Comedy · 1970s
The 1970s account for 59 of the 654 comedy shows here, and 61 opening sequences.
BBC One carries the most, with 14.
One rebuilt its titles mid-run: The Facts of Life, with three sequences.
59 shows61 sequences
1 sequence
Saturday Night Live
A new cast montage every single season for fifty years — New York at night, the current company photographed in it, and a band playing over the top. The longest-running rotating title sequence on television.
- Season 1
1 sequence
All in the Family
Two people at an upright piano singing about how things used to be — an opening performed live by the cast rather than scored.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFawlty Towers
A hotel sign whose letters are rearranged into a different rude anagram every episode — the earliest running title gag in this catalogue by two decades.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHappy Days
A fifties jukebox theme that started as a closing song and was promoted to the opening once it became a hit record.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThree's Company
A theme that explains the premise, the address and the invitation in about forty seconds, then hands you a farce.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Love Boat
A cruise ship with a new guest cast every week, introduced by name in the titles.
- Season 3
1 sequenceTaxi
A single cab crossing the Queensboro Bridge to Bob James's electric piano — no cast, no jokes, and an unusually melancholy opening for a comedy.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSanford and Son
Quincy Jones writing a harmonica blues for a junkyard — one of the few sitcom themes composed by someone of that stature.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWKRP in Cincinnati
A radio-station sitcom whose theme was written to sound like a record the station would actually play.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Muppet Show
An opening that changes every week by design: Statler and Waldorf get a new heckle, Gonzo gets a new way to fail the closing note, and the arch fills with whoever is in that episode.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Jeffersons
'Movin' On Up' over a family arriving at a Manhattan apartment — a theme that functions as a plot summary and a thesis at once.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGood Times
A Chicago housing project and a gospel-inflected theme whose lyrics nobody has ever fully agreed on.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMork & Mindy
An egg-shaped spacecraft over Boulder, Colorado, and a theme that has to establish an alien, a roommate and a sitcom simultaneously.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBarney Miller
A bass line so good it outlived the show entirely — a police-station sitcom remembered chiefly for forty seconds of funk.
- Season 3
1 sequenceThe Good Life
A couple turning their Surbiton garden into a smallholding, next door to neighbours who would rather they did not.
- Season 1
1 sequenceEl Chavo del Ocho
A boy living in a barrel in a Mexico City tenement, and the most watched Spanish-language series ever made.
- Seasons 4–6
1 sequenceMaude
The All in the Family spin-off, with a theme song that lists historical women and lands on Maude.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSoap
A narrator recapping a plot that has already become unmanageable, ending every week on the same weary question about what will happen next.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMind Your Language
An adult English class of national stereotypes, opened by a blackboard that spells the title out in every student's hand.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequenceMinder
Arthur Daley and his minder, and a theme song sung by Dennis Waterman about Dennis Waterman.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRising Damp
Leonard Rossiter as a boarding-house landlord, and the most successful ITV sitcom of the seventies.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Odd Couple
A narrated premise about two divorced men sharing an apartment, delivered in the tone of a public information film.
- Season 2
1 sequenceTo the Manor Born
A widow forced to sell the manor and move into the lodge at the end of its drive.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBenson
The Soap butler promoted into his own series and eventually into the lieutenant governorship.
- Season 2
1 sequencePorridge
Ronnie Barker inside HMP Slade, opened by a judge's sentencing read over the prison gates.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRhoda
The first Mary Tyler Moore spin-off, following Rhoda Morgenstern back to New York.
- Season 1
1 sequenceIt Ain't Half Hot Mum
A Royal Artillery concert party in wartime India, and the Croft series that has aged worst.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Two Ronnies
Barker and Corbett behind a news desk, with a pair of spectacles as the logo for sixteen years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceNot the Nine O'Clock News
The sketch show that launched Rowan Atkinson and Mel Smith, opening on a parody of the bulletin it was scheduled against.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSome Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em
Frank Spencer in a beret, and stunts Michael Crawford performed himself.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOpen All Hours
Ronnie Barker again, this time behind a corner-shop till with a faulty cash register.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRainbow
Zippy, George and Bungle, and a theme about a paintbox in the sky that ran for twenty years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin
A middle manager who fakes his own death by leaving his clothes on a beach, weekly.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Goodies
Three men on a trandem who will do anything, anytime — sketch comedy shot like a silent film.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhatever Happened to the Likely Lads?
The sequel to the 1964 series, about two friends who have grown in opposite directions.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Electric Company
The Children's Television Workshop's reading show for older children, with Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno in the cast.
- Season 1
1 sequenceZoom
A children's programme made entirely of what children sent in, down to the address they had to sing.
- Season 1
1 sequenceButterflies
Carla Lane's series about a housewife considering an affair and never quite having one.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRentaghost
An agency staffed entirely by ghosts, which is a sitcom premise and a title sequence at the same time.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSigmund and the Sea Monsters
A sea monster thrown out by his family for being unable to frighten anyone, hidden in a beach clubhouse.
- Season 1
1 sequenceKing of Kensington
A Toronto corner-shop owner in the Kensington Market, and the sitcom a fifth of the country watched.
- Season 2
1 sequenceLaverne & Shirley
A skipping chant and two women walking through Milwaukee — the Happy Days spinoff that outrated its parent.
- Season 1
1 sequenceArchie Bunker's Place
All in the Family continued as a bar, four more years after the series that made Archie famous had finished.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAre You Being Served?
The Grace Brothers department store, opened by a lift announcing each floor's stock.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Bob Newhart Show
A psychologist commuting through Chicago, filmed at the pace of a man who is not looking forward to his day.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCitizen Smith
John Sullivan's first series, a Tooting revolutionary with no revolution, written five years before Only Fools and Horses.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDiff'rent Strokes
Two boys from Harlem adopted by a Park Avenue widower, in the sitcom that turned a nine-year-old's disbelief into a catchphrase.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Dukes of Hazzard
A Georgia county run by the man who owns it, and a car that spends a good part of every hour off the ground.
- Season 1
3 sequences
The Facts of Life
A girls' boarding school in Peekskill, spun off from Diff'rent Strokes and running three years longer than it.
- Season 1
- Season 7
- Season 8
1 sequenceGoing Straight
Fletcher out of prison and trying to stay out, six episodes after Porridge finished.
- Season 1
1 sequenceM*A*S*H
A comedy that opens every week with casualties being carried off a helicopter. Nurses and surgeons run for the landing pad while the theme plays underneath — an instrumental of a song the network would not let anyone sing, because of what its chorus says.
- Seasons 1–11
1 sequenceOnly When I Laugh
Three men in a hospital ward who are not especially ill, and the registrar who cannot discharge them.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRobin's Nest
The second Man About the House spin-off, with Robin running a bistro in Fulham.
- Season 2
1 sequenceThe Ropers
Three's Company's landlords given their own series, from the British spin-off George and Mildred.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSCTV
A sketch show shaped as a fictional television station, which let it parody the whole schedule rather than one programme at a time.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
A married double act insulting each other between songs, in the variety hour that made Cher a television star.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTerry and June
Suburban misunderstanding for eight years, and the programme most often used as shorthand for what alternative comedy rebelled against.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWorzel Gummidge
A scarecrow who swaps heads for different moods, played by a former Doctor Who.
- Season 1
1 sequenceYou Can't Do That on Television
The Ottawa-made sketch show that gave Nickelodeon its slime, and its house style for a decade.
- Season 1