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 world's longest running sitcom. The commercial station ITV had popular successes with "Rising Damp" (1974–78, sometimes called the best of all ITV sitcoms), "Man About the House" (1973–76) and "George and Mildred" (1976–79). "Rising Damp"'s star, Leonard Rossiter, also played the lead role in the BBC's highly popular "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin" (1976–79). The decline in cinema attendance in this period meant that many of these series were turned into cinema films; the first film version of "On the Buses" (1969–73) was the biggest hit at the British box office in 1971. According to Jeff Evans, "On