Nostalgia is bad for us, according to the head of Bafta. Former BBC executive Jane Lush, who chairs the prestigious awards charity, hit out this week at the ‘tsunami’ of revivals and relaunches that has hit TV this summer.

It’s not just last weekend’s remakes of Are You Being Served? and Porridge that have angered her, or the return of Poldark and Cold Feet next week. It isn’t even the promise of a return for Blankety Blank this Christmas.

What makes Jane’s blood simmer is the caution of the suits at New Broadcasting House, who are afraid to take a gamble on new talent when there’s so much classic gold in the archives, just waiting to be polished up and put on display again.

Nostalgia is bad for us, according to the head of Bafta. But the BBC has brought back a host of classic sitcoms, including Are You Being Served? (pictured)

If you love a good laugh, then like me you must be applauding wildly as the Beeb’s classic comedy season lines up one-off remakes of original episodes from three of the greatest sitcoms ever written, including Steptoe And Son, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

You might think this is a bit rich, given Jane was the BBC controller of entertainment who rebooted the 50-year-old Come Dancing format and reinvented it as Strictly in 2004. That is the prime example of how old ideas are so often the best.

And if you love a good laugh, then like me you must be applauding wildly as the Beeb’s classic comedy season lines up one-off remakes of original episodes from three of the greatest sitcoms ever written: Steptoe And Son, Hancock’s Half Hour and, tonight on BBC4, the return of Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, with Simon Day as the foul-mouthed old bigot.

The Bafta boss is right, though, to accuse TV execs of failing to understand how to commission new comedies that will get the whole country laughing. Last month the BBC offered John Cleese a free hand, and a sackful of money, to come up with any sitcom he liked.

According to rumour, Cleese turned them down. Even he accepts that he’s not funny any more, let alone capable of achieving the heights he did in Fawlty Towers 40 years ago.

The Beeb made the same mistake when it invited Ben Elton, writer of the brilliantly witty Blackadder, to come up with a new series in 2013. The result was appalling, and hopelessly misnamed: it was called The Wright Way.

Commissioning shows like that isn’t nostalgia, it’s lack of understanding. The people who run the BBC don’t know what makes ordinary people laugh, because most of them are Oxbridge graduates who have existed all their lives in a snob’s paradise, untainted by the everyday world.

Mrs Brown’s Boys was voted the best British comedy of the 21st century. Apparently it’s the finest comedy we now have to offer the world: Brendan O’Carroll, dragged up in a wig and cardie, spitting F-words while a crowd of extras mutter ‘Yes Mammy’ and ‘No Mammy’

They look at classic sitcom and want to recapture its magic, but they haven’t a clue why us lot were laughing in the first place.

It’s all very well to sneer at nostalgia, but what’s the alternative? Look at the recent poll to pick the greatest British sitcom of the 21st century. What modern-day classic was acclaimed for its wit, its multi-layered characters, its whiplash dialogue and inventive stories?

Mrs Brown’s Boys, that’s what. Apparently it’s the finest comedy we now have to offer the world: Brendan O’Carroll, dragged up in a wig and cardie, spitting F-words while a crowd of extras mutter ‘Yes Mammy’ and ‘No Mammy’.

Mammy’s brood of grown-up children are drawn so insipidly, they all merge into one. You could swap their lines and no one would know — not even the actors.

Compare that with real ensemble comedy, such as Dad’s Army, where every personality was distinct. Almost 50 years after the show first screened, we still think of these characters as archetypes — everybody knows someone as pompous as Captain Mainwaring, or as miserable as Private Frazer.

Try calling out, ‘They don’t like it up ’em!’ or, ‘Do you think that’s awfully wise?’ and everyone will know the reference. Those catchphrases evoke the inimitable Lance Corporal Jones and Sergeant Wilson.

Compare that with real ensemble comedy, such as Dad’s Army, where every personality was distinct. Almost 50 years after the show first screened, we still think of these characters as archetypes — everybody knows someone as pompous as Captain Mainwaring

O’Carroll greeted the Radio Times poll as proof the critics have always been wrong about his crude sitcom. ‘There is an audience out there that comedy forgot,’ he said.

