The BBC had three comedy series running this week, none of which were funny. It’s a serious matter when the financial and creative resources of the world’s greatest broadcaster can’t raise a smile. The more so given its reputation for having produced radio and TV comedy that succeeding generations remember as both expressing and transcending their eras. From radio’s Glums in Take It From Here through Hancock to Steptoe, Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers and Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses, a parade of little people – deluded, cunning, pathetic – touched a vein of self-recognising humour.

From the wartime ITMA through the Goon Show to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the comedy of the absurd took national stereotypes and blew them to monstrous proportions, yet preserved a ludicrous continuity – from Tommy Handley’s Minister of Aggravation and Mysteries in ITMA to John Cleese’s Ministry of Silly Walks in Monty Python. The audience could say: “Yes, it’s like that! I know someone like (Goon Show) Spike Milligan’s idiot Bluebottle.”

So maybe – though one shouldn’t spin grand theories of national comedic failure from a bad week, but the depth of the failure prompts declinism – the gloomy pundits are right, and we are too fragmented a society to warm ourselves against commonly recognised comic genius. Maybe – for there are many good stand-up comedians around, of whom two, Michael McIntyre (Comedy Roadshow, BBC1 Saturday) and Russell Brand (Russell Brand’s Ponderland, Channel 4 Friday), were performing this past week – it’s just that the situations of situation comedies no longer span the class, ethnic and generational divides.

Or maybe they just can’t write comedy any more. Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (BBC2 Monday) had as its “situation” a band of medieval outlaws, led by Kröd, battling against an evil regime, represented by provincial governor Dongalor. Krod, a handsome, muscled hero, played by Sean Maguire in apparently the same mould as Sean Bean’s Boromir in Lord of the Rings, is nevertheless a self-doubting, politically correct idiot; Dongalor, played by Little Britain’s Matt Lucas, is a ludicrously sadistic narcissist with a Noël Coward drawing-room accent. The comedy is meant to come from the collision of the style of medieval heroics with sophisticated, amoral urbanity. You could see the clash – too clearly – but it sparked no wit.

Psychoville (BBC2 Thursday) is at least weirder. A collection of characters – a theatre dwarf, a clown (right) whose act has been usurped by the surgeon who amputated his hand, a blind collector of soft toys, a maternity nurse who cradles a doll as if it were the living baby she lost, an adult “mummy’s boy” who attempts to be a serial killer – are caught in a mysterious web of revenge, punctuated by messages saying: “We know what you did”. It is mildly sadistic and disgusting; it has many homages to other films (such as, this past week, the Hitchcock thriller Rope, in which two teenagers murder, inspired by their teacher’s discussion of Nietzsche’s superman) and has fleetingly haunting passages. But, unless you like mild sadism and disgust, you won’t find pleasure. You certainly won’t find humour, which, since Dawn French is in it, is itself an achievement.

Saddest last. Taking the Flak is a satire on TV foreign correspondents. More precisely, it is a satire on John Simpson, the BBC’s foreign editor. David Bradburn, played by Martin Jarvis, is about the same age, weight and hirsuteness as Simpson and is the BBC’s “chief foreign editor”. It must have been good fun for BBC people to guy Simpson – who has, to be sure, a measure of the pomposity all famous broadcasters acquire. But to make him into a womanising, fraudulent vampire, sucking the facts out of local stringers and fixers in order to feed his self-dramatising “pieces to camera”, is a terrible thing to do to this boldest and most illuminating of reporters.

Still, satire is unfair by nature. Broadcasters dish out much worse to politicians and other public figures who don’t have their comfort and salaries, and it would be fine if it were funny. But it’s very bad.

Torchwood (BBC1 Monday-Friday) was a mix of science fiction of the venerable Quatermass and the Pit form (BBC, 1950s vintage) with the newer, paranoia-lite, government’s-out-to-get-you style. This, the third series of a drama about a small unit created, back in Victoria’s time, to protect Britain against extraterrestrials, was given five hour-long slots across the week. It can be said of it that it has moments of effective drama – as when all the children in the world suddenly stand stock-still, then start screaming “We are coming back!”; and also – unlike the sitcoms just mentioned – that it isn’t meant to be funny, and wasn’t.

In a self-congratulatory promotion of DVDs of Quatermass put out in 2005 (before the corporation slipped into its present self-flagellation mode), the BBC described the series as “simply the first finest (sic) thing the BBC ever made. It justifies licence fees to this day”. The reverse might be said about much of the present offering. Those colleagues in the press who abhor the BBC as a leftist conspiracy, and the licence fee as an intolerable tyranny, have had a good week.

john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd