1 - Introduction

Summary

There's something inherently small-time about sitcoms.

(Simon Nye 2005)

The quote above comes from Simon Nye, the writer of the sitcoms Men Behaving Badly (ITV/BBC1, 1992–9), Is It Legal? (ITV/C4, 1995–8), How Do You Want Me? (BBC2, 1998–9), The Savages (BBC1, 2001), Wild West (BBC1, 2002–4), Hardware (ITV, 2003) and Carrie and Barry (BBC1, 2004–5), among others. Indeed, with Men Behaving Badly, Nye created and wrote perhaps the defining British sitcom of the 1990s, which fed into debates about social changes as it was seen to promote the lewd and childish antics of the ‘new lad’ (McEachern 1999). Many of his series have been broadcast all over the world, and the scripts and formats have been bought by other countries so their own versions could be made; the American version of Men Behaving Badly (NBC, 1996–7) ran for two years. All in all, Nye is someone who has been highly successful in the sitcom industry and who might, therefore, be expected to sing the genre's praises from the skies, arguing for its cultural worth and insisting that it is taken seriously. So why does he refer to it as ‘small-time’?