One of my favourite things about The Fast Show is how many different textures it has.
For instance: it isn’t just a programme which knows which sketches need to be shot on location, and which sketches should be shot in the studio. This is a programme which knows that certain location sketches should be shot on film (Ted & Ralph, Unlucky Alf), and certain location sketches should be VT (The Off-Roaders, Fat Sweaty Coppers). And while I could wax lyrical about how shooting each sketch the right way helps sell the joke better, part of the joy here is even simpler: your eyes don’t have time to get bored.
And then we have Chanel 9. A parody of every foreign news broadcast you might imagine you’d seen on holiday, with accompanying dreadful picture quality, it adds yet another texture to the show. Let’s take a look at the first Chanel 9 sketch, from the very first episode of The Fast Show, broadcast on the 27th September 1994.
I asked Charlie Higson recently on Twitter about how they created the highly-convincing picture effect for the Chanel 9 sketches, and he kindly gave the following reply:
“These days you could do it all in five minutes. We had to develop a very complicated process – degrading the picture, messing up the colour settings and over-printing to create a ghosting effect, and finally putting it through some special BBC equipment for sending crushed video around the world.”
The technical details were then usefully filled in by Gordon Murray, who helped create this particular look:
“The edit suite sent pictures to us in the Central Technical Area at Television Centre. This was fed into two very expensive video standards converters where we went PAL > NTSC > PAL. We then tweaked all the motion and colour settings to get the look. The units in question were called Snell & Wilcox Alchemist Ph.C standards converters, and were the highest quality way at the time to go to between video standards. Or plug them up back to back and create video havoc in the name of telly!
The sketches were never actually transmitted on satellite to complete the look.1 The two standards converters were in adjacent equipment racks in what was called the Central Apparatus Room (CAR) in my day on the 3rd floor of TVC.”
Learning this kind of information is the whole reason this site exists. And so is our other main topic for today:
The opening titles for the Series 1 set of Chanel 9 sketches. They pass by in a flash, but they set the tone perfectly for the kind of country run by a certain El Presidente. But where did this footage actually come from? Did they grab it from a load of foreign news broadcasts? Or did they go out and shoot it all from scratch?
The answer is: they did neither. I’ve consulted the paperwork for the first series of The Fast Show. Interestingly enough, “Chanel 9” is never actually mentioned – the sketches are always just referred to as “Foreign News” or “Foreign News Sketch”. And the footage from the opening titles comes from a perhaps unexpected source:
FOREIGN NEWS OPENING TITLES
1. Crocodile eating chickens (top L.)
Ex. “BBC 1.00 News” Tx. 4/1/93. BBC C.
D3 No: DT58200.
Dur 00’11”2. Gas Masks (top R.)
Ex. “BBC 1.00 News” Tx. 13/1/93. BBC C.
D3 No: DT60000.
Dur 00’11”3. Man chopping meat in abattoir and Woman in Supermarket (bottom R.)
Ex. “BBC 6.00 News” Tx. 17/11/93. BBC C.
D3 No: DT61100.
Dur 00’11”4. Tanks in street (bottom L.)
Ex. “BBC 9.00 News” Tx. 18/9/90. BBC C.
Spool No: HT8117.
Dur 00’11”
All four clips come from the BBC’s own news bulletins. Amazing. Even better, I’ve managed to get hold of three of the clips for myself. Sadly, much as I’d love to, I can’t upload them here. But I can give you a few more details about them.
Top-left, and the crocodile eating the chickens. This is a slightly alarming piece of footage, taken from a report about the battle between the conservation and the hunting of man-eating crocs in Australia. “Despite the fact that people are killed by them each year, they’ve become a major tourist attraction. In fact, the number of sightseers actually increases after every attack.” Lovely.
Top-right, and the fellas in gas masks. This is from a report about a treaty banning the stockpiling and use of chemical weapons in 1993. In fact, the footage we see in the opening titles of Chanel 9 is actually of British soldiers, destroying stockpiles of mustard gas left over from the 1920s!
Bottom-right, and the rather unpleasant abattoir/supermarket clip. This is mislabelled in the paperwork listed above; it actually comes from a BBC News bulletin broadcast on the 18th September 1990.2 This was a John Simpson report from Baghdad on the Gulf crisis, and specifically about the impact of Western sanctions on those living there. Interestingly, the shots of the abattoir and supermarket are not consecutive in the original report: The Fast Show did their own edit to place them next to each other.
Sadly, the footage of the tanks bottom-left remains elusive, despite my best attempts. Almost certainly, the paperwork above contains another typo or mistake – regular readers of this blog will know how often this happens – and it can become virtually impossible to find the true source of footage in these situations. Nonetheless, if you have any ideas, let me know in the comments.
But that’s a detail. Here’s the real thing which I love about all this. Back in 2021, I took a look at how One Foot in the Grave faked a couple of minutes of ITV. The answer: using a load of BBC footage instead, with clips from The Late Late Breakfast Show standing in for You’ve Been Framed.
