This is the first in what may turn out to be an occasional series; as somebody with a fairly catholic sense of humour (and that doesn’t just mean that I liked Father Ted), I’m just going to share a few things about some of the comedies which have made an impression on me down the years and hopefully get you all tuning to UK Gold, Paramount Comedy or whatever.

I begin with a show which, at its best, carried all before it. Roseanne was, in the early nineties, one of the most popular sitcoms in the US and its star one of the most powerful players. Bought by Channel 4 back in the days before buying American sitcoms became standard schedule-filling practice, it became a lynchpin of their Friday evening line-up. It began with a simple premise- take the typical sitcom format of husband, wife, 2.4 kids, irritating grandmother, unmarriageable sister, and take it downmarket a bit. Dan and Roseanne Conner struggle to make ends meet and, during the show’s run, are made redundant, take demeaning jobs to pay the bills and eventually end up with a certain amount of success after various business ventures collapse. Their children are demanding to say the least- Becky is the pretty straight-A student who dreams of something better than the small-town horizons of Lanford, Illinois; Darlene is the cynical, creative middle child with creative ambitions and DJ is a typical mischievous brat. Roseanne’s sister Jackie wanders through various careers and relationships without ever really finding her place in the world and the family is completed by mother Beverly, a world champion fault finder.

It’s a well-know fact that Buffy and Angel creator Joss Whedon served his apprenticeship as a staff writer on Roseanne, and it’s not hard to see the influence. For a start, over the course of its nine seasons, the show was almost as much a soap as a sitcom; characters developed over time, particularly Becky and Darlene, as the constraints of small-town life grew too much for them. The audience’s level of emotional involvement with the characters was much greater than with most sitcoms too: I remember being gutted when Becky found out that she wasn’t going to college because Dan and Roseanne had never had enough spare cash to pay into her college fund, and the show engaged with issues such as domestic violence and teenage sex with honesty and an emphasis on consequences. Dan spends the night in jail after beating up Jackie’s abusive boyfriend, and Becky and Darlene’s love lives lead them into difficult situations. It’s not hard to see Whedon seeing the potential of talented younger actors to carry a show; there are times when Becky and Darlene virtually carry episodes, particularly the edgy dynamic between Lecy Goranson and Sara Gilbert which grew over the years. And of course there’s Glenn Quinn, although in Roseanne his role as halfwitted bad boy Mark alternated between being the butt of everybody’s jokes and the villain of the piece.

During the course of its nine seasons, Roseanne changed more than most series as a result of events behind the scenes. The first major change happened midway through Season 5, when Lecy Goranson, who had played Becky since the first episode, left to take her degree; Becky eloped with Mark and was next seen at the beginning of Season 6 returned home and played by Sarah Chalke, now of Scrubs. Chalke played Becky for the next two seasons until Goranson returned for Season 8, then resumed the role for Season 9, also taking a cameo role as a trick-or-treating parent in Season 8’s Halloween episode. The supporting character of Dan’s friend Arnie was hurriedly dropped when Tom Arnold, who played the character, divorced Roseanne in real life. But perhaps the killing blow in more ways than one came when John Goodman, who had played husband Dan since the first episode, found himself being offered film roles which were, for an actor in his early forties, simply too good to refuse, so marital problems were written into the script and Dan eventually left Roseanne for a new life in California.

The ninth season became increasingly self-indulgent and aimless, as Roseanne, who by this stage had complete creative control over the show, had her character win the lottery and mix with the great and the good. Guest stars were drafted in at the expense of the regular cast; having been brought back to the fold, Sarah Chalke appears in roughly half the episodes; Roseanne has since admitted that Becky was virtually written out of the last season as she preferred Lecy Goranson to play the role. The final episode, in an act which can either be interpreted as postmodernism or vindictiveness, saw Roseanne admitting that the last season had been a fantasy and that Dan had died after a heart attack rather than leaving his wife and rewriting the destiny of the characters. In reality, Goodman and Gilbert were ready to move on to new challenges and the show had slipped badly in the ratings; from second place in its debut season, it made tenth in its penultimate season and seventeenth in its last and the writing was on the wall.

But for all the loss of direction, I loved Roseanne. At times Dan and Roseanne were almost fantasy parents for me (although anybody who knows my mother will understand that fantasy and reality aren’t too far apart there), and I held a torch for Lecy Goranson for more than a couple of years. You laughed with the Conner family’s successes and you cried with their setbacks, but most of all you admired their resilience and determination to get by and handle whatever life put in their way. Paramount Comedy are stripping the show in the early evening, which seems right- believe me, try it for a week and the characters will seem like family.