“It doesn’t rain in TV studios!”

It’s odd, how some shows fade from the common memory.

Take How Do They Do That?, a magazine show which aired on BBC1 between 1994-97. You do not require a long explanation of what the point of the show was: the format of the programme is contained entirely within its title. Just ask that question a few hundred times per episode, give some answers, and you have yourself a television programme.

These days, the show mainly known for two things. Among TV presentation fans, it’s known for this behind-the-scenes look at the making of the BBC2 idents. And among Red Dwarf fans, it’s known for this behind-the-scenes look at the model effects for Series VII. And that’s pretty much your lot.

But I have one very, very strong memory of the show. Something which stuck with me for 25 years. The other day, I decided to see if anybody had uploaded it anywhere, not expecting to be rewarded. And blow me down, somebody else had remembered it too.

Here’s the day – the 24th January 1996, although the explanation part of the clip comes from the following week – when the How Do They Do That? studio was flooded.

Usually, when writing about my TV memories, I make an effort to note down what I remember about a show before watching the resulting video. This time, however, I was caught off-guard. I never really expected it to be online, let alone to find it so easily. So my memories of watching this stunt in 1996 are now thoroughly blended with me watching the video in 2021, and they’re difficult to disentangle.

But there is one moment I 100%, absolutely do remember. And that’s the point 36 seconds in, where we cut from studio VT to film.¹ It blew my mind when I first watched it, aged 14. It still fairly blows my mind now. Suddenly, with that one shot change, we see the barriers between different kinds of television breaking down. Magazine shows just aren’t supposed to turn into films on a whim. But this one had. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing.

I’ve always had a love for television which send genres crashing into each other. Red Dwarf is a sitcom crossed with science fiction. Ghostwatch is a drama, done as a live documentary. And here is a normal magazine show, crossed with a disaster movie. There’s nothing that is more designed to send my brain flying off in weird directions than that. It’s exactly the kind of TV that I adore. The fact they actually then went behind-the-scenes in order to tell us how it all worked was the icing on the cake, but that wasn’t the thing I truly loved about the sequence. I loved the initial genre-bending, legitimately odd piece of television.

And this is exactly the kind of thing which TV finds it difficult to do in 2021. No evening magazine show on BBC One is going to have the money to go off to Pinewood Studios and shoot a sequence like this in their water tank. With a few honourable exceptions such as The One Show, evening magazine shows are an endangered species full stop these days, let alone anything else. The budget for television to go out and do spectacular, stupid things like this just isn’t there any more, at least for this kind of show.

Which makes me sad. Because this is one reason why I loved the kind of TV that was around when I was 14. Not because I was 14. Not because of rose-tinted spectacles. But because truly odd, spectacular things like this could happen on a Wednesday evening on BBC1.

And I miss it.

With thanks to KillianM2 for the original YouTube upload. Their YouTube channel has loads of great stuff, that you could – and should – get lost for hours in.

1. Sadly a little obscured by the upload, as the VT sequence has been folded down to half the temporal resolution it would have had on broadcast. But you still get some of the effect. ↩

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