An Evening at Television Centre

There is a certain kind of deranged comedy fan, who has a very particular kind of deranged list. It’s a list which can bring you nothing but pain. “Which sitcom episodes would you love to have been in the studio audience for, but weren’t?” Bonus points if you hadn’t even been born at the time of the recording.

I am a deranged comedy fan. And my deranged list includes the Fawlty Towers episode “The Kipper and the Corpse”, the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned”, and the One Foot in the Grave episode “The Trial”. Somebody seriously needs to invent a time machine. Screw killing Hitler, I’ll spend most of my time hanging around various TV studios.

But one show has just leapt right to the top of my list. Not because it’s a seminal episode of sitcom, although it is very, very good. But because of what I’ve discovered about the studio recording itself.

Let’s take a look at the first episode of In Sickness and in Health, broadcast on the 1st September 1985. With, of course, a cracking theme tune by Chas & Dave. These first series lyrics are often forgotten now in favour of the revised ones for the second series¹, but they’re still great:

And because I suffer from the severe mental disorder of being desperate to know exactly when programmes were recorded, I did the requisite digging, and put together this little list for Series 1:

Oooh, so, Episode 1 as broadcast was shot as a genuine pilot, four months before the rest of the series. That’s interesting. Or, y’know, interesting to people like us, anyway. We can also see that the series started transmitting before Episodes 5 and 6 had been recorded, and that the Christmas episode was shot a couple of months after the rest of the series.

As for the location material: the film sequences for the pilot were shot on the 9th, 16th and 17th March, and the ones for the rest of the series were shot on the 8th – 20th July, and the 29th July. There was no filming required for the Christmas episode; it was shot entirely in the studio.

Let’s take a closer look at the pilot for a minute, though. For instance, the football match at the end of the episode?

This is a slightly uneasy mix of location material shot on film on the 9th/16th March, and VT footage from Match of the Day. Specifically, Manchester United v. West Ham, on the 9th March 1985. This was that year’s FA Cup Quarter Final, just three weeks before the studio recording date. Manchester United won 4-2. I can hear Alf’s explosion from here.

But none of that is what I’m really interested in here. Instead, let’s take a glance at often-forgotten part of any sitcom recording: the audience warm-up. It’s an utterly thankless task to keep everybody entertained while the cameras aren’t running; they haven’t come to see you, after all. And yet they’re a hugely important part of the experience. I’ve seen my fair share of great ones and terrible ones over the years, and they can make all the difference between the recording being a relatively pleasant affair, and it being an absolute nightmare. If you’ve ever been tempted to underestimate what Bobby Bragg brought to proceedings, you haven’t watched a certain comedian make a complete dog’s breakfast of an Up the Women recording.²

Now, for most of the first series of In Sickness and in Health, the warm-up was Jeff Stevenson, who is this fella here.³ But that wasn’t the case for the pilot.

Because the pilot’s warm-up? Chas & Dave themselves.

And all of a sudden, this episode rocketed straight to the top of sitcoms I wish I could have seen recorded. Even though I was only aged three at the time. Because surely, surely the way Chas & Dave entertained the audience was with a right old Cockney knees-up, or at least as much of a knees-up as a studio in Television Centre would allow. And instead of all the same old warm-up jokes we’ve heard endlessly before, they must have just sung a load of songs between takes.

A free Chas & Dave concert, and a damn good episode of sitcom, all in one evening? Yes please. It surely has a high likelihood of being one of the most sheer fun episode recordings which ever took place at TV Centre.

This is the melancholy of TV archive research. The number of things you realise you’ve forever missed out on gets longer by the day. Whether it’s sitting at home, watching a piece of television which has long-since been wiped… or getting off your arse to go to TV Centre, and getting an unexpected concert with your sitcom. You find so many places and points in time you wish you’d been. No wonder some people don’t like looking backwards.

You constantly find new ways to get mildly irritated.

1. “Bloody poorer, that’s a fact!”, etc. ↩

2. In a rare act of politeness, I’m deliberately not going to mention her name. ↩

3. The paperwork for Episode 2 and Christmas don’t state the warm-up, annoyingly. ↩

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