Comedy Playhouse

The series began in 1961 at the prompting of Tom Sloan, Head of BBC Light Entertainment at the time. Galton and Simpson were no longer writing for Tony Hancock and Sloan asked them to write ten one-offs with the hope that one might become established as a series. Thus, the first two series of Comedy Playhouse were written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, but from the third series onwards, the episodes were written by various writers including the likes of Barry Took, Bernard McKenna, Bob Larbey, Brian Cooke, Carla Lane, Craig Cash, David Croft, Dick Clement, Dick Hills, Doug Naylor, Edwin Apps, George Evans, Graham Chapman, Harry Driver, Jack Docherty, Jack Rosenthal, Jeremy Lloyd, John Esmonde, John T. Chapman, Johnny Speight, Ian La Frenais, Ken Hoare, Kingsley Amis, Jilly Cooper, Marty Feldman, Michael Pertwee, Neil Shand, Pauline Devaney, Peter Jones, P.G. Wodehouse, Richard Harris, Ronald Chesney, Ronald Woolfe, Roy Clarke, Richard Waring, Sid Green and Vince Powell.

The first eight series were made in black and white, with the rest from Up Pompeii! onwards being in colour. Like many television programmes from the time, many of 1960s & 1970s episodes are lost. As a result, 95 episodes are currently missing from the archives, although audio recordings from the soundtracks of 15 missing episodes have been recovered, short extracts survive from Till Death Us Do Part and Thank You Sir, Thank You Madam, and a further episode The Melting Pot survives as a U-Matic video copy.

In Australia the series was broadcast on ABC Television in the early 1960s-late 1970s.

The series itself hasn't been released on home media, although some of the surviving episodes have been repeated on television or included on DVD boxsets as pilot episodes to their respective series. These include Steptoe and Son (The Offer), Meet The Wife (The Bed), All Gas and Gaiters (The Bishop Rides Again), Up Pompeii!, Are You Being Served?, Last of the Summer Wine (Of Funerals and Fish) and Happy Ever After. Clips from the series were also featured in the documentary Comedy Playhouse: Where It All Began, which was broadcast on BBC1 on 29 April 2014, which featured interviews with actors and writers who participated in the series, including Ray Galton, Alan Simpson, June Whitfield, Bernard Cribbins and Keith Barron.

Series 1 (1961–2)

Series 2 (1963)

Series 3 (1963-4)

Series 4 (1965)

Series 5 (1966)

Series 6 (1967)

Series 7 (1968)

Series 8 (1969)

Series 9 (1969-70)

Series 10 (1970)

Series 11 (1971)

Series 12 (1972)

Series 13 (1973-4)

Series 14 (1974)

Series 15 (1975)

Series 16 (2014)

Series 17 (2016)

Series 18 (2017)

The BBC aired six comedy pilots in 1970 in Scotland only under the title Scottish Comedy Playhouse, none of which developed into a full series. While these were being aired, Monty Python's Flying Circus was broadcast in the rest of the UK. All episodes from this series were wiped soon after transmission and are currently missing from the archives. The episodes are as follows:

Critical response

Jon E. Lewis and Penny Stempel described Comedy Playhouse as a series of "comedy playlets" that "launched numerous influential sitcoms", its survival depending on a kind of audience‑driven "natural selection".