Cancelled! The 10 great comedies they wouldn’t make today

“I remember jokes,” said Jennifer Saunders with a nostalgic lilt at a talk at a West End theatre earlier this week. She was describing how, in the current climate, most of the gags in her classic sitcom Absolutely Fabulous would simply not make the cut. The potential for controversy, she said, has rendered comedy sterile. “I think people do talk themselves out of stuff now because everything is sensitive.”

Yet precisely what made Absolutely Fabulous mould-breaking was its outrageous indifference to mainstream sensibilities. You were supposed to understand that sozzled PR lady Edina (played by Saunders) said outrageous things because she was the joke – as the Lacroix capri pants and the bottle of Bolly should have indicated.

But in the age of trumped-up outrage and cancel culture, this sort of territory has become off-limits. It’s simply not in the interests of a TV executive to green-light a risqué comedy that could be misconstrued, deliberately or otherwise, and then lose them their job. The fear of causing offence has stymied the creation of magic.

Which is why these 10 comedies, all of them classics in their own right, would not get made today.

Dad’s Army

Earlier this year, a showing of the sitcom’s 1971 movie on the BBC was preceded by a warning about “discriminatory language”. That one of the most beautifully crafted, most loved sitcoms ever made should require a reminder that attitudes were different 50 years ago seems itself laughable, but it underlines the fact that in 2021 it’s unlikely that Captain Mainwaring and his all-white Home Guard would ever make it to the screen.

Clive Dunn’s character L-Cpl Jones regularly used the phrase “Fuzzy-Wuzzies”, a derogatory name for a black person, the cast was predominantly male, and Mainwaring’s wife, never seen on screen, is depicted as both neurotic and bossy. What’s more, the underlining message (of how the Germans, to borrow, Jones’s other catchphrase, “don’t like it up ’em”) sounds jingoistic to Gen Z ears.

Ab Fab

Women drinking too much, neglecting their children and making fun of fat people – that could have been the synopsis for Ab Fab, but read now it would land the script straight in the slush pile. Absolutely Fabulous was a product of its age (the early 1990s), a time of excess when a PR woman and her best friend staggering around with a bottle of Bolly in hand was an aspirational career choice. Patsy (Joanna Lumley) and Eddy’s wrecking-ball political incorrectness was simply a product of their characters – a recurring put-down from Eddy to her daughter Saffy was that she was fat – but it wouldn’t wash today.

The Office

David Brent was the ultimate inappropriate boss. He was also one of the greatest comedic creations of the last 20 years. The Office stands as a milestone in comedy, defining a whole new genre (mockumentary) and influencing a generation of comics and TV shows. Yet its creator, Ricky Gervais, has said that the series – with its jokes about race, disability and “fat Keith” – probably wouldn’t get made today. The problem is that cancel culture has obliterated people’s irony sensors, he says. “I think now it would suffer because people take things literally. There’s these outrage mobs who take things out of context. And the broadcasters have gotten more and more careful.”

Peep Show

These days, in the age of I May Destroy You, Fleabag and I Hate Suzie, no one is interested in the world as seen through the male gaze. But Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong’s Peep Show was literally filmed that way, using a signature technique of a head-mounted camera showing the world as Jez (Robert Webb) and Mark (David Mitchell) were seeing it. Peep Show ran for nine series, made stars of Mitchell and Webb, and propelled Armstrong on to The Thick of It, the Will Ferrell movie Downhill and the world’s current favourite show, Succession. But there’s little chance Channel 4 would take a sitcom revolving around the daily life of two young, white men today.

Fawlty Towers

Where to start? Anti-Spanish (Manuel), anti-German (the goose-stepping) or just lazily racist (Major Gowen discussing the West Indies cricket team), the greatest British comedy of all ticks just about every single non-compliance box you can think of. Yet to watch it is to understand the difference between parody and mockery. That comes in the writing and the performances, but it’s unlikely they would have got as far as making it had it surfaced in 2021.

Friends

The most popular sitcom the world has ever seen has found a whole new generation of fans on account of its precision-tooled writing and timeless characterisation. Ignore the haircuts and it still feels modern – until, that is, you come across “the one” where Ross Geller (David Schwimmer) tells a tanning technician he “wants to go as dark as him”; or “the ones” when Chandler was paranoid about being perceived as gay or ridiculed his cross-dressing dad.

Put on your problematic hat, and Friends is sexist, homophobic, fattist (Monica) and features no non-white actors in any of the lead roles. It’s on perpetual repeat on Channel 5, but it wouldn’t be made now.

Little Britain

Last year Matt Lucas and David Walliams’s sketch show was removed from Netflix, Britbox and BBC iPlayer for its use of blackface and yellowface, and Lucas has admitted that Little Britain has aged terribly. “We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I’d do now,” he has said.

Little Britain was at least equitable in its offensiveness: it was misogynistic, it mocked transvestites, and characters included “the only gay in the village,” a working-class “chav” with an Asbo (Vicky Pollard) and Andy Pipkin, who pretended to be disabled. Oddly, no one seemed too bothered at the time – in 2005, an audience of 10 million tuned in, and Walliams and Lucas’s careers don’t seem to have suffered for their misdeeds.

Will and Grace

The first prime-time television series on US terrestrial television to star openly gay lead characters was also a monster hit, running for eight years between 1998 and 2006 and winning 18 Emmys. On the other hand, even at the time it was criticised for reinforcing stereotypes and paying scant heed to the reality in the gay community.

Fifteen years later, TV has moved on – “Gay lawyer (played by straight actor Eric McCormack) lives with straight Jewish interior designer and hilarity ensues” is not the logline commissioners are looking for.

The Inbetweeners

An unexpurgated smut trawl following four sex-obsessed teenagers at school was always intended to cause some offence – but what’s deemed offensive has changed over recent years. Primarily, The Inbetweeners wouldn’t get off the ground because, like Peep Show but more so, it’s a male-led comedy in which women are either targets or trophies. Of course, the butt of the joke was the men and (in the case of Jay) their pitiful misogyny, but in the current climate context matters little. A modern-day Inbetweeners would look more like Netflix’s Sex Education, with far more female and LGBTQ+ representation.

Father Ted

Read one way, Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews’s cult classic is an affectionate homage to Irish culture – but would it be read that way now? More likely this barmy, anarchic tale of three churchmen living together would be seen as something close to mockery, with the numerous jokes at the expense of Dougal (Ardal O’Hanlon) regarded as anti-Irish. Add the depiction of doddery old Mrs Doyle and the episode about a “Lovely Girls” competition, and Father Ted could also be construed as misogynistic.