Turned Out Nice Again, By Louis Barfe

"Light entertainment" is a slippery concept. In the introduction to Turned Out Nice Again, his history of its British forms, Louis Barfe quotes Eric Maschwitz, head of Light Entertainment at BBC television in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He reportedly loathed the term and would demand: "What is it meant to be the opposite of? Heavy Entertainment? Or Dark Entertainment?"

Well, both: light entertainment should not tax either the audience's intellect or its emotions. A more useful question for Barfe to consider might be: is LE an actual genre or a corporate category, a bureaucratic convenience for broadcasters? The answer that emerges from this hasty pudding of a book is, again, both.

Though Barfe sets out to write a history of a genre, harking back to the Victorian music hall, the early chapters are thin gruel. His interest is only properly engaged when he gets to the 1950s and the arrival of a mass television audience. It is hard to trace a line that takes you from Marie Lloyd and Albert Chevalier to all the things bracketed as "light entertainment" on TV – variety spectaculars, chat shows, talent shows, sketch shows, panel games, quizzes, pop programmes, and so on.

The conventional wisdom, to which Barfe subscribes, is that until the end of the 1970s LE was the backbone of popular television, its high watermark being the 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show, which was watched by 28 million viewers. After that, it withered, thanks to alternative comedy, the snobbery of television executives, and the fragmentation of audiences as channels multiplied, only to bloom again with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Ant and Dec's Saturday Takeaway, and now Strictly Come Dancing.

In fact, the story is less complicated than that. Though some of the most fondly remembered LE programmes – Bruce Forsyth's Generation Game, The Two Ronnies – ended in the late 1970s and early 1980s, stars and formats kept on coming: Noel Edmonds, Cilla Black, Leslie Crowther; Game for a Laugh, Blind Date, Stars in their Eyes. Alternative comedy was never more than a minority interest, and the pretence that it differed in fundamental ways from traditional comedy died in 1990, with Vic Reeves' Big Night Out. As Barfe correctly points out, this was a direct descendant of the Northern club comedy that had always been an important component of light entertainment.

What did end in the 1980s and 1990s was the BBC's automatic dominance of Saturday nights. The real story here is how the BBC lost touch with its populist roots, at the very moment when pressures from Thatcherite ministers and newspaper editors made an appeal to popular legitimacy essential for its survival. The reaction to the Russell Brand-Jonathan Ross pseudo-scandal shows how far the Corporation is from recovering its self-confidence and the affection of large sections of the public.

The outlines of this history can be deduced from Barfe's book, and anybody wishing to understand the period will want to draw on his interviews with producers and stars: I hope the tapes get deposited with some accessible archive. But the book itself would be better titled "Ooh, You Are Awful", if only Dick Emery were not inexplicably absent. A lot of other things are missing – it's perverse to devote pages to The Two Ronnies without mentioning Ronnie Barker's roles in Porridge and Open All Hours.

At times, faced with a mass of material, Barfe slips into ticking off programmes: then there was Oh Boy, then there was Thank Your Lucky Stars, then Elkan Allan invented Ready Steady Go, then there was Top of the Pops. He rarely pauses to take stock or to place the to-ings and fro-ings of producers in a social or political context. A section about the creation of London Weekend Television does include some demographics – the growth in numbers of graduates, in affluence, and in inequality between North and South in the 1950s and early 1960s.

But how have those trends operated in the 40 years since? Though Barfe has sat through a great deal of archive footage, his descriptions are perfunctory and he doesn't back up his judgements. The assertion that Michael Aspel's "entire career has been marked by his subtle wit" cries out for proof. If Barfe wants to argue that Benny Hill's work for the BBC in the early 1960s shows him to be the equal, in complexity and wit, of Stanley Baxter and Ronnie Barker, then he has to offer more than an outline of a sketch and the empty assurance that "the twist at the end is a corker".

His sense of proportion is sometimes out of kilter: in a paragraph about The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, ITV's vehicle for Northern club comics, he says that "No star, no matter how elevated, was safe from [Bernard] Manning's knocking introductions", before quoting a joke about The Bachelors. There are numerous factual errors: the film Elmer Gantry is not a Western; Christopher Ryan, Mike the Cool Person in The Young Ones, is not Canadian. Unless you have a deep interest and a willingness to overlook such fatuities, this book is not worth reading.

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