Comedy Playhouse Comedy Playhouse Comedy Playhouse is a long-running British anthology series of one-off unrelated sitcoms that aired for 120 episodes from 1961 to 1975. Many episodes later graduated to their own series, including "Steptoe and Son", "Meet the Wife", "Till Death Us Do Part", "All Gas and Gaiters", "Up Pompeii!", "Not in Front of the Children", "Me Mammy", "That's Your Funeral", "The Liver Birds", "Are You Being Served?" and "Last of the Summer Wine", which is the world's longest running sitcom, having run from January 1973 to August 2010. In March 2014, it was announced that "Comedy Playhouse" would make a
British sitcom consciously avoids traditional situation comedy themes and storylines to branch out into more unusual topics or narrative methods. "Blackadder" (1983–1989) and "Yes Minister" (1980–1988, 2013) moved what is often a domestic or workplace genre into the corridors of power. A later development was the mockumentary in such series as "The Office" (2001–2003). The first British television sitcom was "Pinwright's Progress", broadcast by the BBC from 1946 to 1947, but the form did not take off until the transfer of "Hancock's Half Hour" from BBC radio in 1956. Hancock biographer John Fisher dates the first use of the term 'situation comedy'