People sometimes ask me why I like to film sitcoms in front of a studio audience. Well, they don't, really. One guy did, a few years ago. But it stands out in my mind because the subtext was easy to pick up in the tone of his voice, and the fact that he put the words "on earth" after the word "why". Studio sitcoms like my current one, The IT Crowd, tend to be expensive and extremely unfashionable with critics, who regularly complain about being "told where to laugh" by the audience's response (as if that was something that ruined their enjoyment of, say, Monty Python or Dad's Army).

So why on earth do I film sitcoms in front of a studio audience? Well, to start with, it pushes me to make the show funnier. We start rehearsals on a Monday in order to film the show in front of an audience the following Friday (location material is shown on monitors in story order). Under the threat of such an unpredictable group of people, any line that doesn't get a laugh stands out like an old guy at a party. Because The IT Crowd, is, like Father Ted before it, just a device for generating laughter, this extra pressure is invaluable to me.

There are some actors who come alive in front of a crowd, and if you've cast it right, there's an energy between cast and audience that can be exhilarating for both parties, then enjoyed by the audience at home. I've seen Hugh Laurie be good in a lot of things, but I've never seen him funnier than he was on A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Blackadder. In fact, everyone in Blackadder is working the audience mercilessly, pitching their performance to elicit the greatest number of laughs.

Audience laughter, when it's deserved, acts as a sort of fairy dust that makes funny moments not just funny, but joyous. It also takes the edge off moments that otherwise might tip over into tragedy; imagine Basil Fawlty whacking his car with a branch or goosestepping around a hotel lobby to complete silence and you're imagining not a comedy, but a fairly grim account of mental collapse.

Of course, there are a lot of bad studio sitcoms, and they encourage a lot of bad habits (overtheatrical writing and acting being the worst), but if we turn our back on them, we're saying goodbye to a whole style of comedy, a whole genre. And a world without future Fawltys, future Blackadders, future Steptoes is going to be a grim place indeed.