I can’t remember which Radio 4 comedy it was, but it had a running gag about a 40’s band called “Archie Struts and His Swinging Nuts”.
Don’t forget Round the Horne with Ruff Trayde and the Cruisers. Not to mention J. Peasmold Gruntfuttock, Julian and Sandy, and the songs of Rambling Syd Rumpo.
Would highly recommend Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing. One of the most relaxing TV shows I have ever seen. Just two aging comedians joking around, chatting about their lives and very occassionally catching a fish. Some stunning scenery as well.
The Detectorists is great as well.
Just started Law and Order UK. I like it a lot. Only thing is that I hope that someday do original stories. So far everything is recycled.
I lost track, but has The Mighty Boosh been brought up yet? Viz magazine?
Funny shit.
Luther is the best police drama ever. Idris Elba plays a brooding, unorthodox misanthropic who suffers much tragedy.
I’d say even with Idris Elba, Alice, his murderey friend steals a lot of his scenes.
Long thread, bad memory so the usual apologies if duplicating. Rose and Maloney was very good with an interesting lead character. Very short series, though, barely a dozen episodes over three seasons.
Black Books and Game On. Just very funny.
A bit earlier than them: Blackadder, The Young Ones and Comic Strip.
Incidentally, the US sitcom I find closest to British humour is Always Sunny and Philadelphia. Don’t know why, perhaps it is the
Mostly lighter fare but we have enjoyed:
After Life
The IT Crowd
The Inbetweeners
Man Down
Sex Education
Gavin and Stacy
Detectorists
Shameless
Rev - and I am sure several others.
I liked the Australian cop series City Homicide. The personal problems of the Commander came to dominate at the end of the series, but it was still good.
That reminds me of another great show - Murder Is My Life with Lucy Lawless.
Looking forward to the next series, set in Auckland.
I realise that this is a month ago, and the topic has been basically dropped- but did you really quote ‘The Picts and the Martyrs’ - a children’s novel by Arthur Ransome as an ‘account of an old miner in the Lake District in the 1930s’?
I did! 
Arthur Ransome based Slater Bob on an old miner he knew in real life, Willie Shaw, who made a living mining slate in the Tilberthwaite deep level. (Timothy Stedding was based on Ransome’s friend Oscar Gnosspelius who actually found a vein of copper on the slopes of Coniston Old Man, and got Shaw to mine it.)
Ransome always kept things events, places and characters very realistic, and I have no doubt that conversation was based on a real life one.
Alice is scary and hot at the same time. Her smile looks like the Joker. The relationship between Luther and Alice adds a lot to the show. Some of the violence looks so real and it can come on so suddenly it shocks the shit out of you, like when the wife learned her husband killed these women and as he gets led away she runs up behind him and hits his head with a claw hammer with all her might.
The beginning of the Olympics reminded me that I thoroughly enjoyed a comedy called Twenty-Twelve, about a group planning the London 2012 Olympics. The cast is great - Hugh Bonneville, Olivia Colman. Twenty Twelve (TV Series 2011–2012) - IMDb
Since we’re in an Olympic mood can I offer the following British shit - two promotional adverts for the Paralympics in
Fantastic promotional advert making.
(I must admit, my expectations of the London Olympics were somewhat tainted by it, until the opening ceremony finally got under way!)
They followed up with some of the same characters moving to some ill-defined jobs at the BBC, in the series W1A
For anyone who’s ever had to sit through endless meetings of management/PR b!ll!cks, it’s all too painfully true.
The actor playing the young cappuccino guy is brilliant in The Windsors.
There’s a running gag that, dim though he is at anything to do with the job, he always manages folding and unfolding a Brompton bike, which the boss can’t.