Genuine merriment might seem a trivial thing to wish for 1999. But in view of the major contribution that laughter can make to the much-sought-after "feelgood factor", it's very important.

What we desperately need this next year is for British comedy to get back on track. We need it to be capable once again of scoring direct hits on what Ken Dodd refers to as the "chuckle muscle" and triggering hysterical, side-aching mirth instead of having to be mulled over by the brain before raising a knowing smile.

Our present plight was summed up on television the other night by one Jenny Eclair, who was captioned "comedian". Although I have never seen her act, I suspect that she is of the "alternative" type of comedian - i.e., a smartypants whose humour goes for intellect rather than instinct.

On a programme which took a look at the rise and fall of the big Christmas TV "spectaculars", Jenny Eclair declared: "We have become a nation of sneerers". Which is all too true. But that's only because we've been forced into it.

British humour, particularly as presented on TV and radio, contains a high sneer factor and not much to guffaw at. It's all very negative and not at all life-enhancing, which comedy should be.

I suspect that has something to do with the background of the people doing the writing and performing. They're university types whose intellects are so highly developed that they've lost touch with real laughter.

When they do try to be more basic, dipping into the wonderful world of rudeness which has provided so many good jokes over the ages, they somehow succeed in being only cringingly crude.

The pornography and masturbation episode in the final Men Behaving Badly three-parter, for example, was hideously embarrassing. The reactions at our house, among a mixed-sex, mixed-generation audience of reasonably sophisticated people, ranged from stunned silence to cries of "Oh, no!" and "Yeeerrk!" Not a single one of us smiled, never mind laughed.

Contrast that with the situation at the Alhambra the other week where camp Australian comedian Bob Downe told a very risque joke about his elderly uncle having to provide a "sample" to see if he was a suitable candidate for Viagra.

When the punchline came, an audience wondering what on earth he was going to say next roared with laughter. He'd scored a bull's eye on the chuckle muscle and deftly managed to avoid causing offence!

If today's alleged humorists aren't being crude or too clever by half, they're presenting substandard surreal stuff which would have been rejected by the Goons or the Pythons as far too silly to be funny. Yet the sneering classes fall for it because, tragically, they don't know any better.

Any country in which Harry Hill (a comedian whose one good joke is that he wears a shirt with a huge collar) can be acclaimed as "the funniest man in British comedy today" is in serious trouble mirth-wise.

So as we start 1999, it has to be one of my wishes for the year to come that we can stop sneering and start the long journey back to proper comedy.

It's probably too much to hope that we might enter the new millennium with the ability to chuckle fully restored. But let's at least see it on its way to recovery.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.