English actor and stand-up Kevin Bishop has claimed that political correctness is generating “a tough climate” for many comedians at the moment.

The 36 year old was the star of BBC One’s special recommissioning of the classic sitcom ‘Porridge’ on Sunday night (August 28th), and spoke to Digital Spy before it was aired to speak about the state of comedy in 2016. Bishop reckons that he would never be able to broadcast the kind of material that helped bring him to stardom in the noughties.

“I probably wouldn't get away with half the stuff that I used to do on Channel 4,” Bishop. “I wouldn't get away with it now, it just wouldn't get commissioned, probably for good reasons!”

Kevin BishopKevin Bishop thinks political correctness is severely limiting the ability of comedians to operate

“It's not easy being a comedian nowadays – our material and our subjects are getting slimmer and slimmer. We're finding it hard to take the mickey out of anything now, because of political correctness.”

With the success of Brendan O’Carroll’s extremely popular but critically reviled sitcom ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’ over the last few years, many have predicted that the British public’s thirst for the ‘edgy’ comedy of the noughties is petering out and that tastes are getting more traditional.

Another classic sitcom, ‘Open All Hours’, returned a few years ago, and ‘Are You Being Served?’ was also given the green-light for a one-off special in the same manner as ‘Porridge’ – the prison sitcom in which Bishop plays Ronnie Barker’s character Norman Stanley Fletcher.

Bishop too has detected this trend, and explained why he thinks an old-fashioned sense of humour is returning.

“I think the reason why ‘Mrs Brown's Boys’ is so successful, or ‘Still Open All Hours’, is because comedians were always pushing the envelope. I definitely fall into that bracket myself, my stuff's always been very edgy and very on the nose and quite over the mark in some aspects, because that was what expected of us.”

“But we've done that. People have seen that… I wouldn't say its nostalgia, but I think people miss those good, daft laughs and those real characters. People miss that broad humour.”

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