SITCOM A PROGRESSIVE GENRE

Sitcom A Progressive Genre



Sitcom A Progressive Genre

Different ways in which sitcom may relate to a social reality include the notions of what is typical or what is extraordinary in the social actuality. In both cases the notions find their basis in common experience. The sitcoms that carry the examples of significant social class differences and, at the same time, belong to those reappearing in the programmes include Fawlty Towers, Keeping up Appearances, Absolutely Fabulous, Porridge, Till Death us Do Part, Only Fools and Horses, and many others. The characters in these sitcoms want to escape from their family class roots and they want to become the members of higher class, by the intentional changes in some aspects of their lifestyle. Their goal is always unattainable and they remain trapped in their class, because the aspects that they try to change do not represent the significant class indicators, those of an income and material wealth, the ownership of the means of production, education and a professional status or a family 252 background. The audiences may decode that it is not the hobbies, car or friends but the complex quality of life one has to change to move upwards in the social hierarchy(Bilton, 1996,, 248).

Finally, it should be stressed that the British sitcoms neither provide sociological definitions, nor facilitate the students with facts. But the range of the images of different classes could broaden the two-class stratification into the rich and the poor. It could also provide the mechanism or strategy for further differentiation. The aspects depicted in the sitcoms could build the more colorful awareness of individual class differences and their markers.

Features of a house interior and exterior, furniture, dressing, behaviour, and interests, they all differ in the two households, that of Mrs. Bucket and her sister's. Watching television and drinking beer are the simplified and stereotyped examples of the main interests of a working class.

Inadequate accessories or a strange hairstyle spoils them. The dress codes of the guests invited to the gourmet night event are used to show the difference between the attempts of Basil and Sybil and the real middle class dresses of Colonel and Mrs. Hall, and the Twit hens. Also the differences in the behaviour of the representatives of the two different social classes are clearly marked in the part of the episode when the guests meet the owners. Differences in the level of formality of their behaviour, the appropriate versus inappropriate topics for conversation, the level of formality of speech, i.e. a register, they all supplement the most visible differences in social manners(Ferenik, 2002,, 9).

Inappropriate behaviour, e.g. Sybil Fawlty sitting on the table or drinking in the presence of guests, the forms of entertainments inappropriate for the middle class that are produced and performed by the hotel staff, and Basil's lack of the knowledge of any foreign language later in the episode finalize the portrait of social class differences.

Mrs. Hyacinth Bucket insists on her surname to be pronounced in the French manner ...