BBC TV's Risk-taking Innovations in the 2000s: Comedy for a Changed Nation

Back in the early 2000s, a new culture emerged in BBC Television. Primarily within BBC Three, executives at BBC Television embraced new, risk-taking strategies to reach younger, differently thinking audiences – all designed to bring back those who were drifting to Channel Four and didn’t care for the BBC’s "public-service" brand.

In reaction, the BBC installed a new generation of controllers and commissioners, working with then-emerging independent production companies like Baby Cow, found new creators on YouTube, and streamed shows via BBC iPlayer.

As I explained in a lecture at the Critical Studies in Television conference, the first Controller of BBC Three, Stuart Murphy, CBE, was a new voice, born in Yorkshire and just 26 years old at the time, he applied his intuitive understanding of humor. His career overlapped with that of Lucy Lusmden, who became the BBC’s first ever Commissioner of Comedy, overseeing all BBC TV channels (previously, BBC comedy had been lumped under the “Light Entertainment” division). Lumsden was a disruptor too, coming from the private sector, including The Comic Strip Presents (Channel Four, 1982-1988), and as a woman, she broke with the super-masculine, “willy-waving” culture in BBC boardrooms, as they ironically described it.

Lumsden’s approach was not that the loudest voice in the room wins (as was then the BBC norm), but that the best, new talent should be given an opportunity – especially those who appealed to her “naughty sense of humor.” Notably, this included funny women like Julia Davis in her dark and outrageously funny, one-off series Nighty Night (BBC Three, 2004-2005), in which she comically performs a self-obsessed, and oddly vindictive woman.

This new approach would give Julia Davis space in the schedule alongside the regularly hired, “trusted” talents, like Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders who dominated television, admittedly brilliantly - their TV show skits-of-movies carrying on the intermedial parody established by Mel Brooks (discussed before). In French and Saunders (BBC Two; BBC One, 1987-1994), their domestic parody of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) perfectly mixed their own nonchalance with costumes and context which perfectly captured the spirit of Alien-movie aesthetics.

I discussed the resulting cultural shift in their new strand of BBC comedy at the Critical Studies in Television conference, which you can see here:

Revealing the Working-class 

As scholars of comedy from Andy Medhurst to Brett Mills have noted, BBC in-house comedy had produced comedies about class anxieties which perpetuated distinct “us”/”them differences – audiences identify with the middle class. This was true for leading series as varied as Til Death Do Us Part, Steptoe and Son, and Only Fools and Horses. While BBC comedy presented working-class characters as loveable, they were the butt of the jokes, making them inferior, “others.”

This all changed in the 2000s at BBC Three when the infusion of new executives, drawing on working class creators at independent production companies like Henry Normal's Baby Cow, produced something completely different aesthetically and culturally.

This BBC innovation is clear in Graham Duff’s series Ideal (BBC Three, 2005-2011), starring Johnny Vegas, set in a seedy Salford apartment. The grim show resonated with young audiences, and turned out to be a long-running hit. It even gained interest from Hollywood, including from Janeane Garofalo who joined the series in a supporting role as Tilly, an American neighbor. Whereas other series like Shameless portrayed working-class people comically as “grotesques,” Duff created an insular, complex world whereby rounded and flawed working-class characters struggle with dark issues (mental health, violence, betrayal).

Duff remembers that the series was regarded as “risky” at the time – it was focused on a character he created in his stand-up career; Moz, a cannabis dealer living in squalor, deep within the underworld of the DJ scene. Music was a driving force in the series. Duff even used underground tracks to inspire scene, drawing on his own extensive musical knowledge, demonstrated in his work for BBC Radio 4.

To help reduce risk, the BBC wanted a familiar face to star, and it was producer Henry Normal of Baby Cow who suggested the visceral, Northern, working-class comedian Johhny Vegas, who played the leading role. As Duff explained, Vegas was “edgy” but famous enough at the time to appease executives who thought the combination would “work.”

Famalam: Anarchic Comedy.

