Review of Robert Sellers' book about 1980s sitcoms

If you were writing a history of 1980s comedy, where would you start?

My guess is that you wouldn’t have chosen Keep It In The Family, a vehicle for actor Robert Gillespie about a newspaper cartoonist despairing of his sexually active daughters. Though almost completely forgotten now, it ran for five series on ITV.

The reason film journalist Robert Sellers chose to start his book Still Laughing here is simple. It was the very first sitcom to air in that decade, and this is a strictly chronological book, subdividing chapters by month, not show.

It is also clearly based largely on contemporaneous press coverage. The item on Keep It In The Family, for example, notes actress Sabrina Franklin saying: ‘The cast were really lovely’ and her co-star Pauline Yates stating: Franklin ‘was a delight to work with’ and Gillespie (pictured above in the show) was ‘very pleasant to work with’.

There is more to the entry than these platitudes, but such bland PR quotes do not seem to earn their place in history 46 years later.

That said, too much information is a better sin than the alternative, and Still Laughing is certainly useful as a reference tome to the comedies of the decade. It’s much easier to dip in and out of on that basis, reading up on particular shows, than it is to read as a continual narrative given its piecemeal nature, going simply from one show to the next, regardless of its significance.

It seems to be a definitive guide – yet The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – first broadcast in January 1981 and surely a landmark comedy series by anyone’s reckoning  – doesn’t get an entry, which makes one wonder what else is missing.

Yet there are A LOT of shows here. From today’s point of view, it’s incredible just how many sitcoms were commissioned in the decade, with almost every comic actor of note given their own six-parter, just in case.

We remember the hits – Only Fools And Horses, Blackadder, Yes Minister, The Young Ones – but does anyone remember The Bright Side with Paula Wilcox as housewife Cynthia Bright, Mann’s Best Friends about a boarding house owner called Henry Mann, or Ffizz starring Richard Griffiths as a wine merchant?

If you want to find out more about any of those now obscure sitcoms, this is the book for you.

• Still Laughing: How the Sitcom Kept Britain Smiling in the ’80s by Robert Sellers is published by The History Press. It is available from Amazon for £19.93 in hardback, or from uk.bookshop.org below, which supports independent bookstores.  

Published: 11 Sep 2026