Ten of my favourite English comedy TV shows

My personal top ten would be:

1. Mrs. Brown's Boys.

Mrs. Brown's Boys is a British-produced Irish television sitcom created by and starring Brendan O'Carroll and produced in the United Kingdom by BBC and BBC Studios in partnership with BOC-PIX and Irish broadcaster RTÉ.

The series stars O'Carroll as Agnes Brown, with several close friends and family members making up the rest of the cast. The show adopts an informal production style often breaking the fourth wall, where production mistakes and tomfoolery, mostly instigated by O'Carroll, are edited into each episode. The show has been a ratings success in both Ireland, where it is set, and the United Kingdom, where it is recorded. It also received high ratings in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The show has won numerous industry awards.

2. Philomena Cunk.

Diane Morgan is perhaps best known for her portrayal of Philomena Cunk, an extremely dim-witted and ill-informed interviewer and commentator on current affairs. For her performances, Morgan was nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Female Comedy Performance.

She has a distinctive Bolton (North-Western England) accent. The character was originally envisaged as posh and Southern but Morgan asked to read for it using her natural accent as well and everyone agreed that that worked better.

3. Little Britian.

Little Britain is a British sketch comedy series that ran between 2003 and 2006. It was written and performed by David Walliams and Matt Lucas.  

The programme consists of a series of sketches involving exaggerated parodies of British people from various walks of life. Each sketch was introduced by a voice-over narration (Tom Baker) suggesting that the programme was a guide – aimed at non-British people – to British society. Despite the narrator's description of "great British institutions", the comedy arises from the British audience's self-deprecating understanding of either themselves or of people known to them.

 
Recurring characters included Andy Pipkin, who falsely presented himself as requiring the use of a wheelchair to gain the attention of his carer Lou Todd; Daffyd Thomas, who claims to be "the only gay in the village" despite much evidence to the contrary; and Vicky Pollard, presented as a working-class "chav" (UK slang: a young person of a type characterized by coarse and brash behaviour with connotations of low social status) engaging in anti-social behaviour.

4. Ricky Gervais.

Although not a television series, I added this as an honourable mention as his stand-up comedy is extremely funny. Ricky Gervais is an English comedian, actor, writer, producer, and director. He co-created, co-wrote, and acted in the British television sitcoms The Office (2001–2003), Extras (2005–2007), and Life's Too Short (2011–2013) with Stephen Merchant. He also created, wrote and starred in Derek (2012–2014) and After Life (2019–2022).

He has won seven BAFTA Awards, five British Comedy Awards, two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, and the Rose d'Or twice (2006 and 2019). In 2003, The Observer named Gervais one of the 50 funniest performers in British comedy. In 2007, he was placed at No. 11 on Channel 4's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups, and at No. 3 in their 2010 list. In 2010, he was included in the Time 100 list of World's Most Influential People.

5. Mr. Bean.

Mr. Bean is a British sitcom created by Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis, produced by Tiger Aspect Productions and starring Atkinson as the eponymous title character. Based on a character developed by Atkinson while he was studying for his master's degree at the University of Oxford, the series centres on Mr. Bean, described by Atkinson as "a child in a grown man's body", as he solves various problems presented by everyday tasks and often causes disruption in the process. The series has been influenced by physical comedy actors such as Jacques Tati and those from early silent films.

6. Allo Allo.

'Allo 'Allo! is a British sitcom television series. Originally broadcast on BBC1, the series focuses on the life of a French café owner in the town of Nouvion,during the German occupation of France in the Second World War, in which he deals with problems from a dishonest German officer, local French Resistance, the handling of a stolen painting and a pair of trapped British airmen, all while concealing from his wife the affairs he is having with his waitresses.

7. Fawlty Towers.

Fawlty Towers is a British television sitcom written by John Cleese and Connie Booth, originally broadcast on BBC Two in 1975 and 1979. Two series of six episodes each were made. The show was ranked first on a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000 and, in 2019, it was named the greatest ever British TV sitcom by a panel of comedy experts compiled by the Radio Times.

