The Rise And Fall Of The British Panel Show

Mock mock mocking on Heaven’s Door.

panel show mock the week

British comedy is a fluctuating format. Sometimes it’s dictated by taste, often by budget, and sometimes the collective cultural conscience decides what’s funny and what isn’t. The 1970s and 80s saw the classic multi-cam sitcom reach its heyday courtesy of Fawlty Towers, Citizen Smith and Yes Minister, whereas the 90s heralded the introduction of more subversive offerings in the form of Brass Eye, The Day Today, Bottom and various Harry Enfield vehicles. The turn of the century has defied categorisation somewhat, but there’s one format that saw an explosion in popularity after the year 2000: the panel show.

Traditional panel shows had actually been around for years, imports such as What’s My Line? and Call My Bluff removing the necessity for scripts, characters and fancy locations in favour of pitting two very real teams against one another to play a series of arbitrary games or challenges. The constantly-revived What’s My Line?, for instance, simply involved a panel of celebrities attempting to guess the profession (line of work) of a series of random contestants. A Question of Sport, meanwhile, put the exciting world of sports trivia onto the small screen as celebrity sports stars answered questions about who won the 400m hurdles at Seoul ‘88 or how many crowd umbrellas there were in a clip from the first Ashes Test at Edgbaston in 1997.

The panel show as we know it, i.e. a vehicle for comedians and TV personalities to play arbitrary rounds of games in a studio or else poke fun at the week’s news, saw its true apotheosis in the early-to-mid 2000s, with shows such as QI, Would I Lie To You?, Mock The Week, 8 Out Of Ten Cats and Argumental all debuting in the noughties. The trail had already been blazed thanks to the now iconic news satire Have I Got News For You, launched in 1990, and 1996’s anarchic music quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks, but the panel show wouldn’t see its true heyday until ten or fifteen years after HIGNIFY had made its debut.

Have I Got News For You

The popularity of such vehicles was self-evident, as were the reasons behind it. Panel shows require modest means to produce, often filming in batches to save on time and costs, and need very little outlay besides hiring half a dozen eager comics and a small set in which to house them. No special effects, no tricky outdoor shoots and no fancy camera work, just people in a room making jokes about how shit the British rail system is or whether or not Prince Harry is really adopted. People In A Room could very easily have been a panel show in the mid-2000s considering how many production companies tried their hand at the format.

Happy with the setup, too, were the performers hired to appear, many of whom found their careers utterly transformed by their appearances on Mock the Week or Would I Lie to You?. The panel show revolution coincided with an explosion in popularity of what one might term the rock-star comedy culture, wherein British comedians started selling out venues such as Wembley and the O2 with astonishing regularity. Russell Howard, Frankie Boyle and Dara Ó Briain became bona fide household names thanks to Mock the Week’s popularity, while a few viral appearances on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown propelled Joe Lycett to comedy superstardom.

This was perhaps only possible given the rise not only of such massive commercial venues, but the increased popularity and exposure of the modern television panel show, something to which dozens of comics can realistically attribute their success. Such shows were providing not only a cheap format for TV executives and networks but the ideal opportunity for comedians to gain unprecedented exposure via mainstream commercial means. A small price to pay for having to sit next to Carol Vorderman or Greg Wallace.

A symbiotic relationship was thus born whereby jobbing comedians doing the rounds on ‘the circuit’ gratefully made their names via panel show appearances, these household names in turn drawing in significant viewing figures for the variety of quizzes, political satires and other vehicles now dominating a large corner of the market. Mock The Week was the perfect vehicle through which to exhibit a few minutes of well-honed material in front of a far more mainstream crowd, while Have I Got News For You was a chance to prove that you had more serious political chops by perceptively pointing out the fact that Gordon Brown was uncharismatic or that John Prescott was fat.

