BBC Comedy Festival<\/a> in Liverpool as he made the claim that comedy is the \u201crebel sibling\u201d versus drama. \u201cThe Prince Harry of the TV Royal Family if you will,\u201d he joked. \u201cI won\u2019t say who\u2019s Andrew [Mountbatten-Windsor].\u201d<\/p>\n\n\tPetrie said he therefore \u201cintends to camp outside\u201d new BBC Director General Matt Brittin\u2019s office when he starts next week to \u201cmake sure he understands just how vital it is that the BBC keeps backing comedy.\u201d <\/p>\n
\n\tWhile flagging that scripted comedy is \u201cgoing through a tough patch and has been for a long time,\u201d he said the producers in the room \u201ckeep delivering\u201d with breakout hits like Amandaland, <\/em>just renewed for a third season, and Mackenzie Crook\u2019s Small Prophets, <\/em>which recently became the BBC\u2019s biggest scripted launch of the year. <\/p>\n\n\tPetrie didn\u2019t only celebrate his own hits but pointed to rival shows like Sky\u2019s Saturday Night Live UK <\/em>and Prime Video\u2019s Last One Laughing <\/em>as proof that British comedy is in rude health. <\/p>\n\n\tBut he said \u201cwhat sets the BBC apart is that we are Britain\u2019s biggest comedy backer by far.\u201d \u201cBecause the BBC does not back comedy to make money. We back it for laughs,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd if we weren\u2019t here to support comedy properly, the simple truth is there would be a lot less of it.\u201d <\/p>\n
\n\tThe likes of James Corden, Ruth Jones and Diane Morgan are speaking at the BBC Comedy Fest. The BBC has just renewed six shows including Daisy May Cooper\u2019s Am I Being Unreasonable?, Black Ops <\/em>and Such Brave Girls.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source deadline.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Prince Harry of the TV Royal Family.\u201d That is how BBC comedy boss Jon Petrie characterized his genre competing with the popularity and big budgets of high-end drama, with comedy \u201chaving to fight harder than it should for attention, for status and sometimes for survival.\u201d Petrie was opening the annual BBC Comedy Festival in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2415193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[25507,472741,472742,22730],"class_list":["post-2415192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-bbc","tag-bbc-comedy-festival","tag-jon-petrie","tag-prince-harry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/BBC-Comedy-Boss-Jon-Petrie-On-Prince-Harry-Amandaland-SNL.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2415192"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2415194,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415192\/revisions\/2415194"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2415193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2415192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2415192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2415192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}