Worst 11 British sitcoms ever and number 1 stars a TV legend

British TV has produced some of the greatest ever situation comedies, from Hancock's Half Hour to Only Fools & Horses via Porridge, Steptoe & Son and Fawlty Towers. But what were the worst? The TV graveyard is littered with forgotten sitcoms that conked out after one series. Who now remembers stinkers like LWT's High Street Blues - a rare flop for Jimmy Perry?

Or BBC1's Nice Day At The Office which starred Timothy Spall and David Haig failing to overcome a lamentable script? We'll draw a discreet veil over Romany Jones. Here is my completely subjective list of the Worst 11 UK Sitcom Stinkers. Let me know what I've missed in the comments, please. I limited Ben Elton to one entry for the sake of variety.

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Cold Feet's John Thomson was reduced to saying lines like comedy "we need to catch those escaped ferrets - without the audience noticing!" Every character was dim enough to appear on Celebrity Mastermind, and there was a comedy East European, idiotic acrobat Boyco, who mangled his sentences in a Borat accent and delivered lines like "That homosexual pop group...Coldplay."

Even Lizzie's high heels and hot pants weren't enough to divert our attention from the wheezing awfulness of the ham-fisted script which included the old ‘electric buzzer in his palm' handshake routine - a prank that originated in silent comedy. You felt for Ruth Madoc, Tony Robinson, and Patrick Baladi forced to ham up the awful dated lines. Pathetic punchlines included, clown Geoff: "When we come in, you're supposed to play Looney Tunes, not..." Soundman Erasmus: "Hitler's speech to the 1935 Nuremberg Rally." Be still my aching sides. Even The Times was horrified. Caitlin Moran concluded, "were the awfulness of Big Top rendered into miles, we could use it as a bridge to the Moon."

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The script packed in more racial epithets than Love Thy Neighbour. Kevin announced: "I leave Pakistan because they are far too many w*gs there, so I come to England and there are still too many w*gs." Even Arthur says, "If he's wandering around in the dark, I'll never see him." When Kevin is arrested later in the series, his landlady (Fanny Carby) tells the police: "All he's done is been coloured, ain't it? If his father was a bit more fussy about who he slept with, Kevin would be white like us. Knowing the Irish, his father was probably drunk." The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

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How the canned laughter soared. But hold on Victoria wasn't his wife, she was his daughter's other half. (That's the edgy bit, 29 years after the Brookside kiss). Oh those pesky lesbians... It didn't help that the characters all shouted their lines irrespective of the situation.

Gerald was the best thing in it. He was perpetually exasperated by life's irrationalities and Haig portrayed his Victor Meldrew-style frustration with comic flair. You felt his pain over badly loaded dishwashers, knobs of butter carelessly left in jam pots, queue-jumpers and the rest, but it wasn't enough to rescue the show from the feeble and unoriginal ensemble interplay which made many boil up in despair with equal venom.

Critics were unanimous in the condemnation, branding it "irredeemably dreadful", a new sitcom low, loaded with humourless gags and underdeveloped characters.

"Clive, talk me through my proud erection," says Gerald in a meeting about speed bumps" - the sort of jokes Elton once sneered at.

The humour was lowest common denominator fare that misfired. Audiences turned off and the BBC quietly axed after one series. Some found it was hard to believe that this dross was written by the man behind Blackadder and The Young Ones. Except Ben was not the sole writer of either. On his own he also created one-series stinkers like Blessed.

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Sir Yellow was a cowardly drunkard who spent his life avoiding fights and chasing women. It was worse than it sounds. Joust awful. By episode three, the audience figures had plummeted so dramatically that ITV moved from 7pm on Friday evening to the early hours of Monday morning. No Sir Prize. (Puns deliberately as bad as the script).

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"Birmingham is a Pakistani town," he said to more gales of mirth; not a world away from Bernard Manning saying of Bradford "Dial 999 there and you get the Bengal Lancers," which was also funnier.

There were mother-in-law jokes and a posh woman called Virginia was called "Vaginia" and "Virginity" (recalling the late reggae star Judge Dread's "Virginia was her name, Virgin for short but we all knew not for long", which again was funnier). When he went for a job as a lollipop man, we got the rib-tickling observation that Bangladeshi drivers can't see over the steering wheel. If you or I submitted a script like that to the BBC we'd be laughed out of the door.

Citizen Khan was commissioned for its subject matter though, rather than its feeble ragbag of stale slapstick, non-jokes, and toilet references. The Beeb wanted a British Muslim comedy. There's nothing wrong with that. But why not get someone genuinely funny involved? The series proved what most viewers knew: you can't run a comedy department on wish lists and box ticking. Here's our Muslim sitcom, here's our transgender one, aren't we ahead of the curve? No. Only one thing matters with sitcom: is it funny? The huge difference between Khan and previous comic monsters from Tony Hancock to David Brent - they were recognisably real and brought to life by genuinely gifted writers.

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The opening few minutes was essentially a flat retread of Python's Dead Parrot sketch as Sara tried to explain to an older woman that her cat had ceased to be, while the deluded owner insisted on asking for all sorts of homeopathic remedies. After she storms off in a fury, Sara tells her assistant which phrases to avoid when speaking to recently bereaved cat owners.

He then recites all of them in front of people before singing Sara a birthday song ending with the line, "Happy birthday, she killed a cat". Anyone who watched beyond that was probably just stunned by the inanity. But be assured it did get in following episodes when Sara's permanently angry French ex turned up and kept shouting for no apparent reason. The late, great TV critic A.A. Gill called it "nails-on-blackboard awful."

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