC screened many hours of live 'comedy' TV this weekend. Well, not quite. Comic Relief (Red Nose Day) is laughable only because this tiresome burbling is described as comedy (I know it's about charity but it's still third rate entertainment). I mean, Lenny Henry - need I say more?

Never ever been funny - ever