He’s entitled to be delighted with his win, of course. It’s a tremendous accolade, even if the competition was over-rated fare such as Ricky Gervais’s The Office, or self-congratulating bilge Raised By Wolves, inspired by a newspaper columnist’s Eighties childhood in Wolverhampton.

But he’s wrong about the forgotten audience. We’re still here, laughing at the classics, gobbling up boxsets of everything from Monty Python to One Foot In The Grave, Citizen Smith to Father Ted. British comedy writers didn’t leave us behind — they just veered off in terrible directions. We’re just waiting for them to find their bearings and come back to us.

Many modern sitcoms rely on foul language and bodily functions for their big laughs. Want to see a sixth former throwing up on his girlfriend? Treat yourself to The Inbetweeners, a 2008 comedy that spawned two movies.

Fancy listening to a 40-year-old actor spouting an endless chunder of swearwords, like Hugh Grant without the charm? Watch any episode of Peep Show, the comedy with David Mitchell and Robert Webb that eavesdropped on the monologue inside their heads. It started in 2003, returning one last time like trapped wind earlier this year.

And you’ll need a twisted sense of humour to find anything to smile about in Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s sex-obsessed dollop of self-pity, pitted with C-words, that masquerades as a Sunday night comedy on BBC2.

Last month the BBC offered John Cleese a free hand, and a sackful of money, to come up with any sitcom he liked. Cleese turned them down. Even he accepts that he’s not funny any more, let alone capable of achieving the heights he did in Fawlty Towers 40 years ago

It often seems as though TV is too lazy to bother with anything but four-letter words and toilet humour. Brilliant comedy used to hold up a mirror to society — now it just raises its middle finger.

Compare that with what’s currently being made in America. The Big Bang Theory, which revolves around two physicist flatmates and their friends, is cleverer than Einstein, and faster than a bobsleigh run. No one could have believed it was possible to fuse slapstick with quantum physics and generate a perpetual laughter machine.

There’s plenty more of the same calibre — political comedies Veep and Parks And Recreation, intergenerational sitcom Modern Family, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, about a cult survivor adjusting to the outside world, and police comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

These shows are achieving something British sitcom ceased to do 20 years ago: they are reflecting social changes, mirroring the way America is evolving.

The Big Bang Theory works because intellect is important in the U.S. as never before. Brains beat brawn now: Silicon Valley has superseded the factories of Philadelphia and Detroit.

And like Rip Van Winkle waking after a sleep of decades, the States are coming to terms with a new metropolitan world where homosexuality is open and normal, couples don’t always marry, and stepfamilies rub along as best they can — just as we see in Modern Family, among others.

Only Fools And Horses, written by John Sullivan, ran for more than 20 years, and in that time we saw the brothers grow up, get married, get rich, get poor and bicker endlessly, without ever turning their backs on each other

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the first real British TV sitcom, Hancock’s Half Hour. Don’t try to say the writers, Alan Simpson and Ray Galton, invented the genre, because they’ll deny it. But they self-consciously set out in the mid-Fifties to create something that had never been done on TV or radio: comedy about real life. Until then, Britain was hooked on silly voices and music hall jokes.

Tommy Handley ruled the airwaves in the Forties with ITMA — an acronym for It’s That Man Again, meaning Adolf Hitler. Then the Goons erupted, and we were all piping, ‘Curses, Neddy!’ and ‘He’s fallen in the water!’ in strangulated tones.

Galton and Simpson wanted to do something different. A few years ago, I was privileged to work on a book with them, part double biography and part compilation of highlights from some of their 600 scripts.

When they were writing for Tony Hancock, Ray told me: ‘We didn’t think in terms of jokes at all. Hancock didn’t tell jokes. It was life, the character, the situation and the relationships.’ ‘Once in a while we couldn’t avoid it,’ Alan said, ‘and if we ever wrote a joke in, Tony would do it in a music-hall voice, “I Say, I Say”. So that was another reason not to put them in, unless it was deliberate... as A Joke.’

