Does the Tardis ever get stuck in traffic? The space-time highway suddenly seems more congested, with our TV schedules clogged up with time-travelling shows – from the period drama-with-a-twist Outlander to DC’s superheroes in Legends of Tomorrow, and action-adventure shows such as Timeless. Not all of them have the longevity of Time Lords. Making History, in which a bungling time traveller’s love life threatens to disrupt the past as we know it, has disappeared into a black hole after just one series. And time has also been called on Time After Time – a series that coupled sci-fi pioneer HG Wells and Jack the Ripper, in modern-day Manhattan. Frequency – where the time machine was an amateur radio that allowed a daughter to communicate with her dead father – was also cut short.

Yet none of this has put off the creators of a new UK sitcom, Timewasters, from adding their own spin on the time-travelling trope. In the ITV2 series a south London jazz quartet find themselves stranded in the 1920s after getting into a lift in a rundown block of flats – a set-up that writer Daniel Lawrence Taylor says originally inspired the cheeky title Black to the Future, before Universal ruled it out.

So what is behind the enduring appeal of leaping through the ages – and why is it suddenly surging in popularity? Lorna Jowett, the author of Time on TV and reader of television studies at the University of Northampton, says our fascination lies in our own mortality coupled with our obsession “with youth and putting off the passing of time”. But the pace of our time-pressed modern life might play a part in an increasing enthusiasm for the genre. “Often it is mundane things that appeal to people about time travel – you probably wouldn’t [go back in time to] try and kill Hitler; you would stop yourself being late.”

Travel, but not as you know it ... watch the trailer for Timewasters.

The recent spawning of shows, she suspects, reflects our current anxieties about the state of the world. “Some of the more modern ones are about people coming back from the future to try and fix things,” which, she says, could be linked to the fact “the global political scene feels a little apocalyptic” – sending us scurrying towards what we assume was a simpler time.

This would explain why time-travel programmes, which once focused on future societies, today seem to heavily focus on the past – such as Outlander. “The nostalgic trend gives people something to fondly reminisce about,” Jowett points out. “It’s a period drama by another name. The conservative underpinning is the fact that people feel their comfortable lives are being threatened by changes.” Yet, she says, time-travel shows can also interrogate or subvert such assumptions. Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, where police officers go back in time a few decades “unpick” this view of the past “suggesting that if we went back to the 1980s we would remember how bad it was”.

Timewasters, too, plays with our preconceived ideas of the 1920s, created in TV shows such as Downton Abbey or House of Elliot, one character wistfully suggesting: “People like us never get to time travel – it’s what white people do, like skiing or brunch,” before his friend offers a reason why. “Any time before the mid-80s wasn’t good for black people.”

I meet the cast on their last day of filming in a beautiful Georgian house in Liverpool complete with 1920s furniture. In one scene, Nick, the quartet’s trumpet player (played by Taylor), is leaving his friends to live with a girl he has just met. Impeccably dressed in a roaring 20s-style three-piece suit, his friend and fellow musician Lauren, played by Adelayo Adedayo, is ranting at him. “Maybe you make her breakfast, or lie about keeping in touch on Facebook,” she fumes. “But who proposes to a one-night stand?”

Saxophonist Jason (Kadiff Kirwan) is taking a more romantic view. “She gave you her heart despite the social stigma of interracial relationships in this age of ignorance,” he sighs. The scene neatly ties up the show’s promise to extract the silliest comedy from the collision of the past and future cultures, and the ethnicity of its characters at a time when slavery was still in living memory. Jowett says this is another reason why the genre has been so durable and can easily be slotted into a sitcom setting. “All time-travel shows involve a culture and ideology clash – because we have different ideas now,” while “often the time-travel device throws people together in close quarters.”

Holding back the years ... the cast of Timewasters. Photograph: Big Talk/ITV

The Timewasters premise also offers a sly dig at the lack of diversity in period dramas such as Downton Abbey – whose first recurring black character was a US jazz musician played by Gary Carr. Samson Kayo, who plays singer Horace, jokes that playing in a period drama is “like playing a Russian as a black man. It’s one of those things you never see happening.” Kirwan points out that this reflects a lack of awareness of the history of BAME (black, Asian, minority and ethnic) people in the UK. “Lots of the period dramas give off the impression that black people weren’t invented yet or something,” he says. “There’s never a nod to black culture or the existence of black people in Britain. Which is heartbreaking because so many different ethnicities were responsible for building the British empire.”

But Taylor says this was not exactly intentional. “At the time I was learning how to play the trumpet and I just thought it would be funny to write about a jazz band. Then I thought it would be cool to set it in a different time period – the 1920s – but there still wasn’t enough going on and I thought, what if they went back in time?”

Researching the period, he says, naturally led to jokes about attitudes to race. “In the 1920s there was racism, but also negrophilia [a craze for black culture, when to collect African art, to listen to black music and to dance with black people was a sign of being modern and fashionable]. In Timewasters there are people chucking things at the quartet in the street, while others want a black jazz band in their house or a black lover – it’s ripe for comedy.”

Film studies professor and author of Time Travel in Popular Media, Matthew Jones isn’t surprised that identity politics and nostalgia are becoming recurrent themes in recent time-travel shows. “We are clearly in a moment of anxiety about identity politics, and I think there is something about the nostalgia for a simpler past and the problems of what that means in identity terms. The past being hankered for is [essentially] a patriarchal, white past, so playing out the problematisation of what that means comes up time and time again.”

Daniel Lawrence Taylor says writing about the past certainly helped him to “reflect on where we are now – in terms of racism and prejudice. They are still here and still run deep but someone described [racism today] as more ‘sophisticated’ because it is not thrown at you in the street, but it might be embedded in the way you work, in education and so on.”

The distance of time also allowed him to discuss difficult issues such as “negrophilia or cultural appropriation”, which if he had included in a modern context might have got a different reception. “It’s like the way people feel about America – if there is police brutality or #OscarsSoWhite, Brits find it easier to talk about it or be outraged about than when things happen here. Having it set in the 1920s means there is some distance. It was quite a lovely thing to be able to put things that we find uncomfortable talking about into comedy. Because that’s often where we talk about things we find uncomfortable.”

Yet Taylor says jokes are prioritised above political and period details. “It is foremost a comedy and you need to be laughing – anything else is a bonus. We changed storylines that were too close to the bone. The minute you start preaching to people, they turn off.” And while he understands the risk of launching another time machine in a crowded field – “the tricky thing about high-concept shows is they are prone to dying a horrible death” – he thinks it is one worth taking. “When one works, it is amazing.”

Timewasters starts on Monday 9 October on ITV2