Inspector Venice

As I continue my trawl through recording dates for the first series of A Bit of Fry & Laurie, I can hear some of you plaintively cry: what is the fucking point, you utter moron?

Whether I have an actual answer, I shall leave to your extremely capable judgement. I think the following is at least vaguely interesting, though. Let’s take a look at Series 1, Episode 4, broadcast on the 3rd February 1989. Nearly eight minutes into the show, we get what appears to be a normal restaurant sketch. That is, until a member of the audience pipes up and claims authorship of the routine. Well, Benjamin Whitrow pipes up, to be exact.

Series 1 of Fry & Laurie doesn’t have too many running threads in it, especially within individual episodes. So it’s a genuine surprise when an antiques shop sketch starts halfway through the show, and the same thing happens:

Beautifully, we are then given just enough time to forget about this running joke. So when a certain Inspector Venice comes to the door near the end of the show, we hopefully don’t guess what happens next.

So, what’s the big mystery? And how can recording dates help us here?

The big mystery is one which occasionally does the rounds on comedy forums and the like, and it involves the quite brilliant script books for the series. Here they are. Hello there.¹

These books contain most of the sketches present in the show, alongside some amusing stage directions, some different bits of dialogue, and plenty of sketches which never made it into the broadcast shows at all. Some of these unused sketches are funnier than the very best transmitted material in other sketch shows.

Oddly enough, the first two interrupted sketches we are discussing here aren’t actually present in the Series 1 book. There is a sketch called “Inspector Venice”, mind. But instead of being interrupted after the first couple of lines, a whole sketch based around the disturbed Inspector Venice appears instead.

Here’s the sketch in full, as seen in the Series 1 script book.

A woman answers the door. Hugh is standing there, in a raincoat and pork pie hat.

HUGH: Good evening, Chief Inspector Venice, Burnham CID. May I come in?
WOMAN: Of course you can, dear. It’s your house.

She turns and walks away, leaving the door open.

HUGH: You stupid woman! You stupid bloody woman! Come back here! Are you mad? I could be anybody! I could be a maniac!
WOMAN: You’re my husband, dear.
HUGH: How do you know that? I mean how do you know that? Have I produced any identification?
WOMAN: No.
HUGH: No, exactly.
WOMAN: But…
HUGH: Ask to see my warrant card.
WOMAN: (Sighs) Can I see your warrant card, dear?
HUGH: Certainly madam. A very wise precaution, if I may say so.

Hugh produces warrant card, and holds it under her nose.

WOMAN: Good, now do you …
HUGH: Well look at it! You haven’t even looked at it! Jesus, I could have bought this in Whitechapel, for all you know. I could be a maniac with a fake warrant card.
WOMAN: Alright. “Chief Inspector…
HUGH: Don’t leave the door open! God almighty! Use the chain, woman! What do you think it’s there for?

She closes door. Hugh stays outside which she reads the card.

WOMAN: (Off) “Chief Inspector Venice, Burnham CID.”

She opens the door again.

Now come in and have your dinner, dear.

HUGH: Come in where?
WOMAN: The kitchen.
HUGH: I’m sorry. I have no authorisation to enter the kitchen.
WOMAN: You don’t need it. It’s your kitchen.
HUGH: Our kitchen, dear.
WOMAN: Our kitchen.
HUGH: You know perfectly well, I cannot enter our kitchen without your special permission.
WOMAN: You have my permission.
HUGH: Haven’t you forgotten something, dear?
WOMAN: What?
HUGH: We agreed that we would both get telephone confirmation of the other’s identity, before either of us gave special permission.
WOMAN: Oh Christ.²
HUGH: Here’s the telephone, dear. And remember. Better safe than cut up into tiny pieces by a maniac pretending to be me.

She dials.

WOMAN: Burnham CID? Have you got an Inspector Venice in your department? (Pause) Thank you very much indeed.
HUGH: Well?
WOMAN: They’ve never heard of you.
HUGH: Damn. Anyway, what’s for supper? Smells great.
WOMAN: They’ve never heard of Inspector Venice.
HUGH: Probably just a joke. We’re always having jokes, down the station.
WOMAN: You’re not a policeman, are you?
HUGH: No. No, I’m not.
WOMAN: What are you?
HUGH: A maniac.

So, what’s going on?

