Why is almost nobody making TV sketch comedy any more?
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Version 0 of 1. When The Fast Show’s Charlie Higson announced the death of the sketch show last year, few could deny that the format was in worse shape than Monty Python’s parrot. There has not been a long-running sketch show in the last five years. It has been largely replaced by the topical news panel show – a rigidly formatted, aggressively male preserve that provided instant gratification for a relatively small outlay. “If there’s one thing that is affecting the sketch show it’s the budgets,” says the Psychobitches and League of Gentlemen writer/director Jeremy Dyson. “In the last 10 years, budgets have decreased, so you’re less able to afford the multiple sets and costumes you need.” These economies of scale mean the days of high-profile programmes such as The Catherine Tate Show and Little Britain, which were able to launch a catchphrase the nation could embrace, are a distant memory. With the pressure on newcomers to capture the imagination of the nation straight out of the gate, shows such as LifeSpam, Dr Brown and Other World didn’t get the past the pilot or one-off special stage. Experimental reality/sketch show Boom Town showed up another modern peril: dealing with social media comments, which can have a disproportionate impact on a show in its infancy. “It’s extraordinary that you can see what people think of a show in real time,” says Dyson. “It’s a distorted sample, though, because it’s only a certain type of person who tweets their response to things. Ultimately the only critic that tells the truth is the passage of time.” But the generation of comics who came of age in the last flush of great sketch shows have moved on. The likes of Tate, Victoria Wood, David Walliams, Sally Phillips and Alexander Armstrong are now taking on serious roles, acting in sitcoms, writing children’s books, musicals and hosting quiz shows. “Sketch shows are a great way to start your career in comedy,” Dyson says. “You get to learn so many different things early on. But then people often go off and do more ‘grownup’ things.” Part of the reason for this high dropout rate is that sketch shows require intensive work. Dyson’s current show, Psychobitches, in the middle of its second series, had a 1:3 ratio – for every sketch shot, three were written. It’s a considerable amount of discarded work, since most skits last for only a couple of minutes and each episode is 22 minutes long. “Sketch shows are always much more work than narrative shows. You have to over-produce at every stage.” Dyson says Psychobitches “gets made in the edit”. Psychobitches’ largely female cast (including Kathy Burke, Julia Davies and Rebecca Front) seems to be a comedy exception rather than the rule. “For whatever reason, comedy is culturally favoured towards the masculine. Depressingly little has changed in the 15 years since I started working on television,” says Dyson. This may be due a little redress soon, though, if Channel 4’s iconic Smack the Pony follows through on its rumoured return. Perhaps the future of the sketch comedy lies not on TV but on other, cheaper formats. From Dead Ringers recently returning to its original home of the radio after being axed from BBC2 in 2009, to online sketch shows like Clever Pie and Picnicface, there’s a world outside the TV commissioning process. Even a US show such as Inside Amy Schumer earned a big following worldwide after streaming its sketches on You Tube. But whatever the format, there’s one rule that should never be broken: “The bottom line is, always, to keep the audience entertained,” says Dyson. • Psychobitches, Sky Arts, Tuesdays, 9pm |