Wondering if we are experiencing a decline of the comedy-discussion-panel show in the UK. Never mind the Buzzcocks was canceled a few years back(though it was back this year…not as funny).
Mock the Week with Dara Ó Briain and Hugh Dennis was just canceled, 17 years after its debut.
Q.I. with Sandi Toksvig is still running and there are others, of course, but I wonder if we are experiencing a decline of the TV panel show in the UK. A few years back, a requirement on the BBC was added to always have a female guest on the panel and I think it was beneficial. So much of the humor was just “lad humor” and I think having women on the panel(or hosting on QI now) has actually been beneficial.
Are panel shows in a decline? What panel shows on TV do you still enjoy?
I used to watch Mock the Week. Well, I did when it was actually on, which seemed to be about eight weeks a year. I never understood the idea of a current events panel show that was almost never actually on.
I think quotas of any kind are counterproductive. Put the funniest people on the show and if they happen to be female then who cares? if it happens to be all male, who cares? Thinking about the funniest guests on QI they’d all be male but I don’t see the problem with that.
Certainly not, how can it be? But whoever is putting the show together should be picking the people that they think will provide the greatest entertainment and not worrying about quotas or token representation.
The best people will shine regardless.
And the funniest people in comedy tend to be those who are part of some minority at this point, due to them having takes we haven’t seen, IMHO. Comedy seems to thrive on being an underdog, and not part of the establishment.
I think their goal isn’t so much quotas as it is to have different perspectives to bounce off each other, and comedians with different specialties. They don’t want to get stuck in a rut. If all your comedians are the old white man variety, you wind up just repeating those older jokes.
People will talk about how these shows “used to be funnier,” but that is because they (1) forget the times they weren’t and (2) remember the jokes fondly due to nostalgia. Those same jokes would not be so funny today, as comedy thrives on novelty.
FWIW, 60-70 years ago, panel games on radio and TV almost always had two men and two women (but a man chairing), at least in the UK. The switch to all or almost all male came with the satire boom of the 60s - “hard-hitting” didn’t seem quite the environment for women, except in limited roles, and the further change into more personal “banter” only strengthened that, until very recently.
Almost any format gets stale and its resident fixtures inclined to smug self-satisfaction if they’re not very careful.
What does “minority” mean in this context? Everyone sees things that others don’t see, every individual occupies a minority mental space regardless of any identifiable outward trait. Being an underdog is one potential comedic starting point but it is neither sufficient nor necessary.
What nonsense. You speak as if old white men are a monolithic comedic entity who share the same sort of joke.
Every individual has a different perspective anyway, the most important thing is to assemble a group of people who will work well together and fit in to the ethos of the show.
There have been occasions on QI where certain individuals bring the humour to a shuddering halt and have been clearly heavily edited out. I’d prefer that the producers have a completely free hand to choose panellists that avoid that.
In an ideal world, I would agree. But we are not in an ideal world. The quotas were introduced because the overwhelming majority of the time it was an all male panel line-up. Like 95% of the time! A quota does not need to be permanent, but if it’s introduced and kept for ten or fifteen years, then it will become second nature. And the end result is being introduced to comedians* you may never have seen on TV at all, and they garner a new following which can lead to great successes in their careers.
As a one-off, nothing. As a standard regular occurrence, it’s preventing equal representation. The default becomes ‘white male’ and everything else is looked on as something unusual and worthy of comment.
Panel shows were as common in the U.S. as in the U.K. in the 1950s and 1960s, but then they began to disappear. There are still a couple on afternoon TV, but that’s it. I think the decline of them on British television is a belated version of the decline of them on American television.
I see some of these as clip videos, or sometimes whole episodes, on YouTube. Jimmy Carr hosts some of them (Big Fat Quiz, 8 out of 10 Cats, 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown). I’ve also seen quite a few clips of Mock the Week, and a few of Last Leg, and lots of QI. Would I Lie To You? and Have I Got News For You are two that show up but that I don’t find interesting.
I find a few problems with some of the more topical ones as an American, in that I don’t get many of the references. However, I assume these programs are not made for me and I must get whatever enjoyment out of them as I can. Mock the Week has been one of the most consistently enjoyable to me as a foreigner; I have mostly stopped watching the Jimmy Carr ones, they are pretty formulaic (as is Jimmy) and have the same people too often.
To answer the OP, I don’t think the cancellation of this show (and another one a few years ago) mark a decline in popularity of these shows. They are, after all, a cheap format to produce compared to any scripted show, and audiences still seem to like them. And 17 years is a good run.
Yeah they are still many of the most popular shows on TV, though it does seem to be getting harder for new shows to get popular in the netflix / smart TV era. Panel shows work well as something that happens to be on the TV that the family (the older members anyway) gather round to watch, but as something you choose to watch when you have the choice of anything…it’s tougher, especially with the topical shows.
I also want to agree about the female panellists thing. It’s easy to say “Just have the funniest people on” but in practice, people can be risk-averse and not give a new demographic the opportunity to prove themselves.
Probably now we don’t need the quota, but it was useful for getting better exposure for women.
There are several radio panel shows still on NPR in the U.S., as well, most notably “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!,” though others, like “Whad’ya Know?” and “Ask Me Another” are no longer on the air, or no longer producing new episodes.
In addition, some of the old U.S. TV game shows that were in a panel format, like “Match Game” and “To Tell The Truth,” have been revived in recent years, and now run in prime time.
Moaning about quotas aside, I think Mock the Week has simply run its course, not helped by the rare frequency with which it’s on the air. Even Have I Got News For You is looking a bit threadbare these days, and both shows also suffer from the problem of modern politics being so OTT ridiculous that it has become difficult to satirize or make jokes about that are funnier than reality. It also doesn’t help that the BBC has been under constant assault from the right for years (despite basically being run by the right-wing anyway) which puts a further pall on political humor.
Mock the Week - BBC - YouTube