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
Television comedy is true to say that certain genres of comedy transfer to the small screen more successfully than others. The "situation comedy", or sitcom, has been the most common, successful and culturally significant type of television comedy. As the name suggests, these programs feature recurring characters placed in humorous situations. The first television sitcom was "Pinwright's Progress", ten episodes being broadcast on the BBC between 1946 - 1947. Since the early 1950s with "Hancock's Half Hour" in the UK, (derived from a radio show) and I Love Lucy and spin-offs The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy in the United States, sitcoms