They say familiarity breeds contempt, but when it comes to telly it appears that familiarity breeds warm and fuzzy feelings of comfort, a bit like popping a couple of tamazepam of an evening followed by a nice glass of 20-year-old single malt. Our commercial channels are apparently struggling to find more than one or two new shows to give us per season so they’ve fallen back on that old staple of desperate broadcasters everywhere – the repeats. Not that this is anything new, I hasten to add, and I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing, just sometimes.

On one hand you have the kind of repeats where an episode of a series is broadcast on one day, and then the same episode is broadcast on another day sometime before the next instalment, and so on. This trick is just a way to fill in dead time for the broadcaster and typically the shows are broadcast either during the daytime or late evenings. For poor saps like me who end up watching a lot of TV it all gets quite confusing. It’s like being Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. You’ll be watching one of those interior design shows and think the curtains they’re putting in this week look just like the ones from that other show the other day, and after fifteen minutes you’ll realise it is in fact exactly the same programme.

The other kind of repeats are the ones where you have a series, normally a long-running comedy show, which as soon as the end credits roll on the last episode the announcer says, “And tomorrow we’ll be showing season one episode one of this show, and spending the next six months broadcasting the same stuff you’ve been watching for the last half a year. Enjoy.” We have at least five endlessly-repeating shows being broadcast at the moment:

Friends – Running for ten years until 2004, and looking to be repeated for the next fifty. Set in a New York bizarrely devoid of black people.

Frasier – Cheers spin-off also running until 2004. Consistently funny and packed full of wry performances, easily one of the best sitcoms of the 90s.

The Simpsons – Still-running longest-lasting animated series ever. Generally genius in character, gets surprisingly dull when broadcast every day on Sub TV. Everybody Loves Raymond – Ended in 2005 and broadcast ever since, this show nearly always ends with the main cast going to sleep – a situation familiar to the viewer.

Will & Grace – Originally broadcast 1998-2006, the only mainstream comedy with main characters who are gay, Jewish, or Harry Connick Jr.

All these shows have their moments, but, Frasier aside, they were all much funnier the first time around. Plus they’re all American. Being half-British I reckon there are plenty of brilliant comedies from this side of the pond that deserve to be shown again (and again). I’m waiting for Blackadder, The It Crowd, I’m Alan Partridge and The Thick of It to (re)appear on our screens. Maybe the problem with these is that the runs are relatively so limited. Sub TV will only get two weeks of daily showings out of each of those, whereas they get several months with Friends et al, removing the need for the channel’s schedulers to actually do their job more than twice a year. Now where’s my Tamazepam?

NICK BARLOW