David Bussell hasn't given up hope

I love sketch shows. Love ’em! Ask me to name any of my favourite comedy moments and chances are I’ll go off on a Mr Show sketch or something from of A Bit Of Fry & Laurie, or an old Monty Python bit (or maybe I’ll start quoting The Simpsons at you, I can be real puckish that way).

There’s just something about the format of a sketch show that does it for me – the willingness to experiment, to go big, to run with an idea that would never see the light of day in another medium. I’d bloody marry a sketch show if I could.

But the sketch show is in trouble. Treated with a minimum of respect it seems, the format is about as unfashionable now as it’s ever been, and sadly I can’t help but feel that’s not undeserved. I mean sure, there have been good sketch shows in the last few years (notables being Limmy’s Show, Cardinal Burns, Dr Brown and The Peter Serafinowicz Show as well as a few more that didn’t make it past the pilot stage such as Lifespam, Dawson Bros Funtime, MeeBOX and probably some others I’m too buzzed to remember right now) but for me the last truly great sketch show to come out of the UK was Big Train. And that was 15 years ago.

There are a few reasons for this, I think, and a major one is the advance of web technology. As the very idea of television becomes ridiculous (you’re telling me I have to sit here and wait for an episode to arrive like some awful animal?) streaming, on-demand internet sketches enjoy rude health, racking up thousands, sometimes millions of hits. The quality often puts most TV comedy to shame too - just check out Seldom Differ, Picnicface, Happy Harry Toons, Clever Pie Comedy, The Exploding Heads, Owyn & Co, Waverley Flams or Turtle Canyon Comedy and tell me I’m wrong.

Another reason that web sketches are kicking TV in the dick is that they’re mercifully free from having to invent some contrivance to link sketches together. It’s this insistence on the dreaded ‘Unique Selling Point’ that’s killing the TV sketch show I think – the idea that it’s not enough to drop a hot carpet of laugh bombs, you also have to show a cutaway of God watching a bank of poxy CCTV monitors, one of which has the next sketch playing on it – as though that going to make the whole thing funnier somehow (unless you do find that funny, in which case it was my idea and don’t you dare touch it).

Still, despite this, I haven’t given up on the sketch show. Much as I enjoy web comedy, there’s something inherently unsatisfying about sitting at a laptop clicking around a disjointed collection of skits fighting for purchase among a landslide of hilarious cat pranks (or whatever the hell it is kids are into these days). Ultimately I’ll always be happier sat on the couch watching a half hour of carefully curated sketch comedy, so that’s where I want to see us get back to (unless the prank they’re playing on that cat is really top notch, in which case I’m golden) .

We just need to remember that the sketch show format can be made unique by tone and sensibility alone - Big Train proved that; bits about suicidal horses sat side-by-side with animations about blinking contests and parodies of office documentaries, and yet the whole thing hung together because the writing and cast were superb, not because of some pointless gimmick. Truth be told, the sketch show with all the great sketches would be gimmick enough right now.

• David Bussell is entirely too modest to mention his own online sketch show, Hunka Wunda, or the fact that you can follow him on Twitter @Busselling.

Published: 10 Jul 2013