“I Don’t Need a Brolly, You Wally!”

The greatest crossover event of all time? There’s clearly no contest. It’s Star Trek and Hi-de-Hi!, of course.

This early 90s advert for National Power and Powergen – specifically, for the sale of shares as part of the privatisation of the UK electricity market – exists in a weird hinterland for me. I don’t remember it from the time; I only really got into Star Trek in the mid-nineties.¹ So who knows when I first saw it properly. All I know is that once I finally saw it on YouTube, it hung around in my head, ready to drop into conversation at a moment’s notice.

Even if you’re not keen on the main body swap gag – which is still more tasteful than “Turnabout Intruder” – there’s still plenty to enjoy. I’m a particular fan of Scotty’s paper aeroplane. The ad justifies its existence with Simon Cadell’s “Good afternoon” alone. But as I watched it recently for the 1,585th time, I started to wonder something. Exactly when was this advert shot?

At first, the answer seems obvious – so obvious that I did one of my ill-advised assumptions back in 2018. Surely they would have made this during one of the film productions – either 1989’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, or 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. This is a case of a little knowledge being a very dangerous thing. Because there is at least a reason why I assumed this. And as usual with my stupid obsessions, that reason is to do with the sets.

Let me explain. I knew enough to know that Star Trek: The Next Generation reused many set elements from the TOS films.² Just take a look at the refit Enterprise corridor in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, from 1979:

And compare it to this shot from the first episode of TNG in 1987, “Encounter at Farpoint”:

By the time you get to the later films, with TNG already in production, the reuse can become even more blatant. Especially with sets which have limited screen time. Compare the transporter room in 1989’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier:

And then this shot from TNG’s “The Hunted” in 1990:

My favourite example of reuse is in 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Here is the Federation President’s office:

Which is, of course, TNG’s Ten Forward, seen here in 1992’s “Power Play”:

I could do this all day, but we’re straying from the point. And that point is: when we briefly see the engine room in Star Trek VI, Scotty is pretty much just standing in an unmodified TNG engine room set. Even the graphics in front of him are distinctly 24th century, rather than 23rd:

And this is why I assumed our advert at the beginning of this piece was shot at the same time as Star Trek V or VI: because there was already precedent for these films using distinctly TNG-era dressed sets. Scotty sitting in the Enterprise-D engine room in our advert made my brain leap for what the TOS films were doing, not TNG itself.

But there’s a problem with this. And the problem becomes very obvious when faced with our next question: exactly when did this advert air?

*   *   *

The answer to this is surprisingly hard to find out. The date usually given is simply “1990”, presumably due to the 1990 copyright notice at the start of the advert. But I needed something more specific than that.

Let’s start with the end date for this campaign first. There was more than one advert in the series; take a look at this one featuring Uri Geller:³

This gives the end date of the shares offer as Wednesday 6th March. The 6th March was a Wednesday in 1991, not 1990. So the very last date this advert could run was the 6th March 1991.

Next up: when did the campaign start? After much searching, I found this report in the Newcastle Journal, published 10th January 1991:

This splendidly confirms that the specific advert we’re discussing started airing on the date this article was published. Meaning although it would have been shot in 1990, it was actually broadcast the following year. Specifically, between the 10th January – 6th March 1991.⁴

Which gives us a few problems, if we thought that this advert was made during the production of the films. Star Trek VI is immediately out: shooting for that film started in April 1991, a month after the share offer was closed. But Star Trek V is hardly any better; that film was shot between October and December 1988. It’s extremely unlikely that the share offer would have been organised in that much detail two years before the advert was transmitted.

All of which leaves us with a lot of proof about what didn’t happen, but not an awful lot about what did. Luckily, this is where I rely on people who know far more than me to shove me in the right direction.

*   *   *

So, thanks to James Cooray Smith, who pointed me towards that golden thing for any researcher: a contemporary article which tells you everything you need to know about the subject, and more besides.

Our answer lies in cult television magazine TV Zone – specifically Issue 15, dated February 1991. Brilliantly, it has an entire page going behind-the-scenes on the advert. The whole thing is worth a read – I’m not going to parrot it all back to you:

Which means we finally have our answer. The advert was shot on the 26th, 27th and 28th November 1990. And a quick bit of digging over on Star Trek wiki Memory Alpha reveals that this is right in the middle of production of “Clues“, an episode of TNG’s fourth season.⁵ The shooting crew for the advert would have had to carefully work around the main TNG unit, to make sure they didn’t get in the way.

And there you have it. The story of how one of my favourite things in the world – Jeffrey Fairbrother looking bemused in the Enterprise-D’s engineering room – came to be. I’m sure everyone who has ever watched it on YouTube and then left a comment feels the same.

RichardM8422
Didn’t need that prat at the end.

The internet doesn’t deserve nice things.

1. Blame my Dad wanting to see the 6 O’Clock News on BBC1, instead of me being allowed to watch BBC2. ↩

2. For more on this, see Trek website Ex Astris Scientia, particularly this article on set reuse, which the examples given here are mainly taken from. ↩

3. You are very sympathetic, yes. ↩

4. The advert may well have stopped airing at least a couple of days before the share offer ended, but these dates are close enough for our purposes. ↩

5. “Clues” first aired in the US on the 11th February 1991 – right in the middle of the “Power” ad campaign airing in the UK. Coincidentally, that episode has its own link to British comedy – the plot is extremely similar to Red Dwarf‘s “Thanks for the Memory”, broadcast three years earlier. ↩

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