The Snug

This decade has so far only produced three great sitcoms. That's three. In five years. All of them have had a minimum of two series and date back to the start of the decade. All of them have been shown on Channel 4. That's a pretty damning inditement of the Beeb if you ask me. The BBC doesn't actually do sit-coms anymore. Sit-com actually means situation-comedy, a comedy that derives from the situation that the characters are in. Most BBC comedies (certainly all the BBC1 mainstream rubbish) are based around characters saying amusing things - the worst for this is My Family, which seems to be half an hour of lame one liners.

What are these three saviours of our time then?

1) Spaced. Genius surreal sitcom about a couple of strangers who pretend to be mates to get a flat. Really innovative camera work and a great script saw this do two series back at the start of the decade. The bods involved went on to make Shaun of the Dead.

2) Black Books. Suffered from the first season being just about the most perfect telly ever but has still run for 3 seasons. It follows the drunken second hand book shop owner Bernard and his bumbling assistant Manni (played by Bill Bailey playing, well Bill Bailey). It's genuine laugh out loud funny and even the latter two series that were written without the dude from Father Ted's involvement are great.

3) Peep Show. The twist in this sitcom is that you can hear the inner monologue of the two main characters. As well as having interesting characters, it is actually a sit-com, the situations are used to derive a lot of the comedy.

But aside from this it's pretty bleak to be honest. I'm struggling to even think of another sitcom I've watched more than one episode of.