Britcom - Television Tropes & Idioms

A Brit Com is a Sitcom made in the UK. The only real difference between the two is that Britcoms are much, much more British.

Britcoms have a reputation for being bawdier and more daring than US TV, although the US is working hard to catch up. Still, the stereotype of English gentility makes playing against it that much funnier. It has been claimed that the Double Entendre is the fundamental particle of Brit Com humor.

It's also worth noting that the typical Britcom takes a much more negative worldview than its American cousin. Britcom leads are usually lonely, miserable, doomed to failure or just plain weird. The cast also tend to not in any way come together and learn a valuable lesson as a family/group at the end of each episode. Another big difference between British and American sitcoms is a decided lack of Hollywood Homely characters — British actors run the full gamut of human appearance. Female leads tend to look a lot more like real women - in other words, not drop-dead gorgeous and certainly not stick-thin.

With a single memorable exception, it can be hard for foreigners to get into. The Historical In Jokes alone are practically a Continuity Lock-Out: Brits have a lot more history than Americans, are much better educated in it - and dearly love making fun of it. Ninety percent of the humor in Blackadder is that it's basically Hercules: The Legendary Journeys played for extremely morbid laughs, Rowan Atkinson is the British Seinfeld, and his spoken parts are every bit as steeped in British popular culture. Even the internationally loved Doctor Who suffers from this; when the Ninth Doctor insisted that "Lots of planets have a north", you weren't supposed to just snort— you were supposed to go into a Jim Carrey-quality diaphragm spasm, you heathens! Yet, despite all that: American sitcoms are also very typically... well, American. Many of them tend to rely heavily on pop culture references and celebrity guest appearances. Sitcom characters referencing or spoofing Hollywood films, American TV shows, comics, pop singers or even TV commercials are not uncommon. Even though a lot of these things also reach the other parts of the globe thanks to America's mass media imperialism, not all of this stuff is as well-known there as it is in the U.S.

One important facet of British TV that distinguishes it from American TV is that the number of different British TV program[me]s is higher than in America, simply because British TV programs are shorter and cheaper. The UK standard for the length of a TV "series" (equivalent to a "season" in the US) is anywhere from 6 to 8 episodes. By contrast, a successful US series will often have a single season of 20-30 episodes — with each episode a half-hour or an hour, this means that an American TV cast will, through the course of a single year, have to film as much footage as several feature films. One of the major reasons for this is the differing way in which they are written: US shows frequently have writing teams of 20-30 writers - one writer said sometimes you'd be happy if just one of your lines made it in. Conversely British shows (especially the ones that are called "classic") tend to be written by just one or two people, often long term collaborators such as Gaulton and Simpson. In a programme comparing the two (where the quote about getting one line in came from) the point was made that in many US sit-coms many of the lines could be said by anyone on the cast - they are far more generic.

Compounding this is the fact that successful US TV shows will run for many more total seasons than UK TV shows. UK production companies have a reputation for being a lot better about ending a show when it's over, and letting showrunners have freedom over that decision; US producers, by contrast, have a reputation for determinedly running successful franchises well into the ground until they let them go, which is usually the point when it becomes too unprofitable to keep running them. Thus, a UK program like Life on Mars can be a "major hit" and still end in two seasons, which is relatively unheard of in the US; on the other hand, the number of successful American TV programs that have run for longer than a decade, Jumping the Shark multiple times in the process, is too long to list. (Of course, the UK has its notable exceptions, like Doctor Who and Last Of The Summer Wine — and the former had a long hiatus in the '90s and early '00s, while the continued survival of the latter is one of the things that ~~still struggles to explain within the confines of a rational universe~~ has finally ended

This is ultimately less of a cultural difference exactly than a result of the fact that, let's face it, all the big money in show business is concentrated in Hollywood, and so the budgets available for big long TV shows and the corresponding pressures for corresponding profits have always been higher in the US. (That and the fact that the BBC, a not-for-profit entity, controls a much, much bigger share of the UK's media pie than PBS has ever done in the US.)

This means that American fans of Britcoms (and there are quite a few of them) frequently complain about how little material there is of their favourite shows — you can watch the entire run of the UK version of The Office in one evening, while the US version — still going strong — would last you multiple days. (Interesting use of The Office to demonstrate this point: Ricky Gervais ended the UK production very deliberately after two series and a Christmas special - he always planned it this way. He said that as it was a "fly on the wall" show, he felt there was only so much that viewers could accept before it became unrealistic.)

On the other hand, the greater variety — and, some would argue, greater quality per episode and decreased sense of episodes of even the high-quality shows being "churned out" as "filler" — of British TV is probably a direct result of its "snack-sized" nature.

Expect to see a lot of Black Comedy, surrealism and Refuge in Audacity.

A frequent complaint among British audiences is that when the US remakes a British sitcom, which is then exported back, the US version lacks the Darker and Edgier tone of the original, and they are bland and saccharine. The usual reason cited by British viewers for this is that "Yanks demand a happy ending", where as Britishs sitcoms set their leads up as Butt Monkeys. (Can you imagine a happy ending for Steptoe and Son?)

For pretty much the only places to see these in America, see [adult swim], your local PBS station (although what is shown when will vary highly by region), or BBC America (which has very little to do with the actual Beeb).

Examples are, naturally, numerous (but feel free to start making lists).