The secret of any great sitcom is the delicate balance of sit and com. Mess the ‘sit’ bit up and you lose the ‘com’. Del Boy without Nelson Mandela House is as unthinkable as Alan Partridge without his ‘grief hole’ (aka the Linton Travel Tavern), which is why both of these characters eventually came unstuck. Sending the Grace Brothers’ employees on holiday to Costa Plonka in the 1977 Are You Being Served? feature-length comedy fell flat because, devoid of petty department store politics, the characters had no reason to exist – thus audiences felt cheated.
Remove tightly written characters from their uncomfortable surroundings and viewers stop caring. The tension between tragedy and just-about-holding-it-together is what makes us root for a character, with tragedy being the prison from which our adorably flawed heroes can never escape. Think Steptoe’s hellish hovel in a backwater of Shepherd’s Bush or Rigsby’s lonely boarding house. The hope that one day we will free ourselves from the injustice of individual circumstance is what keeps us keeping on.
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