Never Mind The Buzzcocks

But the untouchable golden age panel shows enjoyed in the noughties is over. A downward trend has been evident in the last few years that has hardly rendered the format redundant but certainly seems to be making a few executives question whether this is the way forward. The recent cancellation of Mock The Week seemed like a thunderbolt from the blue when it was announced that the news satire would end after 17 years on the air, but the panel show skies were already turning a shade of ominous grey. Never Mind The Buzzcocks was canned by the BBC in 2015 before Sky salvaged it a few years later, and the once popular 8 Out Of 10 Cats saw a humiliating relegation from Channel 4 to digital satellite E4 to appeal to a more youth-oriented demographic. With A League of Their Own seeing many big names jump ship, and A Question Of Sport’s rebrand earning general public derision, the sports panel quiz is in similar danger.

What has precipitated this decline is harder to pin down. Writing in The Guardian, Mock the Week host Dara Ó Briain extolled the intricate difficulties of keeping everyone happy on a political panel show primarily intended to make its audience laugh. Ó Briain describes a losing game in which you simply couldn’t please everyone, or indeed anyone, at a time of heightened political polarisation. “People would accuse us of whatever bias they felt they saw in BBC news”, he explains, despite his ssurance that the show was “always just seven comedians a week trying to get laughs from the studio audience”.

Certainly, the format had come to a position at which it was ludicrously overcrowded, even if that tipping point was likely at its worst a few years ago in the late 2010s, when new formats and concepts simply couldn’t survive. We had The Imitation Game, Was It Something I Said?, Safeword, Virtually Famous, Play to the Whistle, swathes of shows trying to piggyback on the format’s popularity but unable to tie down a significant enough audience share to warrant their own survival. For the last couple of years, if anything, it felt as though natural selection had put things back on a relatively even keel.

Others have blamed social media and television’s difficulty being spontaneous and topicality for the increasing decline of the format, especially with regard to more news or politics-oriented offerings. Television as appointment viewing is on the decline thanks to streaming services and online media, especially among the younger generations. The idea of sitting down to watch Have I Got News For You or Mock the Week following a seismic political event (recently there have been plenty) perhaps isn’t the done thing for this new generation of viewers.

Streaming is threatening to kill almost all mainstream TV anyway, and with fewer viewers actually watching things live anymore, topical shows struggle – Mock the Week was drawing in three million viewers a week during its 2008 peak, falling to around half that number by 2021. Those panel games not relying on topicality, such as QI and Would I Lie to You?, seem less under threat. It hasn’t hurt that Would I Lie to You? in particular seems exceedingly conducive to being chopped up into YouTube compilations. The BBC owes Bob Mortimer a fruit basket and a thank-you note at the very least.

Would I Lie To You?

Ó Briain’s more candid revelation about why Mock the Week is ending is far more worrying in its candidness: “because the BBC has less money than it used to; and to do something new, something old has to stop.” But if panel shows were once seen as the cheap alternative to filming a classic sitcom, a task in itself that pales in comparison when compared to a big-budget production like Dr. Who or The Outlaws, how cheap do the BBC want their TV to become? A naked man sitting on a stool lit by an anglepoise lamp reading jokes from expired Christmas crackers? A Powerpoint slideshow of some Fresian cows in a meadow? Eggheads?

It’s unlikely that the setup will die out for good. Many such shows are simply too established to even consider being jettisoned, so much so that you’re more likely to see Springwatch or BBC Weather culled before Have I Got News For You gets the chop. Hislop and Merton’s badinage is so ingrained within the public psyche that it’s hard to imagine a televisual landscape without it. QI has been soldiering on since 2003 and won’t conclude until the show makes its way through the entire alphabet. With season ‘T’ expected to air sometime this year, there are roughly seven more to go before John Lloyd’s baby faces oblivion or else decides to go back through the alphabet starting from the letter ‘Z’.

In truth, panel shows are still too important to die out completely. For one thing, they remain a key part of many a scheduler’s arsenal, hardy perennials that can be turned to in times of crisis or transition. Ó Briain’s assertion that cost was a factor in killing off Mock the Week may indeed be true, but we’re unlikely to arrive at a point at which the BBC can’t afford the price of lighting a studio for an afternoon and paying six separate cab fares.

The real necessity doesn’t belong to the producers, however, but the performers still relying on such an influential and important means of gaining exposure. Mock The Week was responsible for giving countless big breaks to countless aspiring comics, as have many of the show’s contemporaries. As far as British institutions go, the panel show still serves a very important, very necessary function even in this social media-driven, do-it-yourself digital age.

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