Save our sitcoms!

The ITV network, and maybe even British terrestrial television generally, is on the verge of making a calamitous mistake. This week ITV announced it was going to pull the plug on its sitcom Barbara, despite the fact that Gwen Taylor's down-to-earth Yorkshire agony aunt is hugely popular and an unexpected smash-hit in the United States.

The reason? Although it is well pleased with mainstream comedy stars like Frank Skinner, David Baddiel and Harry Hill, it wants to move away from the sitcom as a genre. "The network controller must be pragmatic about what the channel needs at any particular time," it says. And where ITV goes, the BBC may follow.

And what does that mean? Well, it would be nice to think that this "pragmatism" meant a highminded ambition to mount popular comedy drama like Cold Feet, even though the melancholy experience of watching Hugh Laurie in Fortysomething has once again taught us that this hybrid often means the worst of both worlds, where the comedy is an excuse for the lack of drama, and the drama is an alibi for the absence of gags.

But what it really means is more reality TV. More Big Bruv. More makeovers. More ordinary folk submitting to being made to look silly by smart-alec producers and editors. More Location, Location, Location. More Pop Stars and Pop Idols. More Ibiza Uncovered. More pairs of posh batty old lady "characters" - the spiritual daughters and granddaughters of Fanny Cradock and Barbara Woodhouse - telling people how to cook, how to clean, how to have dinner parties.

The network execs love it because, in the words of their latest mahogany-tanned star, it's as cheap as chips. And the pundits and the culture-studies graduates love it because they can endlessly discuss the instant "characters" it throws up.

Who needs sitcom with its hard slog, its tough and daunting investment in writers, actors and other professionals, when those unpaid performing ponies, the public, pathetically eager to appear on television, will deliver big laughs for nothing?

I can't believe that ITV is proposing to abandon the sitcom, such a gloriously and intensely English television form. It's part of our inheritance - a unique bridge between the popular world of light entertainment and the higher-culture world of the theatre.

And it's not as if sitcom has died out. Millions tune into repeats of Jimmy Perry and David Croft's Dad's Army and John Cleese's Fawlty Towers, including young people born years after they first went off the air. Repeats of The Good Life are big ratings winners. Viewers are captivated, just as people were the first time around, by the genre's lampooning of pomposity, and simply by how funny it is.

And The Office, starring Ricky Gervais and written and directed by Gervais and Stephen Merchant, brilliantly carried on this sitcom tradition with David Brent, the grotesquely puffed-up and delusional manager. Over on commercial television, they have found great success in repeating Eric Chappell's Rising Damp, starring Leonard Rossiter as the awful landlord Rigsby.

Meanwhile, the penny is dropping that neglecting the writing craftsmanship of comedy and drama for dumbeddown reality television is a bad deal. Big