Friday, 27th January 2006.

God's great banana skin

For someone who complains about the barrage of Top 100 programmes on Channel 4 etc., I do seem to write an awful lot of lists in my diary lately. Perhaps it's because my personal life - while no less fun - is a little more settled than it once was, so there's no need to revel in emotional angst, or at least not to the same extent. But enough whiny introspective self-analysis: this afternoon we're talking about things which make you laugh.

A few months ago, a friend of mine published a list that was in itself a response to someone else's comments about "how some episode or other of 'Friends' was the funniest piece of comedy ever recorded for television". Andy's own feelings on this were clear: that there were many, many other moments of genius that surpassed anything that Central Perk's finest had to offer, and he listed his personal favourites. I have to admit to being a Friends fan (although I got bored with it in later years) and while I do think he was a little harsh on Aniston and the team, I nonetheless found his comments pretty compelling reading.

Anyway, this set me thinking, and I decided that it might be fun to put together my own list. It took months to write, in short bursts as I thought of them. This is by no means a definitive collection, nor is it complete - but I had to stop somewhere. It's just the things that have stayed with me over the years - with a slight nineties bias, I'll admit - and listed in no particular order. Starting with...

1. 'White Hole' (Red Dwarf IV)

Yes, I know that everyone talks about the shrinking boxer shorts in Polymorph. Yes, anything with Dwayne Dibley is classic comedy. But if I had to pick a favourite adventure of our boys in the Dwarf in terms of sheer comedy, it would be this one (although 'Back To Reality' is arguably their finest hour, at least from a creative standpoint). Diverse, clever and downright funny, 'White Hole' sees a plan to restore Holly's I.Q. backfire drastically, and the crew find themselves marooned on a ship that's turned off its engines (and locked all the doors) before experiencing severe time dilation that can only be resolved by playing pool with planets. Some absolutely choice moments, particularly from Kryten ("I'm fine, thank you Susan!"), as well as some genuine soul-searching from Lister ("Why didn't I pay any attention in biology class? Why did I just turn to page 47 and start drawing little beards and moustaches on the sperms?") and the obligatory scientific explanation scene ("So what is it?") - rendered utterly ridiculous simply because it's played completely out of sequence. And, of course, Talkie Toaster - the essential household gadget.

2. 'Hell' (Father Ted, Season 2)

The second season opener of Lineham and Matthews' finest is a splendid lampoon of caravanning holidays. After a suitably silly opening, in which Ted and Dougal discuss the possible importance of July 19th, the relative merits of cake, and the questionable language in Roddy Doyle, the priests decide to take a holiday. Cramped living conditions, a series of unfortunate encounters with a neighbouring couple, a dearth of tourist activities and constant rain hamper their attempts to have a good time, but just when you think things can't get any worse, Graham Norton turns up. Featuring some of the best lines in the series ("These are small...and the ones in the field are far away"), this is television at its finest, and essential viewing for anyone who has ever considered Riverdancing in a caravan.

3. Maplins re-enacts the French Revolution (Hi-De-Hi, Season 8 - 'Let Them Eat Cake')

Hi-De-Hi was by turns hilarious and irritating, but this is a perfect comedy gem: a wonderful sequence in which an increasingly frustrated Ted attempts to get the yellowcoats to run through their French Revolution dramatisation. Things get complicated when we discover that the performance's swimming pool location necessitates miming ("They're on the water! We tried giving 'em all microphones and amplifiers last year, and they all got electric shocks!") with Gladys and Spike doing voiceovedrs for all the characters in the play. This gives Spike all the opportunity he needs to go through a wide range of impressions: cue Burt Lancaster as Louis the Fourteenth, Winston Churchill as the Scarlet Pimpernel, and Arthur Askey as Sydney Carton ("It is a far, far better thing that I do now than I have ever done. Ayyy thang yew!"). As if that weren't enough, Perry and Croft add to this melee an overly enthusiastic Peggy and a 'trick' guillotine that actually works, as is demonstrated when the melon that's supposed to be standing in for Marie Antoinette's head is chopped in half. This causes Peggy to faint on the spot, but not before crying out "I'd rather be a peasant!".

