Brown Bread, Toast, Pegged It, Checked Out, etc

Steptoe finished when I was three. Think it was mostly (maybe all?) in black and white, so rarely repeated. I’ve never seen an episode.

I think the only sitcoms that I've seen a lot / all of are Men Behaving Badly and Friends.

Fucking hell, Russ. Two massive life confessions in one week!

Steptoe & Son, one of the greatest BBC sitcoms, ran for 24 B&W episodes in the 60s and 24 (different) B&W episodes in the 70s and was repeated throughout the 80s, 90s and 00s on BBC One, BBC Two and BBC Four.

genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/search/0/20?order=-last&filt=bbc_one&q=Steptoe+and+son

You Philistines.

This is obviously madness. The way the characters interact and it builds to the payoffs is genius. It's much more gritty than it's given credit, mostly because David Jason does a decent pratfall but Rodney's downtrodden sarcasm is one of the best performance in British sitcom. But then I'm a big fan of sketch shows and British sitcoms, the American team of writers model gave us Simpsons series 1-10 but Friends etc. plots never have the same focus.

Ingos top 10 British sitcoms:

Only Fools - All except a Royal Flush
Red Dwarf 1-6
Blackadder 2-4
Men Behaving Badly - everything after series 2, including subsequent specials
The Inbetweeners - not the films. Bit of a last hurrah for sitcoms on Free to Air
Drop The Dead Donkey - everything before it lost its focus on current events
Outnumbered - all
One Foot in the Grave - all
Citizen Smith - 1-3
Faulty Towers - Both series

Sketch Shows

Not the Nine O'Clock News - unsurpassed.
The Fast Show - There's no getting away from it being dribble, but what dribble
Mitchell and Webb Look - Good shout Mince. Trying to get the horse to learn French is played well. Cheesoid the Robot is the highlight.
MPFC - I've watched this to death
The Mary Whitehouse Experience - History today is excellent

Shows I never got:

Spaced - I don't do drugs so probably missed the point of this.
The Office - Ricky Gervais is always Ricky Gervais, which I don't mind when he's playing himself (stand up, hosting etc), in anything else it's just to diverting. Which funnily enough is the opposite Greg Davies who is a great character actor but his stand up is crap, think's he's funnier than he is.
Little Brittan - It's just wank.
Bottom - I do sort of get it but if it's all hamming it up then it's too much. Some good lines though.
The Young Ones - See: Bottom.

The rest can be mostly categorised as either family pap or pioneer stuff, which probably hasn't aged well but is worth watching for the conventions.

Honorable mention for Peep Show, surely?

Decent shout. It's a bit of a departure from the classic sit-com format though as it focuses on the making you feel awkward. The sketch show is more outright funny, but that said Super Hans is a standout character.

You're a real student of the game. And you're naturally very funny and acerbic, you should try writing a sit-com yourself.

We should go for a drink in Super Hans' pub.

I also don’t do drugs, but think Spaced is one of the all time greats. I’m not particularly a pop-culture person either, but I think that’s more the ‘thing’ of it than drugs. Also.. being young-ish and broke in London. That wasn’t me, but it was a lot of people I know.

Your selections are generally solid though. Americans started making good comedies much more recently. I love stuff like Community, The Good Place, Brooklyn 99.. basically when everything stopped being about shiny people and suffocated by canned laughter.

Even the last ones after they lost the fortune again? (Which is obviously the realistic thing to happen but still...) For at least one of those it seemed like some of the secondary characters (Boycie, Mickey Pearce and Denzil?) were sitting around in the pub occasionally being told where the main plot was up to as an obvious drop in where they couldn't assemble the whole cast.

Not sure it was ever that focused on current events. It was always a joke or two that they cut into the main plot which had been filmed some time before.

I am ingo, which is a bit worrying to be fair.

Also Game On was a 90s post pub student sitcom requisite.

I possibly didn't given it a chance. Spaced came to me via an ex (from London). I didn't like London. Simon Pegg always looked a bit smug and it's similar to Ricky Gervais that he's always Simon Pegg. I should rewatch it.

There's a decent argument to say after 96 (I think) it should never have come back. Sullivan clearly struggled to write funny parts for women, he definitely couldn't do it for kids. The more their lives moved on and the more family characters that came in the more Boycie et al (The nature of the Christmas special was a bit of cast reunion as well which was unfortunate, rather than those needed for the story but I suppose they couldn't go to Margate every year) were pushed out, and with that the sharp interactions between Del, Rodney and their friends but the biggest loss was Albert dying losing the charged 3 way bounce in the family. Raquel could do this quite well but the character couldn't be given the funny attacks Albert took. And like all sit-coms they eventually the characters parody themselves which made it all a bit over the top. That said I cut it slack because of what went before and tastes had moved on but an OFAH special was Christmas telly.

A Royal Flush however is just outright bad rather than flawed.

It's been a while since I worked through all of DDD but I remember it being an element that waned, and it lost it's spontaneous panicked style that I assume was part of the newsroom send up.

Mostly because you would have done.

I didn't mind The Detectives but I think that is pretty niche.