Most of our TV shows are stuck indoors, and even if the characters have northern accents, it is hard to pinpoint them on the map. We know that Brookside is set in Liverpool because the credits give the game away, but the characters rarely step outside the wobbly confines of the Close. Our comedies are just as bad. The answer is in Genericsville, Anytown. For British comedy at the moment, the city is merely a convenient backdrop.
TV seems ashamed of our cities.
It is part of a more general malaise where London dominates the UK and everywhere else is the regions. Our negative images, or no images, of Birmingham, Bradford, Sheffield and countless other cities damage this country and TV is partly to blame. The real problem is that we are stuck in the past. Seventies comedies with a strong sense of location were about leery landlords and toothless rag and bone men - Rising Damp and Steptoe and Son. Not even Del Boy could transform Peckham's image.