Hasn't it always been the case in Britain that entertainment and sketch shows typically employ a team of writers? I'm pretty sure Barry Cryer has spent most of his career working in them.
Not always.
Even in sketch shows, you can find examples of one writer being responsible – pretty rare admittedly, but off the top of my head, there’s It’s That Man Again penned by Ted Kavanagh, Just Fancy by Eric Barker and Les Dawson series (plus, Ken Dodd) that James Casey wrote and produced – all very successful shows for the BBC. Whilst the Eddie Braben-penned shows for Morecombe and Wise are considered to their best. Then there are shows where two writers were responsible – e.g. Take It From Here, The Burkiss Way, Beyond Our Ken. Benny Hill’s BBC period was written by him and Dave Freeman. Etc etc.
Also, traditionally, in the UK, where a show had various writers, it’s often best to think of it that terms of having multiple writers, rather than them working as a team. For example, with shows like The Two Ronnies or Alas Smith and Jones, writers (or pairs of writers) would work independently of each other. Plus, even when there’s a small group of writers working on the same project, it’s quite common for them to write in smaller groups - Monty Python an obvious example and a non-sketch one would be Motherland.
You mentioned Barry Cryer and he’s worked in a variety of set-ups. For instance, with the Thames Kenny Everett shows, it was basically him, Everett and Ray Cameron writing together. Sometimes he worked in a partnership (e.g. with Graham Chapman). When he’s talked about writing for someone like Tommy Cooper, where his series had several main writers, it sounds like people would fundamentally work on their own, rather than write as a team.
That’s very different to the American writers’ room, which the UK has moved more towards and has a different culture. As illustrated by The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine, a joint UK/US production in the early 1970s. Like previous Feldman vehicles, it used a group of writers – but went about it in a very different way. Feldman wanted an American-style writers’ room where they all got together in the same physical location and err, well… write. However, this went down badly with British writers, who had worked with him before and were approached by Feldman to write for the show, as they preferred to write as they liked, when they liked etc. Going from memory, but although a number of people who had written with/for Feldman were approached, only Tim Brooke-Taylor took part and he said that enforced format didn’t really work. (I might have inferred incorrectly, but when he’s talked about this, my impression is he had reservations about the set-up but agreed because he liked and wanted to support Marty.)
I suspect this point has been made (and I’m subconsciously repeating it) but effectively, UK comedy writing was a cottage industry, whereas Feldman wanted a more factory-like approach. The usually mentioned issue was Feldman was trying to introduce a way of working, alien to most writers over here and they didn’t like the sound of. There may be other factors at play, but someone like John Cleese was happy writing material in the usual way around that time for other shows (e.g the Doctor series and for Ronnie Barker). Similarly, John Junkin was happy to act in the series but chose not to be part of the writing team.
I suspect that possibly it might be how Feldman was trying to implement a writer’s room was a contributory factor as well. In the States, how these operated varied – e.g. in radio comedy, Bob Hope’s way of operating was vastly different to Jack Benny; whilst more recently, the book Difficult Men (looking at shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men) illustrated that such differences are very much in evidence.
Getting back to the UK and now, as other said there’s been a move towards the American-style room… ironically, the US television industry has been moving away from it. One reason why I feel the UK has moved to it is because – this is generally, rather than comedy specifically – international co-production is becoming more important and utilising similar writer structures helps that.
However, every so often, writers will publicly extol the virtues of that set-up and argue the UK would benefit so arguably, there are genuinely creative reasons. Then again, My Family was publicised as having an American-style writers’ room…..
