Amol Rajan sits in, with Ben Elton and Ward Thomas

From comedian & writer Paul Kerensa:
Delighted to be on the same show as Ben Elton – just seen him down the corridor... He inspired me to become a comedy writer. I met him in the 90s – between him adding Blackadder Goes Forth and The Thin Blue Line to his sitcom-writing CV. After he signed my VHS cassettes, I asked for writing advice. Mr Elton said, “just go and do it” – or might have been “just go”. Can’t remember. Regardless, thanks to that, two decades on I’ve helped write a couple of sitcoms – Not Going Out, Miranda – though my own self-created show is yet to come good. But hope is at the heart of all sitcoms as characters try to come good. 
Even monsters like Blackadder or Basil Fawlty try to better themselves, to leave the trenches, or Torquay’s budget hotel sector. Sitcoms hold up a mirror to us: a Problem of the Week gets worse at first, and our hero blames the apparent idiots around him – Baldricks and Joey Tribbianis. But they might actually have the best ideas, the most cunning of plans. These are bizarrely moral tales. The problem is solved, the proud are humbled, comeuppance comes, and the world is as it should be... Till next week when when everything resets for another of life’s hurdles. As we go, we laugh, at ourselves. So has it always been – before even the time period of the first Blackadder. 
Two thousand years ago, Jesus told stories that levelled society, that elevated the underdog. His parables are mini-sitcoms... ...In ‘The Good Samaritan Life’, pious priests ignore a poor beaten traveller, but in a plot twist, the unlikely title character comes to the rescue. ...In ‘Men Behaving Prodigally’, a wasteful son is welcomed back by his father in the big final party scene, to the other son’s annoyance. ...In ‘Only Fools and Lost Sheep’ (tenuous, that one), a shepherd leaves ninety-nine others for the one sheep that’s got away. I think Jesus used comedy too – though our tastes have changed over two millennia.
He talks of ignoring the speck in someone else’s eye till you’ve got this plank out of your own. Comic exaggeration – even the language of his family trade, carpentry. The stories we tell, and watch, help us laugh at ourselves, when we’re in The Thick of It, as we Keep Up Appearances, Till Death Do Us Part, Goodnight Sweetheart.