The BBC never did commission a second series of Home Time, the 2009 sitcom set in Coventry. Shame – its austerity years’ premise was timely. Ten years after leaving, Gaynor, a 29-year-old Cov native, was returning to her home town impecunious after failing to cut it in that London. Tragi-comically, she moved back into her parents’ home, where adversity compelled her to wear her 10-year-old wardrobe which, there’s no easy way to say this, included a Geri Halliwell union flag fright frock.

Coventry, insisted her mates, had improved since Gaynor last lived there. “A lot’s changed,” said Mel. “We’ve got an Ikea now.” Becky told Gaynor how sophisticated Coventry has become since she left – even the petrol station now sells sushi!

This is very often how British cities appear in sitcoms – they that exist on screen at all: to have their provincial hubris skewered, to have their civic pride curdle into stock joke. If, for example, Torquay’s tourist board used Fawlty Towers to lure holidaymakers, they would be overrun by tourists with a penchant for crap service and/or exquisite senses of irony.

Part of this is because British comedy is fixated on failure. Our greatest sitcoms are about personal failure (that’s why Steptoe and Son is, essentially, a Greek dynastic tragedy melded to the Russian drama of thwarted life becoming a slow death) and/or systematically satirise characters who, if they get above themselves, get punished. Perhaps that’s why Dad’s Army co-creator Jimmy Perry told me once that the key to the successful British sitcom was to create characters who never succeed. “In America it’s different, and in France or Germany they just wouldn’t be amused by these characters,” he said.

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The only really successful comedies in which place has been fundamental, I would argue, are those set in London. The Peckham of Only Fools and Horses, the Wormwood Scrubs of Steptoe and Son, the East End of Till Death Us Do Part, the Chigwell of Birds of a Feather. Perhaps this is because the capital is so diverse and diffuse that defining a locale specifically is essential so the comedy doesn’t get lost in London fog.

Still, let’s not complain too much: you’re probably seething, as you read this, with counterexamples. Here’s one. I remember the final scene of Nice Work, the 1989 adaptation of David Lodge’s novel set in his fictional simulacrum of Birmingham, Rummidge (which made Britain’s second city sound like something you’d do if you got your hands up your lover’s jumper). As Warren Clarke’s Brummie businessman drove round the inner ring road with Randy Crawford on his car stereo, laughing about how the drama had all turned out and yet how he hadn’t quite got off with the diverting academic Haydn Gwynne, I had an unusual feeling: here was a British city, front and centre, beating at the heart of British comedy. Just for once.