4. 'The Ski Lodge' (Frasier, Season 5)

Frasier's brand of comedy was generally pretty sophisticated - and smug with it - but this particular episode resorted to farce to achieve its aims, and actually provided more belly laughs than any other in the show's ten year run. Frasier, Niles, Daphne and Martin visit a ski lodge for the weekend, along with Daphne's nice-but-utterly-thick friend Annie, and Guy, the tightly-packed gay ski instructor. As Martin ruminates on the importance of seizing the moment, the wine and mountain air goes to everyone's heads. What follows (in the second act) is a comic series of misunderstandings, badly-timed entrances and exits and some of the silliest love triangles / squares outside of Shakespeare: Frasier wants to bed Annie, but she's looking longingly at Niles - who has a thing for Daphne, while Daphne is gazing with erotic hunger at Guy, who (as it turns out) wants Niles...you get the idea. Brilliant, if more than a little insane.

5. The death of Tubbs and Edward (The League of Gentlemen, Season 2 - 'Royston Vasey and the Monster From Hell')

This isn't actually funny, but it's in here because it was arguably the high spot of one of the most creative, original sitcoms ever to grace British TV screens. While it's fair to say that Tubbs and Edward wore out their welcome in the second series (along with the canned laughter, which was also consigned to the scrapheap come season 3), it nonetheless takes a certain amount of guts to kill off two of your lead characters. The final sequences of the episode shamelessly rip off Bride Of Frankenstein, but the show doesn't suffer as a result - as Tubbs and Edward's world comes tumbling down (in a very literal sense) you find your emotions shifting from morbid disgust to sheer pity, as the inbred locals waltz gracefully round their burning shop. Tubbs gazes into the distance and asks "Will heaven be like Swansea, Edward?", to which the reply is: "Yes, Tubbs. Only...bigger." Simple, elegiac, and quite, quite beautiful.

6. 'The Grapes of Wrath' (Black Books, Season 1)

The funniest episode of Black Books, and the one we always seem to wind up using to introduce the sitcom to people who haven't seen it. A simple premise (Bernard and Manny housesit for a friend and unwittingly drink a bottle of extremely expensive wine that they hadn't realised was off limits) results in twenty-odd minutes of the best comedy the show had to offer, culminating in a brilliant mad scientist routine from Bernard (with Manny as the hunchbacked servant). Meanwhile, a less farcical but still amusing sub-plot has Fran dating a divorced man who hasn't realised he's gay. Even without the plot, the episode is full of some cracking one-liners - Manny's japes with a head massager ("I'm a prostitute robot from the future!"); Fran's attempts to be sophisticated and relaxed ("I am a giant ear, awaiting your songs of niceness"); Bernard's ruminations on attractive backsides "(There was this one woman - Janine...I don't know if it was nice, but it was huge....so there was this tremendous sense of value"). And then there's the Cleaner, perhaps the most sinister character to ever show up in the programme (at least before Simon Pegg, who was really just a big pile of ham). If every episode had been this good, the entire ensemble would have been knighted by now.

7. Ross talks dirty to Joey (Friends, Season 1 - 'The One With The Stoned Guy')

Yes, it's a Friends clip. And yes, Friends *is* bubblegum television. But the first season had a dry sophistication; a mild, self-deprecating sense of humility, a Jewish sitcom where only two of the main characters were Jewish (and non-practicing, come to that). Before the show and cast got too full of themselves, there was this: a moment of comic timing that would never be surpassed. Ross discovers he's unable to talk dirty to a girl he's dating, and reluctantly finds himself practicing on Joey. As the talk gets more intimate, Chandler walks in. What makes this scene so downright hilarious is the delay: when Chandler's hand moves the fruit bowl Ross and Joey know that he's sitting there and has probably heard everything, but they take a good few seconds to turn round, milking the gag for all its worth. Priceless.

8. Alan and the obsessive fan (I'm Alan Partridge, Season 1)

As cringeworthy as it might have been in its most uncomfortable moments, Alan Partridge was usually far too ridiculous to take too seriously. That said, there's something deeply sinister about this: a well-meaning but frankly crazy chap working his way into the life of everyone's least favourite TV presenter / late-night D.J. An initially harmless beginning (the handshake that doesn't seem to want to end) leads to Ged helping Alan out of a tricky spot when he invites two Irish television producers back to his house - only for Alan to discover that the back room is absolutely covered with photos of him. And some of them were taken on a telephoto lens. Coogan's responses are a perfect combination of customary arrogance and outright fear, and Ian Sharrock, who plays the good-natured stalker, is fabulous. Just don't ask him what he's hiding under his shirt.

