The Comedy Vaults: BBC Two's Hidden Treasure, BBC Two

Remember that classic moment from the 1984 sitcom starring the chaps from Madness when their mate suddenly appears and makes them jump? No, of course you don’t, it was never shown, and what a blessing that was judging by a glimpse of it from BBC Two's documentary celebrating 50 years of its own comedy output.

Some of the best – and worst – moments of half a century of programme-making were dusted off and given an airing, complemented by a starry cast of talking heads. Pilot episodes and cult comedy characters came under the spotlight, along with rarely seen archive extracts and a section on household names who got their big break on BBC Two, such as Steve Coogan, Harry Hill and French and Saunders.

While it was enjoyable to be reminded of how brilliant Rik Mayall was as investigative reporter Kevin Turvey (pictured right) in A Kick Up The Eighties (1981), the programme tried to pack in too many shows without really exploring how and why events happened the way they did. Two examples spring to mind. In 1973 the late, great Ronnie Barker starred in a series of sitcom pilot episodes called Seven Of One. The first two to be broadcast were Open All Hours (not a bad start then) and something called Prisoner and Escort, featuring career criminal Norman Stanley Fletcher. This would of course would be rebranded as Porridge by the time it went to series.

I longed to know why the BBC felt these two pilots, as opposed to the other five, were series material, and I wanted a greater sense of the context within which the Corporation operated. Can you imagine such a thing happening today, that one star would be let loose to make seven separate comedies?

And then came a rather strange section involving comedy archives rarely seen or – and this bit was glossed over – the tapes that are lost forever. Cue Eric Idle who said to camera that the BBC “should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity because it wiped On the Margin, the brilliant Alan Bennett series” (Bennett pictured below). 

Right, now we’re talking, I thought, but Idle had barely finished his sentence when the voiceover corrected him that not all of the episodes had been ditched. Bully for them. Again, here was something worthy of debate and historical context. An opportunity was lost to explain why in the 1960s and 1970s – to save money and create storage space – the BBC destroyed television tapes or wiped over them on a massive scale. Bob Monkhouse, a great television archivist in his own right, wrote movingly about the loss of one of his situation comedies called The Big Noise, which he described as “the best thing I’d ever done on TV”. Monkhouse isn’t around to have his say any more, but there are many expert archivists who could have contributed to the debate.

So was it a collection of "treasures" as promised? Well yes, there were dozens of enjoyable and illuminating clips, but for a comedy fan wanting quality as well as quantity, it all felt disappointingly thin.