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.”