BBC Sitcom season.

Carrot Confidential was brilliant back in the day, I'd actually forgotten how good it could be. I remember one gag he did was starting the show by holding his hand over his mouth and saying "I don't think deaf people get enough stick". The following week he started by saying there'd been complaints about that and he went on to say it was just a bit of fun and he meant no harm. He then nailed it by saying "God knows who told them".

Going back to sitcoms and control over the format, Miranda is a case in point. Again, it seems to be a bit of a marmite show (a lot of sitcoms are aren't they?!). Miranda definitely wanted to do a traditional sitcom, she wanted to do looks to camera and she wanted to end with "You've been watching..." I personally love it for its daftness, the slapstick, the vignette cutaways, the way it's so silly yet combines a sweet little love story. It ended perfectly, just as I felt it might be slightly running out of steam and although I'm sure she'll be asked to revive it, I hope she says it needs to stay where it ended (see Only Fools and Horses).

Of course, the breeding ground for new comedy used to be BBC Two (actually it could be argued Radio 4 was the original home of many a tv comedy idea) and that shifted to BBC Three. I think there's a very good case for BBC Two regaining its crown for new comedy scheduling. I can't say I've found much BBC Three content since it went online only (that's another issue though). That said, I have discovered Murder in Successville, which I can recommend - a slightly mad partly improvised thing, where a guest performer each week has no idea what's going on and has to fit in with the story that's being performed around them. Hugely enjoyable, if a little dependent on who they get! The one with Greg James is pretty good though.

A YouTube channel called 'All Our Yesterdays On Two' has uploaded lots of Jasper Carrott shows including Carrott Confidential. Unfortunately they're difficult to find because they're not titled or described properly:
https://youtu.be/bQZR-XJRndE

(it has lots of whole series of Howard's Way, Blankety Blank, Eldorado and lots of other stuff, but all not searchable!)

Are you sure that's the only place it was used. I'm sure I remember someone being called 'a total Gwenlan'. That said I can't find it in the early scripts, but of course it might not be in the scripts

It's so much more difficult to discover new stuff when you can't just stumble across it by changing channels.

Murder in Successville started when Three was on TV so I knew about that, same with Cuckoo. The only new thing I've watched from BBC Three is Fleabag which is excellent.

Thing is that it was a good breeding ground for comedy, but not much of it directly transferred to BBC1 or 2 apart from the odd repeat at an odd time on 2

I'm sure I've seen Dame Edna use a variant of that joke - I wonder who used it first!

I'm pretty sure that never appears in any of the episodes, and I've seen all of Series 1-8 numerous times.

Lister calls Kryten "a total Gwenlan" in S2 E1 "Kryten" and the name also pops up in the credits at the end of the droid soap opera that is being watched on the Nova 5 (but is spelled "Gwenlyn").

I think in that sense, the history of the sitcom can be defined in two eras: "before and after The Royle Family".

Before 1998, sitcom stars and writers had been given a degree of control, providing the style wasn't too radical (Ab Fab, One Foot). Even I'm Alan Partridge followed a traditional sitcom format (albeit in part on a closed set with the audience watching on monitors)

Then came The Royle Family. It was so groundbreaking, and yet was commissioned by the BBC with one hand twisted behind its back. They had wanted it shot in front of an audience, and the only reason it wasn't, was that Caroline Aherne threatened to pull The Mrs Merton Show.

Then came all the plaudits and commissioners everywhere set out to find 'The Next Royle Family'. Then came The Office, Phoenix Nights and all the other 'mould breaking' sitcoms of the early 00s. With this, the lines between writer/star/producer/director became more blended and key creatives on the production were given more control.

Perhaps I'm Alan Partridge would have been shot in a very different style had it come after The Royle Family and The Office.

Though the second series of Alan Partridge was made post-Royle Family and Office, and was still in the same format as the first. I imagine by then they could have tweaked the style if they wanted to.

Funnily enough though, after we'd heard about the "death" of the traditional sitcom (though in reality it never went away, considering how popular My Family was even during the era it was supposedly "dead"), we then had its "comeback" thanks to success of The IT Crowd. At the time ironically they were saying Graham Linehan was taking a risk by making it that way.

It didn't need tweaking, it worked well as it was. But perhaps post-Royle Family they would have tried to do something less conventional as they were developing it.

Funnily enough BBC Three made a fair amount of traditional sitcoms during its time, considering how it was often seen as the home of new and edgy formats!

They also made/showed a ridiculous amount of one particular sitcom.