BBC Three also broke with the official culture’s “norms” of black British comedy which had governed BBC series like The Real McCoy (BBC Two, 1991 - 1996), and the works of Lenny Henry, who dominated BBC schedules through the ongoing, continued revivals of his series, The Lenny Henry Show (BBC One, 1984-1988, 1994-1995, 2004-2005). Those shows asserted the “difference” of black characters to British culture, addressing misconceptions yet fundamentally depending on perceptions of cultural difference.

In contrast to this “official” BBC comedy tradition, Akemnji Ndifornyen created Famalam (BBC Three, 2018-2020) came from a completely different tradition – it was anarchy and hilarity first, inspired by Leigh Francis’s performance of black characters in his highly original series Leigh Francis’s Bo Selecta! (Channel Four, 2002-2004).

The result in Famalam was a total negating of “us”/”them” differences, instead portraying identities as hybrids. Francis fused expressly white, working-class, regional British cultures with glamorous, urban, black British celebrities (his notorious performance of R&B artist Craig David included a kestrel borrowed from the realist Yorkshire film Kes – a powerful and hilarious fusion, more like modern Britain itself). Famalam echoed this cultural-hybrid approach with oddities such as a British-African witchdoctor living in Croydon.

Part of this story is technological. Famalam was produced by BBC Three under the radar – unnoticed by the “official culture.” It completed its entire broadcast run during a strange period enforced by Prime Minister David Cameron’s “austerity” program, in which BBC Three had been taken off linear broadcast, instead available only via iPlayer – an idea to save the channel advocated for powerful by then-Controller Damien Kavanagh. The resulting niche viewing opportunity – keeping the show visible for interested audiences only – allowed it greater creative scope, and the freedom to cause offense (a freedom it still enjoys on YouTube, where scenes from the show still circulate, acquiring views and delighted comments).

Global Britishness

Later on, BBC Three’s “immigrant-conscious” series Guz Khan’s Man Like Mobeen (BBC Three, 2017-2025) and the many series featuring Romesh Ranganathan, beginning with Asian Provocateur (BBC Three, 2015-2016), presented a new kind of hybridity in British identity which stood opposed to all those that went before. These shows portrayed Britishness as transcultural, and connected deeply to the outside world.

No longer was Britishness defined by its announced difference” to foreign others (in stark contrast to “classic” BBC characters like Alf Garnett in Til Death Do US Part, or Jim Davidson’s popular character “Chalky White”, which all relied on a strong conception of “us”/”them”). Instead, the performances by Khan and Ranganathan stood out for belonging to British and foreign cultures at the same time.

The British press, and local fans in Birmingham, all loved Man Like Mobeen for its highly realistic portrayal of a rounded and unfiltered British Pakistani-Muslim experience. The character Mobeen reflected modern concerns – the struggles of urban living, a broken home, poverty, crime, reveling in local colloquialisms and humor. But Mobeen also participated in traditions from Pakistan, like arranged marriage and attending his local mosque. Even his clothing, often noted by the press, was transcultural; his “cool” urban cap and trainers were complimented by his long, quilted jacket – yet his jacket echoes traditional Pakistani attire, and his pronounced beard bellows tradition.

At the same time, the BBC made Romesh Ranganathan a star, beginning with his travel show Asian Provocateur. In a dramatic shift, his show was without the “nationalistic” tone of BBC travel shows featuring Michael Palin or the hosts of Top Gear. Ranganathan was a “global” figure, giving new visibility to what he himself refers to as a “coconut” identity. In contrast to the “mainstream” of BBC travelers, Ranganathan was compassionate to foreign cultures, and supremely “global” in his mindset.

This was clear in his episodes traveling to Sri Lanka and even Zimbabwe (poignantly, both former British colonies). As he interacts with the local people, his comic asides were humble, and aware of his own origins – he mocks himself for not being adaptable to their unusual rituals, rather than “looking down” on the foreigners. In this new dynamic, Britons were suggested to be part of a “global community,” equal and connected to all others – letting go of lingering feelings of British superiority which had been the legacy of Britain’s imperial past.

If you'd like to know more about this BBC history, you can look at my book, BBC Television Comedy Since the 2000s: Corporate Innovation and Changing National Identity: