However, during the interval, he started saying to me that no film or television comedy was as funny as comedy can be in the theatre.

But you cannot dismiss the last 20 years of television comedy.

I want swearing in television comedy to be carefully nurtured and protected.

Nowadays, those boundaries between television comedy and live performance have blurred considerably.

For one of its occupants, however, it became the unlikely route to a career at the forefront of television comedy in the 1980s.