VICTOR: You know what I’m like with weddings. It was bad enough at your nephew’s last year when that organ exploded.
MARGARET: Don’t remind me.
VICTOR: Then there was the father of the bride coming down with that unfortunate fungal infection. Your mother turned round and thought it was the Phantom of the Opera. Thought we’d never going to get her to stop screaming. God, that bloody video cameraman they hired. Got us to pose under a tree, and a bird’s nest fell on my head. Stood there like Jesus of Nazareth. Egg yolk dribbling down my nose.
Sometimes, making a TV show will pose a very particular production problem, which will take some creative thinking to solve.
Take the ending of the One Foot in the Grave episode “Monday Morning Will Be Fine”, broadcast on the 2nd February 1992. The brilliant payoff to the above discussion between Victor and Margaret is that we think it’s Renwick writing one of those gags which happen off-screen, and it’s funny because it’s merely reported. He then brings back the gag as the climax of the episode, entirely unexpectedly. My expectations were confounded and from thence the humour arose.
And the way he brings the gag back is through a trail for You’ve Been Framed!, which Margaret just happens to see in the TV shop as she’s ordering their new telly.
The question, then: how can a TV show broadcast on the BBC fake a section of ITV output, while using the bare minimum of material from ITV itself?
Let’s take a look at the sequence of events.
(0:07) We start off in a slightly peculiar manner. Yes, that’s Pigeon Street playing behind Margaret there. Not a programme which has ever been broadcast on ITV. Presumably, it’s playing the part of “generic kids cartoon which might plausibly be broadcast on the light channel”. Tsk. Whatever.1
(0:30) Ah, the lovely 1989 generic ITV ident. This is the only piece of material in this sequence – barring the logo in the corner of the following trail – which is actually from ITV itself. The paperwork describes it as “supplied by Visual Connection”, a company which seems to be difficult to research in any particular detail. So that’s one for the pile, because I’m sure there’s an interesting story there.
(0:41) OK, here is where things get good. The start of the You’ve Been Framed! trail itself, and it’s a man falling off a horse… with hilarious results. So if this doesn’t come from You’ve Been Framed! itself, where does it come from?
Answer: the BBC’s The Late, Late Breakfast Show. Specifically, the edition broadcast on the 25th October 1986.2 This clip was the winner of that week’s “Golden Egg Awards”, a segment of the show which I think these days is more associated with proper TV programme outtakes; the BBC equivalent It’ll Be Alright on the Night. But home videos were part of the mix too, and this is a genuine home video blooper… which, amusingly, was first broadcast four years before You’ve Been Framed! began.
There are two other elements in play here. Firstly, the music. This is a suitably ridiculous library track called “Master Quiz”, written by Warren Bennett, from the album Video Friendly 3. I detect the “influence” of Blockbusters, myself.
Oh, and the voiceover? That would be a certain Angus Deayton. Already part of One Foot in the Grave, and known to be perfect for the role, given the announcer roles he was doing in Alexei Sayle’s Stuff at around the same time… co-written by Renwick!
(0:52) An shot of the audience, looking for all the world like an LWT light entertainment show at the South Bank. But it isn’t. So what is it?
It is, in fact… an audience shot from exactly the same episode of The Late Late Breakfast Show as the horse clip above. And you suddenly realise how clever the production have been. They’ve taken the most raucous, ITV-like programme that the BBC had made in the recent past… and reappropriated it as a pretend ITV audience. Amazing.
(0:57) The Victor Meldrew home video itself. And again, we see how brilliantly the production does things here; the paperwork for this episode specifically mentions “Victor Meldrew home video specially shot on Video 8”. In other words: they took a domestic camcorder, and shot the clip for real, exactly as it would have been within the reality of the show. They didn’t just take a broadcast quality image and stick an ●REC logo on it.
Does that make it funnier? I would say… yes, absolutely. God bless Susan Belbin.
(1:31) And to round off our little slice of not-ITV, we have an advert. And it’s a particularly famous one: the Carling Black Label Squirrel/Mission Impossible spot:
This was licensed directly from ad agency WCRS, and nothing to do with ITV directly. And note yet again how perfect a choice this was: it’s a hugely recognisable advert, and so absolutely sells the conceit that this is ITV, but it steers well clear of any potential undue prominence concerns. We get no shot of the actual product at all, in fact.
And there we have it. How to create a trail for You’ve Been Framed!, without using a shred of footage from the show. And don’t you feel better for knowing that?
With thanks to Milly Storrington.
