“We’re featuring Paul Nicholls, Ewan McGregor, Jay Kay, Gary Barlow, Johnny Depp and the Backstreet Boys with their new facial hair,” says celebrity editor Paul Hart “It makes them older-looking, which girls find hornier. This month’s issue includes handlebar ‘taches reminiscent of the Mexican bandit in The Roadrunner.
For its August issue, GQ asked a journalist to grow a ‘tache and record others’ reactions to it Teenzine Bliss is covering the trend in a July issue. Men’s style magazine Arena has made a fetish of fashion stories with bearded or moustached models. Forget goatees – we’re talking German woodcutter/Santa Claus growths. In pursuit of the hirsute, one fashion editor asked members of the gay hair-loving and beard-wearing fraternity, the Bears Club, to pose for a recent story. David Beckham dishier with a beard? Ryan Giggs fancied for his chest rug? You bet! Beards may have once signalled mung-bean-munching sensibilities, but style-press moguls and teenagers alike are nestling up to the notion that they’re really quite fetching.

And while chest hair once screamed sad Seventies playboy, a pelt now makes hearts melt. But Stressed Eric is still shit.Jane Bussmann is the author of `Once In A Lifetime’, and a comedy writer for BBC and Channel 4.. Thirteen weeks is long enough for viewers to notice a show, and almost long enough for schedulers to run out of blockbusters There will be a second wave of British comedy. Even comedy shows with brilliant premises need a second series to find their feet – watch the pre-Ben Elton Blackadder episodes or the cack-handed animation of the early Simpsons episodes, when, in the throes of child star petulance, Bart was still missing his cues.But there is a pinhole in the bucket over writer’s heads: the US practice of commissioning much longer runs than the standard six-week Britcom. In the place of rep now we have the harsher training ground of stand-up comedy, where audiences think nothing of booing the turns offstage.If comedy isn’t perceived as the mighty force it once was, it’s because of the spite spat that is scheduling, new shows being deliberately scuppered by rival networks. The most cynical Bruce Willis rubbish or 007 misogyny on the other side will stuff a new comedy’s viewing figures and scupper your chances of the crucial, memorable second series. Rep theatre groups perfected the art of the weekly audience show, rehearsing and performing to a live audience over and over again until their timing was primed for a thousand “Don’t tell him, Pike” moments.

But the bulk of Seventies sitcoms weren’t that hot – just think of Richard O’Sullivan mistaking the boss’s wife for a gravy boat while accidentally getting part of his anatomy caught down the babysitter’s cleavage.It’s harder to put a sitcom together these days, too. Jimmy Perry will be the first to tell you he got his techniques – and cast – from the rep theatre of the day. Obviously we remember the high spots like Rising Damp – we can’t forget them since they are repeated ad infinitum. Channel 4 has Graham Norton, the funniest, most natural host since Parkinson. BBC2 has Simon Munnery, whose catchphrase, “Attention scum”, may yet oust “Ooh, you are awful” from the Christmas compilations.The history of TV comedy is subject to alarming revisionism. No one should deny there was a John Cleese before Fierce Creatures, but any list of classic comedy moments should also include the education of Father Dougal in Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews’ Father Ted (Ted: “Now remember [shows toy cow] this is small, and this [points through window at cow] is far away”); Noel Edmonds pompously lecturing The Kids on the evils of a swallowing a “new drug” – brandishing a pill 10 inches across – in Chris Morris’s Brass Eye; the deadpan “news” report of a feral horse plague on the London Underground in The Day Today.Dad’s Army writer Jimmy Perry deserves every royalty cheque but that doesn’t mean everything that has come since has been rubbish.

And I would, in fairness, also find room for something more modern. Like Porridge.Brian Viner is TV critic for the `Independent on Sunday’.JANEBUSSMANNCRITICS INSIST there is nothing funny on television any more There is a contrary argument: that yes there is. “The Blood Donor” episode of Hancock’s Half-Hour – “A pint? Why that’s very nearly an armful!” – featured at number seven, but sadly there was no room for the “Twelve Angry Men” episode – “Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you, did she die in vain?” I would put that right. Take a look at a Galton and Simpson script some time and savour its ingenuity Which brings me back to the poll.

Now, studio audiences go away satisfied if Nick Hancock has said “shag” enough times In 40 years we’ve gone from Tony Hancock to Nick Hancock. Not exactly progress, is it?I don’t want to come over all Mary Whitehouse, but comedy writers had to be more inventive in the past They couldn’t get cheap laughs with naughty words. Once upon a time, British TV comedy was represented by a world-weary Tony Hancock, an indignant Harold Steptoe, a frantic Basil Fawlty. It sums up all that is worst about TV comedy, being both offensively complacent and complacently offensive. So, knowing that decent sitcoms are increasingly elusive, comedy producers chicken out and make panel shows instead, such as They Think It’s All Over I wish it were. There have always been poor sitcoms, of course, but never was so much energy and hype expended on one so feeble.