An obituary to television’s least-loved genre.
People only write about comedy panel shows when they’ve got an axe to grind. Some people still believe that Have I Got News For You bears sole responsibility for the Boris Johnson premiership, while ‘lefty comics’ have provided endless ammunition for the Daily Mail. Frankie Boyle’s 2008 quip about the Queen being ‘so old, [her] pussy is haunted’ was cited in debates around standards at the BBC; if the original is not to your taste, the clip of Emily Maitlis deadpanning the line – twice – to an ashen-faced DG Mark Thompson on Newsnight is a guaranteed laugh.
I have more than a passing interest here. For over 15 years, comedy panel shows were my bread and butter. As a TV producer, I’ve made, developed or piloted panel shows about the internet, sitcoms, music, trivia, swearing, teenagers and dating – the latter hosted, naturally, by Eamonn Holmes. My name appears at the end of 24 episodes of Channel 4’s festive juggernaut The Big Fat Quiz of the Year.
The panel show has its antecedents in Radio 4 quizzes and shows like Call My Bluff, but the modern form solved a vexing problem in the post-variety age: finding something for comedians to do in a TV studio beyond a stand-up routine. They are Britain’s answer to US late-night formats where stand-up comedy masquerades as a different genre: the Americans aped the chatshow, we requisitioned the gameshow.
My early career breaks were in junior roles on 2000s panel shows, many of which I find a tough watch now. The tone was often mean-spirited and cynical. We regarded ourselves as satirists, but were anecdotally aware that our core audience included 14-year-old boys who’d quote the rude bits at school the next day. Prior to The Fence, the only publication to register an interest in how panel shows were made was Nuts, who dispatched a correspondent to shadow us in the Mock the Week studio.
The shows mirrored this audience in predictable ways. A newspaper ran the numbers in 2017, and found 48 episodes of Mock the Week with entirely male line-ups. The BBC had already taken the step of insisting on at least one female guest on every panel show in 2014, but this mandatory woman did not have to be a comedian – over on Channel 4’s 8 Out of 10 Cats, the likes of Kelly Osbourne, Jade Goody or Jamelia were the sole female presence against six male comics. Many female and non-white comics were rightly irked, but even among white men, the bookings favoured a narrow pool of slick performers delivering rapid-fire takes on, say, footage from the Liberal Democrat conference. Character comics, musical acts and those with more discursive styles were out in the cold.
Many assume this slickness means panel shows are scripted. They’re not: the host has a script prepared by producers and gag writers, but for everyone else it’s trial and error, leading to gruelling record-to-broadcast ratios. A 30-minute show often involves a 90-minute studio record; Big Fat Quiz takes four-and-a-half hours to produce 90 minutes of material.
The artifice is in the edit, which is less about selecting highlights and more about sheer compression. Timings are tweaked, digressions trimmed, sentences reconstructed, laughs bolstered, until everything gleams. The perfect panel show conjures an airless hysteria, the sense that everyone rocked up and was on for the duration, like the best dinner party you’ve ever been to. B-roll is mined for shots of the performers laughing to add conviviality; a regular on one show forbade producers from using footage that implied they had laughed at another comedian’s jokes if they had not done so in the studio.
The proliferation of panel shows is often attributed to cheapness. In their heyday, they commanded a healthy six-figure budget per episode; more affordable than a sitcom, but still a considerable outlay for a genre that, unlike sitcom, had a negligible repeat window, virtually non-existent foreign or DVD sales and whose IP was too localised and idiosyncratic for the international market. In fact, a weekly topical panel show is now prohibitively expensive for most broadcasters, leaving HIGNFY as the sole survivor in a field that once included 8 Out of 10 Cats, Mock the Week, You Have Been Watching and more.
Personnel costs are high – up to seven performers on fees ranging from four to five figures per episode; gag-writing teams on daily rates; an editorial team of ten to 20 people; six camera operators and dozens of studio crew; overnight edits. For shows recording once a week, sets need to be constructed, installed, dismantled and stored between every episode. If you’re thrifty, it can be cheaper to follow one comic on a travelogue than it is to put seven in a London studio to chinwag about the papers.
As ad revenue fell, budgets were squeezed, sometimes by up to 40%, and so the genre evolved to find savings. Topicality was abandoned; in 2009, 8 Out of 10 Cats introduced themed ‘specials’ that didn’t need to be broadcast the week they were recorded, meaning two episodes could be shot in one studio booking. Every Big Fat Quiz since 2012 has been produced alongside a themed episode. Standard panels have been cut from six guests to three, resulting in a less aggressively competitive atmosphere; the need to balance A-lister fees with cheaper bookings created openings for newer comics, of all genders, from more diverse backgrounds. Many shows produced during this second wave – Out of Order, Sorry I Didn’t Know, Question Team, Growing Pains (which I produced for a series) – are among my favourites. 8 out of 10 Cats found its ultimate form after merging with Countdown, keeping the name and cast but jettisoning everything else.
But even with these optimisations, the classic panel show remains largely economically unviable as audiences are spread ever thinner. Stalwarts are being cancelled; aside from some strong efforts from Comedy Central, no new ones are being commissioned. Producers have shifted focus to large-scale reality formats, where the potential for global sales and investment is much higher. (Taskmaster and Last One Laughing borrow liberally from reality television.)
All the action is in audio. With production costs negligible, and fees dropped in lieu of reciprocal arrangements between peers, there’s more comedians having lightly formatted discussions than ever, and audiences are downloading in their millions. With the BBC investing in ‘visualised podcasts’ like Traitors Uncloaked – effectively unscripted television entertainment made for a fraction of the cost of a traditional studio show – the arrival of a third-wave micro-budget panel show looms.
But moving from a six-figure budget to a four-figure one won’t be without trade-offs. One hallmark of second-wave shows is what is known in the industry as ‘business’ – highly visual, studio knockabout like physical games, stunts or dance numbers, often jarringly at odds with the surrounding format. Several execs have used the phrase ‘I don’t want this to be a podcast on TV’ when asking me to add more business to a show. The thinking is that a bit of tacky ‘business’ justifies the higher investment – and the jobs that come with it.
I instinctively find this new development toe-curling, but I sympathise. You can make a broadcastable show for buttons these days, but the hollowing out of the industry is both alarming and sad. Many older panel shows haven’t aged well. But the genre course-corrected, while platforming comic talent for whom sitcom and sketch were not an option. One performer, early in their career, told me that putting ‘As seen on BBC2’ on their tour posters gave a significant uplift to the venues they could play, even if they only made the edit twice. Panel shows paid good rates to writers finding a foothold in the industry, and gave a generation of researchers and assistant producers a more engaging creative challenge than they would get on more strait-laced studio shows.
When they work, they are fun to watch. They were certainly fun to make: some of my happiest professional memories come from working on panel shows. It’s great to be paid to sit in an office with a dozen people, looking for an angle on a dumb news story that made us laugh. I met some of my best friends working on panel shows. I hope they come back.