And no, there is no chance for anyone to change the channel – we see Pigeon Street fading out and leading directly to the next piece of material. ↩
There would only be two more editions; the final show was broadcast on the 8th November 1986. The show was then cancelled under the horrible circumstances that we all know about. ↩
15 comments
Zoomy on 10 December 2021 @ 6am
Am I misremembering, or didn’t the squirrel footage come from a BBC show in the first place, before it was used in the advert? I’m surprised they needed to get it from the ad agency…
Jonny Haw on 10 December 2021 @ 10am
Yes Zoomy, I was going to say the same thing. That squirrel assault course idea started out on a BBC documentary called Daylight Robbery in 1988. The Carling ad was clearly “inspired” by this, but I *think* they reshot their own version and added the Mission Impossible music?
Mateja Djedovic on 10 December 2021 @ 10am
What about the shot of the man crawling out of a ditch? Is that also from “The Late Late Breakfast Show”?
Belperite on 10 December 2021 @ 11am
Where was the TV shop filmed? It looks on-location?
Zoomy on 10 December 2021 @ 11am
It’s 30-year-old recollections here, but I always thought the Carling Black Label ad used exactly the same sequence as I’d recently seen on the BBC show, just with the addition of the owls at the end. This kind of detail is what I love about this blog… :)
Marc Jones on 10 December 2021 @ 11am
Only tangentially related, but when I bought the dvd of RTD’s Midsummer Night’s Dream a few years ago I was intrigued to find the snippet of the You’ve Been Framed theme used in the broadcast version had been replaced by something else for the dvd.
Jonny Haw on 10 December 2021 @ 11am
Ah you’re right Zoomy – having found the follow up documentary on YouTube, it’s exactly the same shot (albeit with different music). Seems odd at that time for BBC footage to basically become an entire commercial for lager – and even odder that OFITG then had to license it back from the ad agency!
Jakob1978 on 10 December 2021 @ 12pm
Interestingly, “Daylight Robbery” is on YouTube here
https://youtu.be/jOzAfTBVtX8
And if go to about 20:07 into it, you can see that the footage used in One Foot in the Grave, looks pretty identical to the scene in the documentary. So I checked the Carling ad and I think it’s the same footage, just with extra close ups of the squirrel inserted.
https://youtu.be/Qen5kgikbVI
Marc Jones on 10 December 2021 @ 1pm
Of course, that production featured among its cast Richard Wilson. So he’s been in TWO shows where You’ve Been Framed has been re-created/pastiched.
Big McIntosh on 11 December 2021 @ 5am
Nice article John. By coincidence I relatively recently looked up that episode of One Foot in the Grave for that actual scene because I’d noticed in 1992 that the narrator sounded like Angus Deayton and I’d always wondered if I was right. However the closing titles didn’t mention who did it. Thanks for confirming that it was him.
Gerald Wiley on 11 December 2021 @ 8am
Is the VO definitely Angus Deayton? I actually wondered whether it was David Renwick, who does do something similar in another episode
Rob Keeley on 11 December 2021 @ 1pm
I’m pretty sure that’s Deayton.
They should have used Dogtanian for the cartoon as that was shown on both BBC and ITV! Homegrown probably came cheaper.
Stuart Allen on 12 December 2021 @ 7pm
Amazing work as always! Paperwork didn’t say where the TV shop was did it?
John Hoare on 13 December 2021 @ 10pm
Fantastic work, everyone. I had no idea that the squirrel footage was taken from a BBC show, but it definitely is exactly the same.
I deliberately don’t usually mention anything too in-depth about contracts and fees etc, but it’s probably worth noting that the advert was licensed from WCRS for no fee. So the BBC didn’t have to pay to use their own material!
To answer a couple of other questions:
a) It’s definitely Angus Deayton doing the voiceover – he’s specifically credited for it in the paperwork.
b) No idea where the shop is, I’m afraid. OFITG was normally shot “in and around Bournemouth”, so it’ll be somewhere there, I expect.
Sean on 23 December 2021 @ 4am
The assistant was played by Helen Patrick. I found an interview with her regarding her time as young Nora Batty on First of the Summer Wine. She left acting behind in the 1990s to become a restaurateur and in 2008 established Fine Wine Works with her husband. She is now based in the south of France. There’s an email address for her on their website, should anyone want to ask her the location of the store. I’d imagine that would be a strange experience when checking her emails: wine, wine, hello do you remember the location of the electrical goods store where you played a sales assistant who sold a NICAM Stereo television to Annette Crosbie’s character in One Foot In The Grave?, wine, wine, more wine.