The answer – or, at least, something approaching one – is to be found in the production paperwork that I’ve managed to have a glance at. Because it helpfully contains not only a list of sketches in each show, but also the dates they were recorded on:

This immediately answers a few questions, and poses some new ones.

Firstly, we have an official name for the stolen sketches. The “BBC Comedy Greats” YouTube upload of the first one titles it “Heckler Stops The Show!”, which is rather un-Fry & Laurie. The unofficial Fry & Laurie sketch archive names the three sketches “Awful Smell”, “Antique Shop”, and “Inspector Venice”.

The paperwork refers to the first sketch as “Copyright I”, and the second as “Copyright II”. But then something rather unusual happens. The third sketch is split into two: “Inspector Venice”³, and then “Copyright III”. Clearly, the first part of the sketch is “Inspector Venice”, and the second part with Benjamin Whitrow complaining is “Copyright III”.

Let’s now compare the recording dates for each sketch. “Copyright I”, “Copyright II”, and “Copyright III” were all shot during the same session: on the 22nd January 1989.⁴ But the fragment of “Inspector Venice” we see was shot the previous week, on the 15th January 1989.

Then let’s look at how each of the three sketches transitions into the “stolen sketch” complaint. Both “Copyright I” and “Copyright II” clearly have interaction between Fry & Laurie, and Benjamin Whitrow. But if you look carefully at the transition between “Inspector Venice” and “Copyright III”, there isn’t any actual interaction between them at all. Whitrow’s voice is just dubbed over the end of the sketch, and then we cut to him yelling from the audience.

In other words: “Copyright I” and “Copyright II” are single sketches, written and shot as complete items. But “Inspector Venice”/”Copyright III” is something different; they are two entirely different pieces of material, shot on different days, with the link created in the edit. The lack of interaction between the two parts of “Inspector Venice” and “Copyright III” surely indicates that “Inspector Venice” was actually shot in full on the 15th January. At some point, the production decided that they didn’t want to air the full version of the sketch – either for quality reasons, or for time – and so found a way to cut it short, by integrating it into the stolen sketches motif, shot the following week on the 22nd.

All of which raises the question: is it possible that “Inspector Venice” wasn’t the originally-intended pay-off to the stolen sketches running gag, if most of the sketch was shot, and then dropped close to transmission? Yer rule of three would surely indicate that there was always meant to be three incarnations of the stolen sketches joke, whatever those three incarnations were originally. Was there another pay-off to this gag – scripted, shot, and then dropped in the edit? If so, what was it? Alas, I am out of answers. But hopefully the questions are worth a ponder.

In conclusion, then:

UPDATE (24/8/21): One of the tricky things with these kinds of posts is figuring out when to stop. With this article, I had a whole section which I excised before publication, because I thought it was going too far into the realms of speculation.

But when the comments on here start going into areas I wrote about and then got rid of, I wonder whether my ruthless editing was a little too ruthless. Such is the case here, as Mateja Djedovic raises the following quite reasonable point:

“Honestly, to me “Copyright III” looks like it was just cut from the end of “Copyright II”. Note how BW and the woman are standing in the same place in III as they are in II. Meanwhile, between I and II they change places in the audience. Maybe the original version of III connected into a sketch which was eventually cut along with the final gag with BW which would explain why III feels a bit anticlimactic, more like a call back then a grand finale to a running joke.”

Indeed, this may well be the case. Take a look at the final shots from “Copyright II” and “Copyright III”:

Copyright II

Copyright III

It is very possible that “Copyright III” is literally just an offcut from “Copyright II”. I fancy the camera might be in a slightly different position – possibly a little closer for III? – but that could easily be explained away.

Moreover, if we can be accused of taking the sketch too seriously, then fine, let’s just go the whole hog with it: what has Benjamin Whitrow and his wife been doing between II and III? Hanging around outside the door? The last we saw of him in II, he was storming out of the studio.

Again, I have no answers here. But if the broadcast version of “Copyright III” is genuinely just an offcut of II, then it seems to make it even more likely that there was a further incarnation of this joke which we just never see any of in the final episode.

Which is the kind of thrilling thing which keeps me up at night, I don’t know about you.

1. Series 4 is not present purely because it wouldn’t fit neatly in the picture, not because it’s ostracised. ↩

2. I’d bloody love to see Deborah Norton deliver this line. ↩

3. Let’s be polite and ignore the typo on the paperwork. ↩

4. Just 12 days before broadcast, which is a point I’ll be returning to in an upcoming article. ↩

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