The series is set in Fawlty Towers, a fictional hotel in the English seaside town of Torquay in Devon. The plots centre on the tense, rude and put-upon owner Basil Fawlty (played by Cleese), his bossy wife Sybil (Prunella Scales), the sensible chambermaid Polly (Booth) who often is the peacemaker and voice of reason, and the hapless and English-challenged Spanish waiter Manuel (Andrew Sachs). 

They show their attempts to run the hotel amidst farcical situations and an array of demanding and eccentric guests and tradespeople. The idea of the show came from Cleese after he stayed at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, Devon, in 1970 (along with the rest of the Monty Python troupe), where he encountered the eccentric hotel owner Donald Sinclair. Stuffy and snobbish, Sinclair treated guests as though they were a hindrance to his running of the hotel (a waitress who worked for him stated "it was as if he didn't want the guests to be there"). Sinclair was the inspiration for Cleese's character Basil Fawlty.

8. Monty Python.

Monty Python (also collectively known as the Pythons) were a British comedy troupe formed in 1969 consisting of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. The group came to prominence for the sketch comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus, which aired on the BBC from 1969 to 1974. Their work then developed into a larger collection that included live shows, films, albums, books, and musicals; their influence on comedy has been compared to the Beatles' influence on music. Their sketch show has been called "an important moment in the evolution of television comedy".

Monty Python's Flying Circus was loosely structured as a sketch show, but its innovative stream-of-consciousness approach and Gilliam's animation skills pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in style and content.A self-contained comedy unit, the Pythons had creative control which allowed them to experiment with form and content, discarding rules of television comedy.[10] They followed their television work by making the films Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), and The Meaning of Life (1983). Their influence on British comedy has been apparent for years, while it has coloured the work of the early editions of Saturday Night Live through to absurdist trends in television comedy.

At the 41st British Academy Film Awards in 1988, Monty Python received the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema. In 1998, they were awarded the AFI Star Award by the American Film Institute. Holy Grail and Life of Brian are frequently ranked on lists of the greatest comedy films. A 2005 poll asked more than 300 comedians, comedy writers, producers, and directors to name the greatest comedians of all time, and half of Monty Python's members made the top 50.

9. Pinky and the Brain.

Pinky and the Brain is an American animated sitcom created by Tom Ruegger for the Kids' WB programming block of The WB. It was the first animated television series to be presented in Dolby Surround and a collaboration of Steven Spielberg with his production company Amblin Television and Warner Bros. Animation. The characters first appeared in 1993 as a recurring segment on the animated television series Animaniacs. It was later spun off as a series due to its popularity, with 65 episodes produced. The characters later appeared in the series Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain, and later returned to their roots as an Animaniacs segment in the 2020 revival of that series.

Pinky and The Brain are genetically enhanced laboratory mice who reside in a cage in the Acme Labs research facility. The Brain is highly intelligent, self-centered and scheming, while Pinky is good-natured but feeble-minded. In each episode, The Brain devises a new plan to take over the world which ultimately ends in failure; usually due to the impossibility of The Brain's plan, The Brain's own overconfidence, Pinky's bumbling, an oversight on The Brain's part, circumstances beyond their control, or a combination thereof. In common with many other Animaniacs shorts, many episodes are in some way a parody of something else, usually a film or novel.

10. The Young Ones.

The Young Ones is a British sitcom written by Rik Mayall, Ben Elton, and Lise Mayer, starring Adrian Edmondson, Mayall, Nigel Planer, Christopher Ryan, and Alexei Sayle, and broadcast on BBC Two for two series, first shown in 1982 and 1984. The show focused on the lives of four dissimilar students and their landlord's family on different plots that often included anarchic, offbeat, surreal humour. The show often included slapstick gags, visual humour and surreal jokes sometimes acted out by puppets, with each episode also featuring a notable selection of guest stars and musical numbers from various performers.

The Young Ones helped bring alternative comedy to British television in the 1980s and made household names of its writers and performers. The show became a notable icon of 1980s British popular culture, and it received its own game and a home-media release while becoming the first non-music-related programme to appear on MTV in the United States in 1985. The show was voted number 31 in the BBC's Best Sitcom poll in 2004.

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