‘The focus of this examination is institutional/ scheduling issues and audience pleasures. These pages on sit-com provide a background only to the topic. The specific issues of institution/scheduling and audience pleasures in relation to sit-com will need to be taught separately.’

Brief Definition

The British TV sitcom is a television series that derives humour from the same characters in a fixed location exploring a variety of comic...

History and Context

Distant ancestors of Punch and Judy shows, Situation Comedies originated, as with much TV Comedy in part on the radio in the 1920s and 1930s. Due however to the exclusive nature of ‘the situation’ and the concept of visual audience identification it remains fundamentally a successful audio-visual sub genre – Hancock’s Half Hour is a notable exception to this in the 1950s transferring successfully from radio to...

Trollied is a Situation Comedy set in a fictional supermarket, Valco in the north-west, specifically Warrington in Cheshire. It is broadcast on a Monday night at 9pm and more unusually it is on Sky 1 (it is rare for Sky 1 to commission programmes from the Sitcom genre). Trollied is repeated immediately after on Sky 2 at 10pm. In its classic 30 minute format it follows some genre conventions but offers post watershed representations.

The...

Outnumbered is a successful British Situation Comedy (Sitcom) named so simply because the two parental central protagonists, ‘Sue’ and ‘Pete’ are outnumbered by their three children. It is set in West London and although on the surface offers pluralistic representations in the guise of their unruly children who often intellectually challenge their parents it very much follows a standard genre template established by family based...

Click on the link below to download a PDF booklet you can print out.

Situation_Comedy_-_Flight_of_the_Conchords.pdf

Click on the link below to download a PDF booklet you can print out.

Genre_and_Sitcom.pdf

Sitcom is a genre which has remained successful by reacting to the changing contexts of the times in which it is produced, as well as more recently experimenting with hybridisation in order to attract its audiences.  (Depending on how much time you wish to spend, you could show either clips or episodes, and I have suggested suitable episodes which should be readily available on DVD or possibly Youtube.)

Rooted in the radio variety shows of...