It’s easy to talk about the heyday of classic British TV comedies being long past, but is the genre really in a slump? Clive Whittingham reports.

Edinburgh is a hotbed of British comedy in August, but at the city’s annual international television festival last year UK pubcaster Channel 4’s chief creative officer Jay Hunt gave a warning to those working in the genre on TV.

Hunt told delegates: “You only have to say ‘I want to commission a music show’ and I say ‘No’ before you get to the end of the sentence. Music is incredibly hard to get big audiences for and comedy has reached a similar place. Catastrophe is one of the best things we have ever done; it gets a consolidated audience of 1.3 million. Comedy with a mass audience is very rare.”

So what kind of health is UK TV comedy in? Are those pining for their student days of The Office, Phoenix Nights, Spaced and Alan Partridge just misty-eyed nostalgics? Or is this actually a lean time, dominated by the bland and risk-averse, saturated with panel shows? It seems the comedy industry isn’t actually sure itself.

Jon Thoday, joint MD of indie Avalon TV, has hits such as the aforementioned Catastrophe, C4’s Man Down and the BBC’s long-running Not Going Out on his slate, but nevertheless paints a bleak picture. “There is massive demand from the public for comedy, but the success of the broadcasters in reaching that market is probably the worst it’s ever been,” he says.

“It’s because all the channels are run by people who know about factual TV. Factual often works overnight; you launch a show with naked people and it does two million straight away. Comedy takes much longer and grows over time. Man Down has just got its highest rating ever, but it’s taken three seasons to get there. It will start doing proper numbers in season four.

“C4 has supported Catastrophe brilliantly, the press like it, it gets big numbers, but can you tell me what day and time it’s on?”

These points are echoed by Mark Talbot, head of development at Hat Trick Productions, which has The Revolution Will Be Televised and Outnumbered in its line-up. “I don’t think sitcoms have had their day; what’s happened is the way people view things has changed massively,” he says. “I can tell you what days of the week comedy shows were on when I was at university. We’d all go round to a mate’s house to watch episodes of The Office. If I was a student now I’d have Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and iPlayer and I’d watch it whenever I wanted.”

There may be the same amount of money in UK TV as there was 10 years ago, he adds, but it’s spread across many more channels, meaning quality has declined. “That makes it harder for narrative comedy because it’s seen as more of a risk. To do it justice you often have to give it the sort of money you’d give a drama.”

So perhaps comedy is suited better to dedicated channels in the modern multi-channel environment? Louise Holmes, VP and director of programming for Comedy Central UK, has seen her network growing its share by 15% since 2014 in a difficult 16-34 demographic that is said to be watching less linear TV.

“There’s something to be said for the purity of our proposition; the name of the channel says it all,” says Holmes. “Comedy is harder to find on terrestrials; it’s mixed up with other stuff, you don’t know if that’s what you’re going to get.”

Holmes also has a commissioning strategy that might be difficult for a terrestrial broadcaster to mirror, but it speaks to Thoday’s point about how comedy needs time to grow. “We want to emulate the US model with Friends or Two and a Half Men, where you get to 80 or 100 episodes – serious volume that can cut through,” she says.

“I Live With Models had a good start for us and did reasonably well, but we want to make some tweaks to characters and locations and keep bringing it back. Storylines and narrative arcs take a few seasons to build. Season two will move it on again and for season three we’ll start aiming to commission in greater volume. Whether we have more slack to do that than a terrestrial I don’t know.”

These are points echoed by Iain Coyle, comedy commissioner at UKTV. His Dave and Gold channels have also increased audiences, showing both the demand for comedy and also the value of the audience knowing where they can find it.

“The terrestrials seem to be in a quandary about comedy at the moment. As a viewer I find it frustrating, and I can understand young talent getting frustrated at the lack of opportunities,” Coyle says. “When I was first getting into TV, C4 was massively important to comedy and, perhaps because of the huge success of its factual entertainment, comedy now seems to be taking a back seat. They’re not doing enough comedy for it to be a destination for the genre.

“BBC3 took up a lot of that slack and was very experimental but with it becoming online-only there will be fewer opportunities, and that will have a knock-on effect for younger talent. As an industry we should be doing something. If BBC, ITV, C4 and us could get together and create a solution to bringing on new talent and commit hours to them that would be fantastic.”

Phil Clarke, head of comedy at C4, is also optimistic. “I feel we’re in good health,” he says. “C4 commissioners have to provide an alternative to the other terrestrials. In the 1980s, there was a beautiful marriage between C4 and the blooming alternative comedy scene; now that has percolated into the mainstream channels we’re looking for alternatives.

“Our strategy is to develop sophisticated, witty, narrative comedies almost in the HBO style. We want to be a place for writers to strut their stuff. But we are giving people who have never done anything on TV before a chance to cut their teeth as well, and Wasted, Chewing Gum and Drifters are the products of that.

“When people say the 1970s was a golden age of comedy there are loads of shows that they’ve forgotten about that weren’t very good. We watched it back then because there were only three channels. There are now more people watching comedy than ever before; it’s just they’re spread out.”

There are recent cases of new comedy talent breaking through in TV. Almost every interviewee for this piece mentioned Fleabag, the BBC3 series born out of an Edinburgh show performed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and since developed by All3Media’s Two Brothers Pictures. Roughcut TV has also enjoyed a break on BBC3 with People Just Do Nothing, which started as an improv show on YouTube.

The Sunday Times’ comedy critic Stephen Armstrong says despite this, and “little marvels” like Wasted, times are indeed tough for TV comedy. “We’ve had a hiatus recently, partly because of big changes in exec personnel across the broadcasters,” he says.

“It’s a very fertile time in the live comedy world; Edinburgh is really rich at the moment. What used to happen, particularly with BBC3, was channels took a punt on somebody they’d seen at Edinburgh. There’s also an argument that broadcasters should go back to having daily or weekly topical sketch shows, because they’re cheap to make and produce talent – Ricky Gervais and Sacha Baron Cohen both have that background.

“It’s short-sighted not to. Good comedy holds a reputational benefit for a channel for years in a way drama and factual doesn’t – Dad’s Army repeats still get one million viewers even now. On Netflix, 60% of the people who watch British comedy are not in the UK and it has specifically said it wants to buy more British comedy. It would be interesting to see what its US$6bn programming budget could do to the industry.”

Maybe such SVoD investment is the light at the end of the tunnel for comedy lovers in the UK. Otherwise their best hope is that the cyclical nature of television brings the genre back to another golden era soon.