Britain’s Best Sitcom is what the BBC want you to pick, using that pollster-friendly method of listing 100 items in order to glean a Top 100. For once though the method is appropriate as the list feels horribly exhaustive as is: the knowledge that programmes even more mediocre than Kiss Me Kate exist and have only been kept off the list by its arbitrary limitations makes you fairly grateful.
The presentation leaves something to be desired though – the A-Z of sitcoms offers summaries that manage to eradicate whatever tiny mote of fun remained to each show, and the idea of actually thinking through a vote left me despondent. There are unlikely to be too many surprises in the final rundown either, and the whole exercise smells more than usual of Bank Holiday spacefiller. (Of course I’ll still watch it.) Most interesting factlets: the number of episodes each sitcom ran. Porridge got only 21, Sorry! managed twice that, and the human mind was not built to contemplate quite how many Last Of The Summer Wines have now been made. There’s something faintly sick about the irony that a show based on three old codgers should have clung to life with such horrid tenacity while a hundred twentysomething rom-coms have mercifully bitten the dust. (Who’s for a write-in campaign for Babes In The Wood, by the way? Oh. OK then.)