Among the many talents the British seem to have lost in recent years is the ability of our television companies to produce situation comedies that manage to make people laugh.

This was something at which the BBC once used to excel. Its list of classic hits stretches right back to the great days of Hancock and Steptoe & Son.

It was the broad church of BBC comedy that through the decades produced successes as diverse as Dad's Army, The Likely Lads, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Fawlty Towers, Hi-de-Hi, Only Fools and Horses, It Ain't 'Alf Hot Mum, As Time Goes By, Yes Minister, Till Death Us Do Part, Butterflies, The Good Life, One Foot in the Grave, even Birds of a Feather in the earlier series.

Some people might add Absolutely Fabulous and the Vicar of Dibley to that list, but I suspect that's only because they stand out when compared to most of the dross that's around these days.

Set them against the past greats and they're seen for what they are: either hysterically over the top or filled with comedy cliches and cut-out characters.

Only The Royle Family hits the mark - a genuinely inventive creation which even so carries echoes of the past as a sort of Till Death Us Do Part with apathy.

Word has it now that the BBC is set to scrap three new sitcoms (Office Gossip, Lee Evans - So What Now? and Savages) because viewing figures for them have tumbled.

Why are we finding it so easy to say no, not only to the BBC's new comedy offerings but also to those on ITV and Channel 4 (which crowned itself with glory when it came up with the magnificent Father Ted, but otherwise tends to rely largely for its comedy output on American imports)?

Once upon a time, the pubs cleared as time for Hancock's Half Hour drew near. Back in the early 1970s, at a parents' meeting at my son's school to brief us on a new way of teaching mathematics, there was an increasing amount of fidgeting, particularly from the dads, as the evening dragged on and eventually apologies were said as, one by one, we sloped off home to watch Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?

There's nothing so compelling nowadays. Most sitcoms come with a powerful built-in "take it or leave it" factor. And increasingly, it seems, we're leaving it.

So what's happened? Where have the titter-mongers gone wrong?

The answer, as in all great comedy, lies in the writing. The truly memorable sitcoms are rooted in the characters who inhabit them, characters created in the imaginations of the writers. They might sometimes be monsters, like Alf Garnett and Albert Steptoe, but we love them nevertheless.

Even though they are larger than life, we recognise in them something of our neighbours, relatives, colleagues, ourselves.

Pompous Captain Mainwaring, demented Basil Fawlty, the dreaming Tom and Barbara Good, cantankerous Victor Meldrew...There is something to relate to in them all, and consequently something to like. Even that bundle of rage and frustration, Alf Garnett, struck a sympathetic chord with millions of viewers.

Too many of today's sitcoms are peopled by caricatures and stereotypes who deliver a succession of wisecracks. It's difficult to take such characters to your heart. They are often annoying, sometimes thoroughly unpleasant.

Maybe the fault lies with the lifestyle and attitudes of the people doing the writing. It must be difficult to create warm, sympathetic characters when you're steeped in a culture which has replaced the chuckle by the sneer.

And maybe, too, the writers spend too much time with people like themselves - university-educated, middle class, politically-correct, clever and witty - unlike the writers of past times who were often from working-class stock and had been about a bit.

The characters they created, and the situations in which they placed them, were based on their observations of the world around them rather than on ideas bounced around at trendy get-togethers.

Maybe that's all that's wrong with British sitcom after all. Let would-be writers stop trying to be too clever for their own good. Let them get out a bit more and mingle with the real people, with all our foibles and eccentricities.

Show us ourselves as we are, with just that little twist of exaggeration, and we might start to laugh again.

e-mail:mike.priestley@ bradford.newsquest.co.uk