Merchant: C4 comedy has lost its way

Extras star Stephen Merchant says Channel 4 has lost its way with comedy.

He said the broadcaster has squandered its enviable reputation as the home of the best shows, and said it wasn’t selling the programmes it does have well enough.

Speaking at a TV Comedy Forum in London yesterday, Merchant said: ‘My memory of Channel 4 was always that it was the channel I went to for comedy, particularly on a Friday night.

‘Since then, I’m not sure with some Channel 4 shows – some have completely passed me by.’

And in an accompanying interview in Broadcast magazine, which sponsored the event, he said: ‘[C4’s] shows are kind of buried away.

‘Somehow the channel isn’t getting behind them, giving them enough publicity and trusting that if you keep plugging away, you’ll find an audience and it will grow. E4 is full of episodes of Friends, but what about its new comedy.’

Merchant did, however, acknowledge that Channel 4’s Peep Show was one of his favourite TV comedy, saying it was ‘dynamite’.

The broadcaster has heaped a huge marketing campaign behind the show, but its audiences have stubbornly remained around the 1.3million mark. Yet despite that disappointing performance, two more series are on the way.

Channel 4 commissioning editor Andrew Newman later defended his channel’s reputation, also citing Green Wing and Balls Of Steel as success stories, even if he conceded the latter might not appeal to everyone.

And Avalon TV boss Jon Thoday doubted the wisdom of spending hundreds of thousands on marketing campaigns for new shows before they had established themselves, and demonstrated they had the potential to become hits.

‘Big marketing at the beginning puts a big expectation on the broadcaster,’ he said. ‘All it leads to is disappointment.’

Merchant admitted: ‘Like a lot of people, once you start working in comedy, I don’t watch as much comedy as I used to. I stopped watching for fear of being unduly influenced.

‘Peep Show was dynamite, but otherwise there’s nothing that’s got under my skin for a while, from this side of the Atlantic at least.

‘Not Going Out is a brave example of people trying to do a mainstream sitcom with a modern sensibility. That could find its feet, it had a lot of charm, I think.

He also spoke about his experience of the American way of working with a team of writers compared to the British tradition of having one or two people responsible for the script.

He said: ‘There’s a misconception that in America 12 people write a script. That would be chaos They brainstorm, then the executive producer assigns someone to write the script, then they all come back and add more funny lines to it.

‘The shows that work have a strong authorial voice. It’s the personality stamped on the programme that makes it a success.

‘The best comedies always have a really strong personality. Roseanne managed to combine soap opera with laughs, and an easily identifiable world. You felt like the characters were always there, waiting to go on stage. What marks out all these greats show is that the characters are perfect, there’s no dead wood.’

He said a lot of programmes failed because they were trying to follow a formula blindly. Talking about the spate of semi-improvised comedies that emerged from the US in the wake of Curb Your Enthusiasm, he said: ‘The improvised style of comedy is very difficult to get right. Larry David orchestrates that very carefully, sitting in on every scene saying, “don’t say that” – and the man’s a genius. That’s what makes the show work.’

Of his next project, he said he and Ricky Gervais were considering a comedy drama ‘maybe in the style of Boon – Ricky is increasingly turning into Michael Elphick’.

And he played down reports that they were working on their long-talked-about period comedy The Men From The Pru, saying the budget demanded by the period setting was proving ‘intimidating’.

He joked: ‘Any money spent on the show should be spent on us, not costumes and hats.’

Published: 24 Mar 2007