9. Lister, Kryten and the severed hand (Red Dwarf V - 'The Inquisitor')

Don't ask me why this makes me laugh so much; it's just a wonderful, wonderful sequence that (if nothing else) shows how much Robert Llewellyn's acting had improved since his clunky, wooden beginning in Red Dwarf III. The grisly moment when Lister uses the hand that's become disconnected from the arm of his dead other self is surpassed only by the pantomime ham that is Kryten's response: "Logically, there is only one way you could possibly have done that. I feel quite nauseous. Tell me - where is it?"
"Where's what?"
"Oh, sir! You've got it in your jacket!!!"

10. 'Battles' (Spaced, Season 1)

Spaced has many great moments - the restaurant fight that rips off Bugsy Malone; the Pulp Fiction reference at the beginning of the second series; anything involving Brian. But it's the paintball scenes in 'Battles' that saw the programme reach what was arguably its creative peak: a systematically brilliant sequence of vignettes that parodied war movies with painstaking accuracy. A hissable villain, a nervous, twitching rookie, the obligatory self-sacrifice and one of the best punchlines in *any* sitcom, let alone this one. The art of war hasn't been this much fun since The Fast Show.

11. 'Training Day' (The Office, Season 1)

A small piece of history: the sitcom / mockumentary that took what Alan Partridge started, upped the embarrassment factor and then made things worse by removing the laugh track (Partridge might have said some excruciating things, but at least you could rely on an audience guffaw to cover the long silences). I still maintain that you can never really appreciate The Office unless you've worked in one - and you can never really appreciate this episode unless you've been on one of the mundane, pointless courses that's depicted here. David Brent once more proves that his ego is even bigger than Keith's waistline: he's the perfect comic foil to well-meant (if not particularly dynamic) facilitator Rowan, who moves from initial enthusiasm through to wariness, contempt and finally anger as the day wears on. Everything's here: a bizarre discussion about farmyard animals, an immaculately produced 80s pastiche training video (complete with Peter Purvis) - and then there's the guitar. If Tim was the Everyman for the show, it's here that we see the extent of his miserable purgatory - forced to endure hours of Gareth's inane drivel, before making an idiot of himself in front of Dawn. Worth watching just to hear Brent singing "Every Breath You Take".

12. Bernard does Gordon Ramsey (Black Books, Season 2 - 'Blood')

While the cracks in the Black Books veneer were beginning to show by season 2 - the show having lost some of its surreal gloss with the departure of Graham Lineham - this is nonetheless a wonderful installment, introducing two very different (and equally compelling) storylines that diverge and then converge in a glorious climax. While Fran wonders how on earth she is going to get rid of the lecherous East European relatives that she's found living in London, Bernard and Manny decide to turn the bookshop into a restaurant. Said climax occurs as the now-drunk Bernard (who has guzzled as much wine as he can so that the empty bottles can be used to hold candles) becomes the embodiment of an angry TV chef as things begin to go wrong, finally resorting to drastic tactics to create a culinary masterpiece ("My oven can cook anything! My oven can cook.bits of ovens!") before inevitably poisoning his guests and witnessing his newly-built empire crashing around him. All this, and a tower of soup.

13. 'The Day The Balloon Went Up' (Dad's Army, Season 3)

It's extremely difficult to pick just one Dad's Army episode, but this is probably my personal favourite (followed closely by 'Menace From The Deep') - it's just wonderful from start to finish. After a suitably silly opening - Mainwaring refuses to believe the vicar's accusation that one of his platoon has defaced the spare harmonium, and attempts to prove it by getting them to copy the graffiti all over the woodwork - the story gets underway properly, with a stray barrage balloon drifting in over Walmington and catching the unfortunate verger in the process. They rescue him, but decide that the only way they can secure the balloon properly is to march it into the woods and tie it to a tree. You know what's going to happen as soon as Mainwaring drifts dangerously close to the central rope, and the stage is set for one of the most ridiculous chases that the show ever had to offer, as Mainwaring flies through back gardens, haystacks and finally smack into a railway bridge. The inevitability of the final punchline is blindingly obvious, which only makes me laugh more. The best British sitcom ever - and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.