Its farcical! BBC puts trigger warnings on Dads Army | UK News

Do you ever really feel TV bosses just desires to terrify us? When they’re not unsettling viewers with documentaries about killer pandemics, they’re scouring the world for disasters. You half anticipate Senna the Soothsayer from Up Pompeii to flip up on BBC1’s 6 O’Clock News wailing “skies will grow dark, the wind will howl, fire and brimstone will rain down upon the city, and all will famish in the flames…”

In desperation, I turned to BBC3’s returning sitcom Juice. It opened with Jamma, a 30-something homosexual manchild and jobbing clown, piddling in a wine glass before a man pleasured himself over him. Hip fashionable comedy, you see. It’s not remotely humorous, the jokes are weaker than decaf tea, and bizarrely, it appears more boob obsessed than Jack from On The Buses, but it does pack in “Strong language and inappropriate scenes”. Hurrah!

True, Mawaan Rizwan has manic cartoony power but wouldn’t you moderately watch repeats of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum? Oh but of course we will’t. That’s banned for crimes against modern pondering.

Most comedies we grew up loving from Tommy Cooper to Dad’s Army, now come with the strict warning: ‘This programme reflects the attitudes of its time’. Well, how may they not? What period’s attitudes would you anticipate Stan Butler or Jim Royle to mirror? thirteenth century Mongolia? twenty third century Mars colonialists? It’s farcical.

ITV At 70 naturally swerved their biggest-selling comedy export, The Benny Hill Show. And there was no likelihood of them mentioning Home James or Cannon & Ball. Where are the laughs now? It’s been 51 years since ITV’s most interesting sitcom, Eric Chappell’s Rising Damp, launched. Harry Hill’s much-missed TV Burp first aired in 2002. And they foolishly turned their hilarious Audience With… format into a forgettable pop vehicle.

Even TV adverts have been funnier then. Think of the Cinzano advertisements with Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins, those laughing Smash Martians, and the Heineken advert reversing My Fair Lady with language tutor Bryan Pringle educating a frightfully posh younger Sloan how to say, “The wa’er in Majorca don’t taste like what it oughta.”

Then there was the tube station Fosters advert where a struggling Chinese vacationer asks Paul Hogan the best way to Cockfosters. “Sure mate,” Hogan replies. “Drink it warm.”

“Should’ve gone to Specsavers” handed into common parlance. And even now it’s arduous to hear the opening notes of Bach’s Air On A G String without picturing Gregor Fisher lighting up a cigar as the soothing voice-over says, “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet…”

“Should’ve gone to Specsavers” handed into common parlance. And even now it’s arduous to hear the opening notes of Bach’s Air On A G String without picturing Gregor Fisher lighting up a cigar as the soothing voice-over says, “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet…”

But we haven’t had a humorous TV advert marketing campaign since the Meerkats began in 2009. Most classics could be banned for plugging booze and smoking or for the standard “thoughtcrimes”. The Milk Tray Man? Obviously a stalker.

In the identify of inclusivity and not offending anybody, no matter how dumb or entitled they’re, TV execs have successfully killed off mainstream comedy too. It’s all run by box-ticking committees now.

ITVX’s celebrations underplayed the significance of Lew Grade’s pace-setting ITC whose 60s and 70s hits included The Muppet Show, Danger Man, The Prisoner and Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation collection. Imagination ran free then. ITC also made sci-fi thriller The Champions, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), and Space 1999. Euston Films’ gritty crime dramas have been another key ITV element: The Sweeney, Widows, Out, Fox, The Fear…They have been the HBO of their day. Other undervalued gems embody LWT’s Budgie and Granada’s Big Breadwinner Hog.

The drawback with turning 70 is you realise most of your best work might be behind you. That’s definitely true of ITV. Jeremy Isaacs’s 26-part The World At War (1974 – ’75) stays their most interesting documentary collection.

With Corrie nobbled Corrie and Saturday night time blockbusters creaking with age, ITV’s strengths are true-crime dramas – I Fought The Law, 2024’s Mr Bates Vs The Post Office. (Although The Hack is cack). But are they as memorable as past glories like The Avengers, Minder, Upstairs Downstairs, Brideshead Revisited, Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Rumpole and so on, which all started at least 4 many years in the past. Morse began in 1987.

Creatively, they’re operating on empty. Downton was vastly efficiently, but it ended ten years in the past. 2015’s Unforgotten began brilliantly and degenerated into politically-driven bat-crap absurdity.

The strongest current drama is Apple TV’s Slow Horses. Mick Herron’s misfit spies, led by Gary Oldman’s sharp-minded, straight-talking, super-slob Jackson Lamb, are back for a fifth collection. There was a right-wing gun assault (a daily menace in liberal imaginations and never in actuality) but this was presumably a pink herring. No signal yet of the ebook’s North Korean terrorists.

Over on BBC2’s Rob & Rylan’s Passage To India, Prof Vinod Shastri told Rylan he’d never discover happiness and was “slightly psychotic”. Vinod is the world’s main unhealthy news fortune teller. Less Mystic Meg, more Septic Peg. Book him for Newsnight!