Last time, I talked at length about the stock footage used in the opening titles of Hi-de-Hi! They took us on a whirlwind tour of important news stories from the late 50s/early 60s, and do a beautiful job of setting up the mood of the show before Ted even mentions his latest scheme.
The closing credits take a different tack. We’re still in newsreel land, but they’re not of important news stories of the day. Instead, it’s a trip through actual footage of holiday camps from the period. It’s the perfect goodbye to each episode, and again adds a real sense of verisimilitude to the show. It also seems to look like a gift to any researcher tracing down the origin of the clips used; surely, if anything, clips of people having fun would be even more delightful to wallow in?
Sort of. In fact, I’ve had a few problems researching this footage, which makes it rather more irritating than I’d hoped. You may eventually get a dopamine hit with this one, but it’ll take a while to get there. Before all that, we have to deal with some exciting sitcom admin. And the major reason for this admin is that unlike the opening titles, which stay the same for every single episode, the footage used in the end credits keeps changing.
To start with, let’s take a look at the end credits for the pilot (TX: 1/1/80).
And here are the first four shots of stock footage in the end credits of the pilot: a close-up of a man eating spaghetti, a wide shot of the table, a man in a checked shirt, and then the bikini contest.
Let’s then look at the very next episode, “Desire in the Mickey Mouse Grotto” (TX: 26/2/81). The important thing to note: there’s an extra shot at the beginning. So this means the first four shots in this episode are of a cheering crowd, a close-up of a man eating spaghetti, a wide shot of the table, and then a man in a checked shirt.1
This additional shot disappears and reappears throughout the following few episodes. So let’s leap ahead to the first episode of Series 3, “Nice People With Nice Manners” (TX: 31/10/82). This adds another additional shot at the beginning, so we now get: a wide shot of a race, a cheering crowd, a close-up of a man eating spaghetti, and then a wide shot of the table.
A further additional shot of the race appears at the start of Series 4 in Co-Respondent’s Course (TX: 12/12/82). But I trust you get the point by now, and don’t need the visuals.
So let’s leap ahead a few years to the start of Series 8, and “Pigs Might Fly” (TX: 8/11/86). It’s worth watching these end credits in full as well:
Hang on, things suddenly look very different. The first four shots are now nothing like they were before. We now have: tea being served, a wide shot of a canteen, a wide shot of a swimming pool, and someone diving into the pool. What’s going on?
Here’s the thing: we have actually seen these shots before. They certainly aren’t new. If we go back to Series 3 and “Nice People With Nice Manners”, those exact shots are present, and in exactly the same order – just later on in the end credits.2
There is, I promise, a reason why I’ve gone into all this in such depth.3 With the odd exception which we’ll get to in the moment, whatever shot the end credits start on, the stock footage then all appears in exactly the same order. The whole reel of footage is, in essence, treated as a loop. Moreover, despite how things initially look, I don’t think the material in the loop itself actually changed throughout the entire run of the show.
As evidence, I submit the gradual appearance of the race footage through the early episodes. Why would the production add a single shot of the crowd cheering to an episode, and then later add another shot before it of the race itself? And then add a further shot of the race a few episodes later? Surely it’s far more likely that that footage was always there on the reel, and they just didn’t start the credits at the point which included those shots?
As to why Series 8 suddenly leaps to a different part of the loop… who knows. Maybe it was a complete accident. Maybe it was somebody new making the end credits. Or maybe, after seven series, they just thought they’d change things up a bit. Note that the “You have been watching” section obscures far more of the stock footage than the rest of the credits; maybe they thought they’d give some of the footage which was usually hidden a chance to shine.
Interestingly enough, this leap to a different point in the loop allows some shots which had never broadcast up until this point a chance to finally be transmitted. These shots of ballroom dancing show up for the first time in “Pigs Might Fly”, and remain there until the end of the run:
I would be highly willing to bet that those shots weren’t newly-sourced and added for this episode. I think they were prepared for the pilot… and just remained unseen for nearly seven years, because the credits were never quite long enough to show them.4
Still awake? Good. Because this is the real reason for bothering to detail all of this: we now have everything we need to come up with a proper list of all the footage we’re searching for, which would be a confusing and incomplete jumble if we hadn’t done the above admin. Rather than listing every single shot, I’ve separated them out into likely groups of related footage, as these will almost certainly be from the same source.
So the footage we’re looking for is as follows:5
Racing
Spaghetti eating contest
Bikini contest
Canteen
Swimming pool
Miniature railway
Sandpit
Regatta
Ballroom dancing
All of which means that we can perfectly identify every single piece of footage listed here, and everything is completely brilliant, yes?
Not exactly. But we can figure out some of the most interesting material. More next time.
UPDATE (5/4/21): This article originally said that there was just a single example of something being removed from the loop: the shot of tea being served. I’ve since discovered that there’s another example of this, in the spaghetti eating competition sequence. I’ve updated the article to reflect this EXTREMELY IMPORTANT NEWS.
At this point I could get into a long and irritating diversion to do with changes in font, colour, whether the circles have soft edges, and when they start using Paul Shane’s version of the theme tune. Believe me, this article is already annoying enough, without going into all that. ↩
Indeed, these shots have been present ever since the pilot, but “Nice People With Nice Manners” gives us an especially good view of them, unobscured by the cast gurning. ↩
Not necessarily a good reason, but you all know what to expect from this site by now. ↩
There are a couple of exceptions to the loop rule, although they take the form of missing shots rather than additional ones. For instance, from “Pigs Might Fly” onwards, the last shot of the spaghetti eating contest with the man in the checked shirt is removed. And in “God Bless Our Family” (TX: 6/12/86) and a number of episodes afterwards, a shot of the tea being served is removed from the end of the credits.
Again, there are any number of reasons why this could be the case, and you could go deep into a guessing game on this one, which would probably prove less than fruitful. It may well just be an error when putting together the loop.
Incidentally, there is a version of this article I could have written which concentrates on how the final shot of the credits keeps changing throughout the run of the series, as well as the opening. But just concentrating on how the opening shots change seemed to be a cleaner way to tell the story. Just take it as read that if the opening shot keeps changing, the closing shot is going to as well. ↩
The screengrabs are taken from various episodes, in order to get the clearest possible view of each shot without the You Have Been Watching obscuring things. ↩