Silence, spiral of
Th e best sitcoms have a long and recurring
screen life: The Phil Silvers Show and Dad’s
Army have been introduced and reintroduced
to succeeding generations of audience. Notable
sitcoms from the UK stable have been Till Death
Us Do Part, Steptoe and Son, Th e Likely Lads,
Rising Damp, Th e Good Life, Fawlty Towers, Last
of the Summer Wine, Birds of a Feather, Father
Te d , Goodness Gracious Me and Th e Offi ce; from
the US, a few of many notable sitcoms have
been Bewitched, Rhoda, Ta x i, Cheers!, Cybill,
Roseanne and Frazier.
Brett Mills in Th e Sitcom (Edinburgh Univer-
sity Press, 2010) talks of the ‘comic impetus’,
a force which ‘drives sitcom as an industrial
product and as a genre’. Over the years it has
been characterized by fl exibility, hybridity, and
is a ‘form of programming which foregrounds
its comic intent’ by its length, domestic settings,
character types, shooting style and use of the
laugh track. ‘Promotional material and open-
ing titles for sitcoms,’ writes Mills, ‘signal comic
intentions before the narrative of the programme
is encountered.’
They tell us what the sitcom is not, that is
‘not-news, or not-documentary, or not serious,
as much as they mark them as comic’. Th ere has
been much talk of the ‘death of the sitcom’ (the
UK’s Channel 4 broadcast a documentary Who
Killed the Sitcom? in 2006), but in Mills’s view it
is ‘likely to remain a potent force within televi-
sion for as long as communities want to come
together to enjoy laughter. Th at is, it’s going to be
around for some time’.
▶Gerard Jones, Honey, I’m Home! Sitcoms: Selling the
American Dream (St Martin’s Press, 1992); Nick Lacey,
Narrative and Genre: Key Concepts in Media Studies
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); John Byrne and Marcus
Powell, Writing Sitcoms (A & C Black, 2003); Mary M.
Dalton and Laura L. Linder, eds, Th e Sitcom Reader:
America Viewed and Skewed (University of New York
Press, 2005); Glen Creeber, ed., Th e Television Genre
Book (British Film Institute, 2nd edition, 2008).
Site The theoretical or physical space where a
struggle over meaning and the power to rein-
force a particular meaning occurs.
Situational proprieties Erving Goffman in
Behaviour in Public Places (Free Press, 1963)
employed this phrase to describe rules of
behaviour common to interpersonal and group
situations which oblige participants to ‘fi t in’; to
accept the particular normative behaviour suit-
able for a successful, dissonance-free interaction.
Such properties might be to avoid making a
scene or causing a disturbance; to refrain from
talking too loudly or too assertively; to hold backity to fi ll an embarrassing gap in a conversation.
Th ere is a tendency in our culture to perceive
silence caused by lapses during a conversation
as awkward. Myers and Myers point out that
masking behaviours, which include coughing,
whistling and sighing, are often employed to
cover up such lapses until someone thinks of
something to say. Th e use and acceptability of
silence does vary from one culture to another.
See apache silence; communication, non-
verbal (nvc); silence: strategic silence.
Silence, spiral of See noelle-neuman’s spiral
of silence model of public opinion, 1974.
Sipdis (secret Internet protocol router
network distribution) US military electronic
database run by the Defence Department in
Washington, also serving American embassies
worldwide. In 2010 Sipdis proved itself vulner-
able to hacking when the contents of ambas-
sadorial reports and exchanges were revealed to
public view in vast quantities. See wikileaks.
Sitcom Situation comedy on TV, the comedy
growing out of context and recurringly gener-
ated or fuelled by amiable antagonism of
one kind or another. Where the soap opera
demands a substantial range of characters, the
sitcom generally focuses upon narrow circles of
acquaintance and relationship, such as families
or groups of friends. Rarely does the narrative
of one instalment of a sitcom continue from
the previous one or continue to the next, again
contrasting with the soap whose narrative key is
balancing a number of ongoing stories and spin-
ning these along over days and weeks.
Each instalment of a sitcom begins with a situ-
ation that is resolved within a single timescale.
Characters may be rounded, even complex, but
rarely do they, or the situations they are involved
in, develop or change. Th is does not mean that
they are sealed against the events of the real
world; indeed they often refl ect real-world condi-
tions and make use of current issues and trends.
For example, the UK sitcom Men Behaving Badly
explored, amusingly and wittily, the ‘gender war’
of the 1990s in which men had to adjust to the
threat to their traditional dominance by women
confi dent that the future is theirs.
Writers of sitcoms have succeeded in creat-
ing diverse themes, from comedy in prison –
Porridge, to comedy in space – Th e Red Dwarf,
to aliens on earth – Th ird Rock from the Sun. Th e
Korean War was the setting for one of the best
and most incisive sitcoms, MASH, starring Alan
Alda, while the zany antics of New York’s thirty-
somethings in Friends proved a worldwide
success.