THE death of Dad’s Army creator Jimmy Perry earlier this week got me thinking about The Great British Sitcom.

Television schedules are packed with bake-offs and dance-offs and sing-offs, most of which could naff off without causing a ripple of regret to most of the viewing public.

But where have all the sitcoms gone?

Comedy on telly seems to amount to little more than the same batch of posh comics swapping seats on each other’s panel shows.

When I was wee, influenced by what my parents were watching, I watched The Good Life, To the Manor Born, Yes Minister and Butterflies and I loved them all.

As the tone and nature of sitcoms changed and as I grew up, I was obsessed with Blackadder, fascinated by the anarchy of The Young Ones and my younger brother and I were massive fans of Red Dwarf.

I’m not suggesting there weren’t some really rubbish sitcoms in the ‘old’ days – ‘Allo ‘Allo, anyone? – but for every Are You Being Served there was an Only Fools and Horses; for every Up Pompeii! there was an Absolutely Fabulous.

Absolutely Fabulous was a groundbreaker, of course, featuring two hard-drinking, drug-taking, outrageously rude and selfish women as its central characters. It built on the success of other all-female sitcoms such as Girls on Top, in which AbFab’s Edina (Jennifer Saunders) appeared alongside her partner in comedy Dawn French, Tracy Ullman and Ruby Wax.

Most of us can reel off a host of 90s sitcoms, like Father Ted, Men Behaving Badly, The Vicar of Dibley, One Foot in the Grave and Keeping Up Appearances – which, incidentally, is the BBC’s most exported television programme, being sold nearly 1000 times to overseas broadcasters, according to BBC Worldwide.

More recent sitcoms, like The Royle Family and The Office, got new names, like mockumentaries and dramedies, while completely off-the-wall, eyewateringly funny shows like Green Wing are hard to put into any obvious category.

Sitcoms might have changed over the years but the really good ones are not easily forgotten.

Witty scripts, brilliant lead characters and excellent supporting casts are all essential ingredients but the key to success is that extra dollop of genius – whether it’s in sudden, unexpected pathos (Blackadder and his men going ‘over the top’ of the trenches at the end of the final series) or sheer, undiluted comedy joy (Del boy’s accidental dive behind the bar).

The warm, fuzzy glow generated by Tom and Barbara’s attempts to become self-sufficient in suburbia or Audrey’s old-fashioned love affair with manor-born Richard might be a world away from the hilarious and slightly appalling fights between Rick and Vyvian on The Young Ones, but it all lives long in the memory.

I hope sitcoms, whatever format they take, live long too – the more the merrier.