Crap towns: why are British cities given such a bad name in sitcoms?

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jul/30/british-cities-crap-towns-uk-sitcoms-bad-name

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The BBC never did commission a second series of Home Time, the 2009 sitcom set in Coventry. Shame – its austerity years’ premise was timely. Ten years after leaving, Gaynor, a 29-year-old Cov native, was returning to her home town impecunious after failing to cut it in that London. Tragi-comically, she moved back into her parents’ home, where adversity compelled her to wear her 10-year-old wardrobe which, there’s no easy way to say this, included a Geri Halliwell union flag fright frock.

Coventry, insisted her mates, had improved since Gaynor last lived there. “A lot’s changed,” said Mel. “We’ve got an Ikea now.” Becky told Gaynor how sophisticated Coventry has become since she left – even the petrol station now sells sushi!

This is very often how British cities appear in sitcoms – they that exist on screen at all: to have their provincial hubris skewered, to have their civic pride curdle into stock joke. If, for example, Torquay’s tourist board used Fawlty Towers to lure holidaymakers, they would be overrun by tourists with a penchant for crap service and/or exquisite senses of irony.

Part of this is because British comedy is fixated on failure. Our greatest sitcoms are about personal failure (that’s why Steptoe and Son is, essentially, a Greek dynastic tragedy melded to the Russian drama of thwarted life becoming a slow death) and/or systematically satirise characters who, if they get above themselves, get punished. Perhaps that’s why Dad’s Army co-creator Jimmy Perry told me once that the key to the successful British sitcom was to create characters who never succeed. “In America it’s different, and in France or Germany they just wouldn’t be amused by these characters,” he said.

Thus, Billy Liar’s tragedy – and comedy – came from the fact that, in the 1970s sitcom spin off of Keith Waterhouse’s 1959 novel, our eponymous hero dreams of, but never succeeds in, escaping the fictional Yorkshire town of Stradhoughton, doomed to work, in a living death, at an undertaker’s.

Half a century later, E4’s Drifters continues that venerable riff on urban Yorkshire as death in life. In the sitcom, three young female graduates dream of escape from Leeds but are trapped in duff jobs and parental homes, in a traditional sitcom milieu fixated on how crap suburban life in Britain can be.

If cities get depicted at all in British sitcoms, they are an extrapolation of that perverse British fixation on failure. For instance, in The Office, Ricky Gervais’s David Brent once recited a portion of John Betjeman’s poem Slough:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!It isn’t fit for humans now,There isn’t grass to graze a cow.Swarm over, Death!

Betjeman’s poem was to do with a specifically British sensibility that can’t be doing with built-up areas, still less those expressed in brutalism’s concrete. To which Brent, quite sensibly, retorted: “You don’t solve town planning problems by dropping bombs all over the place.” It was a remark that was echoed in December last year when Gervais lamented the demolition of Crossbow House, where The Office was set.

But, precisely because Brent was set up as a hubristic twerp lacking in self-knowledge or valid opinions about anything ever, we knew that we were supposed to think Betjeman was right and that Slough should be razed. A very similar argument applies, incidentally, to Alan Partridge: because he was so proud of Norwich and Norfolk, it became axiomatic to the gag that city and county sucked.

In 2007, poet Ian McMillan wrote Slough Revisited, one verse of which went:

Some towns are just seen as a jokeThrough a fog of prejudicial smokeWell, let’s shut up these put-down folk:Their opinions smell!

British sitcoms don’t roll that way. You’d be hard pressed to find a British sitcom that uncritically celebrates the city in which it is set. The put-down folk rule the airwaves. Ever since Carla Lane’s The Liver Birds, whose opening sequence hymned Liverpool’s superb waterfront vista, or Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’ The Likely Lads, which was part love letter to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, no sitcom has ever been quite so fond of the city in which it is set. And both of those were made before most of you were born.

Worse, British sitcoms often airbrush the identity of the city in which they are ostensibly set. Yes, Rising Damp was set in a Leicester boarding house, but Leicester is merely outside landlord Rigsby’s airless rental kingdom, an absence keeping its counsel. Yes, Fresh Meat is set at Manchester University, but, for all the specificities of its locale, it might as well be set in Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield or Liverpool. The Royle Family’s sitting room is in Manchester, as is the pub of Early Doors – but the sit of the sitcom is the suffocating interior, while the city outside is expendable. Like George Orwell leaving his lodgings in Wigan because of the full chamber pot under his breakfast table, British sitcoms have overwhelmingly responded to cities by making their excuses and leaving.

Or consider Keeping Up Appearances, that comedy of suburban mores. It was actually filmed in Binley Woods, a few miles from where Gaynor’s family home in Coventry, but you’d never guess: Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced ‘Bouquet’) lived in an ur-suburbia whose madly pruned roses and crazy paving could be readily mapped on to any British city. When suburbia figures in sitcoms, the result for the most part is a deracinated comedy, the Surbiton-set The Good Life notwithstanding. Of course there are very good reasons for this: a comedy set in a non-specific suburbia is going to court a bigger demographic than one set in, say, Sutton Coldfield. But it’s hard not to feel short-changed: when, rather than a “reality” show (C4’s grotesquely titled Making Bradford British), are we going to have a sitcom set in that west Yorkshire city? When will there be a really good sitcom set in Southampton? Never is my guess.

It’s left to serious drama writers to depict our cities. That’s why, for instance, we haven’t yet had a sitcom about municipal politics to rival Michael J Fox’s Spin City, leaving local government to Peter Flannery to explore in Our Friends in the North, his saga of council corruption on the Tyne. And when your city does, improbably, figure as the setting for a sitcom, disappointment comes fast on the heels of hope. I still wince over the memory of The Grimleys, set in the Dudley of my formative years, and am unsated by the pilot for Caitlin Moran’s Raised By Wolves, set in my birthplace, Wolverhampton. We hunger to see our cities on screen, but at least in sitcom terms, that hunger is rarely fed.

Are we ashamed of our cities? In the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson recently argued that British novelists rarely set their books in real cities (consider George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Hardy’s Casterbridge, Trollope’s Barchester – though each one could be readily mapped on to a real place by a sympathetic critic). Anderson went on to claim this was due to a civic shame. “The persistence of the convention speaks volumes for the low standing of urban life outside the capital, novels risking loss of audience if they speak too openly of a particular city, as unlikely to be of much interest to anyone outside it.” It’s an argument that could be readily applied to sitcoms and used to explain, for instance, why The Inbetweeners isn’t set in a real city, but takes place at a fictional comp somewhere unspecific in England.

The only really successful comedies in which place has been fundamental, I would argue, are those set in London. The Peckham of Only Fools and Horses, the Wormwood Scrubs of Steptoe and Son, the East End of Till Death Us Do Part, the Chigwell of Birds of a Feather. Perhaps this is because the capital is so diverse and diffuse that defining a locale specifically is essential so the comedy doesn’t get lost in London fog.

Still, let’s not complain too much: you’re probably seething, as you read this, with counterexamples. Here’s one. I remember the final scene of Nice Work, the 1989 adaptation of David Lodge’s novel set in his fictional simulacrum of Birmingham, Rummidge (which made Britain’s second city sound like something you’d do if you got your hands up your lover’s jumper). As Warren Clarke’s Brummie businessman drove round the inner ring road with Randy Crawford on his car stereo, laughing about how the drama had all turned out and yet how he hadn’t quite got off with the diverting academic Haydn Gwynne, I had an unusual feeling: here was a British city, front and centre, beating at the heart of British comedy. Just for once.

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