The impact was extraordinary. These 30-minute vignettes captured the frustration of life in a Britain where rationing had barely ended, and the Joneses next-door had ‘never had it so good’, but you were skint.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the first real British TV sitcom, Hancock’s Half Hour

Hancock and his friends endured life’s petty ordeals: missing the last bus home, trying to watch a telly on the blink, tidying a drawer or, most famously, suffering the boredom of a wet Sunday afternoon.

Very few British comedians now would dream of doing anything so mundane. Peter Kay came close last year with Car Share, about two co-workers at a supermarket driving to work together. But the star’s ego got in the way: he’s not an ordinary bloke on his commute, he’s a celebrity inviting us to imagine him as an ordinary bloke. That’s why the full title was ‘Peter Kay’s Car Share’.

Mackenzie Crook deserves a mention for the gentlest sitcom in years, Detectorists. In it, he and Toby Jones play Andy and Lance, two shy men searching for buried treasure on their weekends off. It’s certainly a reflection of real England, with its pub quizzes and committees and an atavistic longing for the land.

But Andy and Lance are eccentrics, while Hancock was an Everyman. You may go for a pint with the detectorists, but Hancock shared your life. Galton and Simpson, having invented sitcom, redefined it with Steptoe And Son. This was comedy without mercy, a portrait of a father and son trapped by poverty and unable to cope with the pace of change in Britain. Outside, it was the Sixties, powered by Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’. In the Steptoe scrapyard, they still kept a carthorse to pull the dray.

The Big Bang Theory, which revolves around two physicist flatmates and their friends, is cleverer than Einstein, and faster than a bobsleigh run

By now, Ray and Alan had moved so far from conventional jokes that many episodes were plain tragedies, mined for black humour. If you want to see the most unsettling five minutes of any sitcom, watch the moment in the third series, from 1965, when Albert Steptoe (Wilfrid Brambell) sits on the bed of his room and weeps, in an old people’s home where his son Harold (Harry H Corbett) has dumped him.

David Renwick dared to do similar bleak stories 30 years later, with One Foot In The Grave. Like Steptoe, that show asked what happened to people in Britain once they were no longer fashionably young. Richard Wilson played Victor Meldrew, a 63-year-old, laid off as a security guard with no hope of finding work.

It felt to him as though all that was left in life was to wait for death, and he said so often. Renwick ended the show in 2000 with a brutal touch, by having Victor run over and killed.

But not every sitcom on life in Britain had to be so dark. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais invented Geordie mates Terry and Bob in the Sixties, chasing skirt and swinging the lead at work. Ten years later, they brought them back in Whatever Happened To the Likely Lads? — with their dreams clipped and pockets empty.

Terry (James Bolam) couldn’t face the fact that, unless he knuckled down and took an office job, he’d be living with his mam for life. Bob (Rodney Bewes) was crushed to think that he’d never get another girlfriend, now that he had a wife.

The States are coming to terms with a new metropolitan world where homosexuality is open and normal, couples don’t always marry, and stepfamilies rub along as best they can — just as we see in Modern Family

This was the Seventies, and Britain was living through the hangover after the shiny delusions of the psychedelic decade before. But the recession didn’t last for ever, and by the Thatcher era anyone could dream of being a millionaire — even a market trader selling dodgy goods out of the back of a Robin three-wheeler.

Del Boy (David Jason) and Rodney (Nicholas Lyndhurst) were two of the most detailed characters ever portrayed on TV. Only Fools And Horses, written by John Sullivan, ran for more than 20 years, and in that time we saw the brothers grow up, get married, get rich, get poor and bicker endlessly, without ever turning their backs on each other.

They did all that while reflecting the headlong changes in British life with more accuracy and clarity than any documentary. And they made us laugh ourselves breathless, too.