With the demise of three top-rating US sit-coms within months of each other, British TV schedulers are desperately looking for something to full the gap.

Ross, Chandler, Joey, Phoebe, Monica and Rachel have gone their separate ways after a long and lucrative Friendship. As well as leaving fans bereaved, the demise of Friends has left a yawning gap in the TV comedy schedules.

The last episode was shown on C4 last night. Sex And The City finished earlier this year. The final episode of Frasier, already shown in the US, will be seen on British screens in coming months.

With three award-winning and top-rating US sitcoms bowing out within months of each other, there's precious little for producers to laugh about.

Losing three series so quickly is a big blow to the American sitcom scene. There's nothing on the horizon to replace that threesome and certainly nothing around that looks able to fill the hole in British TV schedules.

The way C4 has been filling its days and nights with Friends episodes in recent months - someone counted two dozen in a single week recently - you do wonder what they're going to do now.

Well, for one thing, the channel will be showing more repeats of Friends. That's one of the attractions of a long-running comedy hit, life after death. Fortunes can be made from the syndication of old shows long after the cast has said their last lines. That's why actors demand and studios pay big salaries because a hit sitcom is a comedy goldmine. Now there's the additional video and DVD market to consider too.

British TV, where comedy has been in a bad way for years, follows the example of its American cousins by endless re-runs of old series such as Only Fools And Horses, The Good Life and Yes, Minister. They get good audiences no matter how many times they've been shown.

C4 has grabbed the rights to screen The Simpsons from the BBC, so that will help its comic quota. Once Frasier has departed that only leaves Will And Grace, which has never really gained the level of following that Friends has. Another of the surviving US long-running sitcoms, Everybody Loves Raymond, is confined to an early morning slot on C4.

With a lack of good new homegrown comedy, British channels have always relied on US imports to make us laugh. If things are bad in America that's going to be reflected in our schedules.

Across the Atlantic, the end of three top shows has hit them hard with talk that "TV comedy is at a crossroads" and that the sitcom genre is "clearly in desperate need of reinvention".

The rise of drama series, such as CSI and The Shield, and a rash of reality shows has pushed sitcoms off their pedestal. And everyone was so busy celebrating Friends over its 11 seasons, that they forgot to work on any replacements.

The Joey spinoff, with Matt Le Blanc reprising his Friends character in a different setting, will have a built-in audience but, on the principle that lightning doesn't strike twice, is unlikely to reach the dizzy heights of the original series' success.

Opinion is divided as to what needs to be done to revive US sitcoms. Some feel that new personalities, a new Bill Cosby or Lucille Ball, is all that's needed to revive the genre. One fresh hit will help restore confidence.

Others say the sitcom format is exhausted and old-fashioned, that modern audiences can't connect with the characters. Nobody is talking about them the next day in the office as they do with soaps and reality shows.

The style of sitcoms hasn't changed for decades, although that's part of the attraction perhaps. Friends was conventional enough but that didn't stop viewers identifying with the angst-ridden lives of Ross & Co.

Will And Grace played around a bit by introducing a gay character along with the expected witty lines and farcical situations. This was risky, although hardly the major change in sitcoms that some are demanding.

Help could be on the way from the Brits. Admittedly, the US version of the BBC's Coupling flopped and was cancelled after only a few episodes. Now hopes are pinned on another BBC comedy hit, The Office.

David Brent's style of office management was a big hit with viewers over there. Now they're trying to make an American version. After years of laughing at their comedies, It would be amusing if the saviour of the US sitcom genre was one of ours.

Published: 29/05/2004