That peculiarly British phenomenon the comedy sketch show is alive and well and living mostly on the BBC. The format comprises short comic vignettes or sketches lasting around five or 10 minutes and ending with a punch line (or perhaps not) followed by another story, new characters and another joke.

Unlike the sitcom, the cast can change characters, settings – anything at all. There is much less chance to get bored as the scenes vary constantly. The sketch show has its origins in the British Music Hall of the Victorian era where various characters performed comic turns. Charlie Chaplin began his career here, commonly playing a drunk. This format later translated to radio and then to television.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, the first television sketch shows were embraced by graduates from Cambridge University Footlights Society. Many famous comedians cut their teeth here – John Cleese, Alan Bennett, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, Rowan Atkinson.

In the 1960s we had Beyond The Fringe which starred Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and David Frost – all Cambridge graduates. This early political satire was ground-breaking for its time.

Following on from that in the 1970s, the sketch show which went on to achieve world-wide acclaim and cult status was Monty Python’s Flying Circus – again a product of the Footlights (although Palin and Jones were Oxford graduates). All highly educated, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Jones (who respectively read law, medicine, modern history, English and English), brought their sophistication and erudition to the writing.

Who can forget the drunken philosopher song or World Forum featuring Marx, Che Guevara, Mao and Lenin where all the questions are about football. Surrealism, sophistication and comedy all rolled into one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB8VZT_UsE

The Pythons dominated comedy sketches for so long that when Not The Nine O’Clock News was broadcast in 1979, they had great deal to live up to. Featuring Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones and Pamela Stephenson (a woman at last), the show was less surreal but genuinely funny. In a parody of their Python predecessors, there was a sketch complaining that the holy name of Monty Python was being taken in vain by the Christian church - a joke about religious groups taking exception to The Life of Brian.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asUyK6JWt9U

One of the best-loved British comedy duos was Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Also originating from the Cambridge Footlights where they’d studied along with Emma Thompson, Ben Elton and Tony Slattery, the pair wrote and starred in
A Bit Of Fry And Laurie which ran from 1989 to 1995. This has to be one of my favourite Fry and Laurie sketches:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHQ2756cyD8

Apart from Pamela Stephenson where are the women in all this. Step forward Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders - hurrah. And what’s more they have nothing to do with Cambridge – again hurrah. The duo met at the Central School for Speech and Drama and began their partnership in 1987 with their show French and Saunders. The partnership lasted 20 years (although they separated to perform in The Vicar Of Dibley and Absolutely Fabulous). Their sketch show included some hilarious and merciless parodies, including this one of ABBA:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eidyrlSdKcE

The genre continues to this day with the current pairs Mitchell And Webb and Armstrong And Miller. My favourite Armstrong and Miller sketch is the World War Two pilots who speak in a rather unusual way. Watch and laugh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwNQf08Kxsw