Has the rise of the "sad-com" killed studio sitcoms with a live audience?

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Fifty years ago, the stars of the new BBC comedy The Good Life took to the floor of Studio 8 in Television Centre and played to its live audience. Producer John Howard Davies remembers: “It went quite well, but it wasn’t a rousing success. I went home and thought, ‘I hope it’s going to be all right.’”

He needn’t have worried. By the time the show finished four series later, it had an average weekly audience of 17 million and the cast were household names. A year later, in 1978, a final one-off special was filmed with Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh in attendance.

The Good Life still tops TV sitcom popularity lists. But at the time, how did viewers know that Margo slipping in the mud in her yellow sou’wester and wellies was side-rippingly funny? Because 320 audience members laughed loud and long, and told us so.

A laughter track formed a vital part of that era’s most popular comedies: think of Last of the Summer Wine, Keeping Up Appearances, Fawlty Towers – what comes to mind is physical, highly visual gags, invariably at the expense of the protagonist, from Hyacinth to Basil, with a beat for other characters to react, and a collective burst of laughter from somewhere in acknowledgement.

It was comforting, infectiously upbeat stuff, enjoyed by huge TV audiences, so when and why did it change?

I would say July 2001, when The Office took British comedy in a completely different direction. With the tiniest of eye-rolls, David Brent’s needy glances to camera and scene edits left deliberately hanging and awkward – including Keith’s solemn devouring of a Scotch egg – Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant perfected the mockumentary, and a vital part of the genre’s success was the brooding silence that studio (or canned) laughter had once filled.

Did this fresh quietness open the door to a whole new way of creating, and defining, comedy? Certainly, with a couple of notable, crowd-pleasing exceptions (a pal reports a cracking night in the crowd for Not Going Out, and we must salute Mrs Brown’s Boys), any list of recent TV comedy bulges with quieter, calmer shows variously called “dramedies” or, more mournfully, “sadcoms”.

Daisy Haggard starred in Back to Life, Lesley Manville in Mum, both shows that swapped crowd-pleasing punchlines for something gentler, and hoped in return for our chuckles not our guffaws. Toby Jones cemented his status as the standard bearer for such fare as Pete in Don’t Forget the Driver and Lance in Detectorists.

We now watch comedy in the same way we watch drama, hoping for strong narrative threads, nuance, authenticity – all requiring creative precision not called for in previous years. Driver’s writer Tim Crouch once told me he’d written “a drama, just on a comedy budget”.

A few modern comedies could have benefitted from having some loud chucklers to encourage the rest of us; their absence can leave a show horribly exposed, and it’d be fascinating to watch a hit vintage sitcom without the laughter track and see just how funny (or not) it still is.

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Before David Brent, we had Basil Fawlty and Rupert Rigsby. Before Toby Jones’s brow-furrowed Pete, we had Richard Briers’s Martin in Ever Decreasing Circles.

The best comedies have always relied not on how they’re presented but larger-than-life characters we root for through thick and thin. These richly drawn figures will stand the test of time, making us laugh loud and longest.

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