Every so often, when struggling to analyse what I love about a TV show, I reach for the phrase “a complete comedy”. It’s a bit of a shitty, half-arsed idea. Let me at least try to explain what the hell I mean.
Some shows are built to do very specific things. Fawlty Towers is one of the best sitcoms ever made, but it’s essentially a wind-up engine for producing farce. Something like The Young Ones might look wild and anarchic and like it could do anything… but watch how the show immediately has to retreat once it brings up the death of Rick’s parents in “Summer Holiday”. There are some places the programme simply can’t go.
Then you have shows like Hi-de-Hi!, where it feels like they can go anywhere, and do anything. One episode might be a sadistic parody of light entertainment with Ted which would make Filthy, Rich & Catflap blush, the next could be another chapter in the touching Gladys/Jeffrey near-romance, then we’re headlong into a farcial plot about illicitly screening mucky movies.
An even better example is Frasier, a show which would seemingly mould and bend itself to take any kind of comedy the writers felt like doing. Oh, you want to do Mr. Bean this week, but with Niles? No problem.
Of course, it’s not a perfect categorisation. With any show, you’ll eventually bump into its boundaries and limitations; it’s just a question of how far you can wander first. It’s also not meant to be a criticism of shows which are more limited in scope; slagging off Fawlty Towers for not being something it’s not even trying to be would be completely ludicrous.
And yet I have to admit a certain fondness for those shows where you simply don’t know what kind of comedy you’ll be getting this time round. And The Dick Van Dyke Show, which aired on CBS between 1961-66, falls squarely into this category of a “complete comedy”.