Well, blow me down, if The Fast Show didn’t pull exactly the same trick, only in an even more surprising situation. With the right choice of extreme clips and treatment of the picture, footage which initially looks nothing like the kind of thing you’d see on BBC News, actually originated from mainstream BBC news bulletins of the era.
Context really is everything.
The Fast Show Series 1: Foreign News
Episode 1.1 / TX: 27/9/94
Foreign News / RX: 2/4/94
Episode 1.2 / TX: 4/10/94
Foreign News (Antonios/Football Results) / RX: 2/4/94
Episode 1.3 / TX: 11/10/94
Foreign News (Poula) / RX: 9/4/94
Scent Toppo / RX: 1/4/94
Episode 1.4 / TX: 18/10/94
Foreign News (No News) / RX: 16/4/94
Cheesy Peas / RX: 1/4/94
Episode 1.5 / TX: 25/10/94
Foreign News (Technical Breakdown) – Part 1 / RX: 9/4/94
Foreign News (Technical Breakdown) – Part 2 / RX: 9/4/94
Greatest Hits of Trudi / RX: 15/4/94
Foreign News (Technical Breakdown) – Part 33 / RX: 9/4/94
Episode 1.6 / TX: 1/11/94
Foreign News (Cloud) / RX: 16/4/94
Roy & Renee/Special Report / RX: 15/4/94
All “Gizmo” adverts RX 1/4/94.
All sketches written by Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse, except for “Roy & Renee/Special Report”, which was by Caroline Aherne.
“Foreign News Opening Sig. Tune” and “Foreign News Gizmo Ads Music” written and performed by Phil Pope.
“Scent Toppo” music written and performed by Charlie Higson.
“Greatest Hits of Trudi” was music written by Phil Pope, with words by Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse.
With thanks to Darrell Maclaine and Milly Storrington.
UPDATE (3/1/23): Article updated to include information about the abattoir/supermarket clip.
UPDATE (25/1/23): Article updated to include technical details from Gordon Murray about creating the visual look for the Chanel 9 sketches.
An earlier version of this article claimed that they were, hence this correction. ↩
Eagle-eyed viewers will note that this is actually the date the tanks footage in the bottom-left is claimed to be from. Clearly, the two dates were confused when writing up the paperwork. This package was shown on both the Six O’Clock News and the Nine O’Clock News; the listed tape HT8117 contains the Six bulletin, so this seems the most likely candidate. ↩
Shown during the end credits. ↩
7 comments
Daniel James Webb on 2 January 2023 @ 7am
The footage of the abatoir and supermarket may be from the following item in the BBC Broadcast Archive, as listed on Getty Images:
NEWS – ECONOMY: SITUATION REPORT – 6.00 pm
By: BBC Broadcast Archive
17 November, 1993
BBC Broadcast Archive
321-93-06EC
According to the The Times published on the 18th November 1993 it had just been announced that there was a fall of 0.1 percent in the all-items retail index in October 1993, the first fall in any October since 1962, so this may have been what the BBC News on 17th November was illustrating with footage of a supermarket, though I’m not sure where the abatoir footage would fit in.
As for where the footage of tanks could be from, there are several possibilites in the BBC Broadcast Archive on that date alone. I have noticed that the footage looks to be to have been reversed at some point, as the blue sign behind the tank appears to be showing 22 in the direction of the arrow but with the digits reversed. I haven’t been able to figure out what the place name or location is that is presumably 22 miles or kilometres in that direction.
Martin on 2 January 2023 @ 6pm
I was once on shift in CCA when our colleagues from SCAR (the BBC news control room), asked if we had any old bits of kit that would generate analogue “snow’ on loss of signal, rather than, say, full -frame blue. After a bit of rummaging in the apparatus room, a dusty domestic VCR was found, and we sent some of its output down the line to them.
A couple of hours later, I nearly had a heart attack when BBC One looked like it had fallen off air – our snow was being used in a report on Newsround.
So yes, I can absolutely believe they’d have got some engineers to do some silly things to make Chanel 9 look like it did. Perhaps not actually transmitting on satellite – it would have been a bit pricey back then – but I’d imagine at least through a standards converter or two. See also how The Day Today did Barbara Wintergreen”s reports.
John Hoare on 3 January 2023 @ 12pm
Daniel: Thanks for that, and I think yours was a very good stab… but as the update I’ve just published shows, it was a different source instead. But any idea about the tanks I’ll gratefully receive, I haven’t got to the bottom of that yet.
Martin: That’s a great story. And yeah, on reflection, I do share some of your reservations about whether it was actually sent by satellite or not. There’s probably some paperwork somewhere which confirms it all, but God knows where now.
Gareth Randall on 3 January 2023 @ 1pm
Yeah, I can’t quite believe that the sketches were really sent by satellite. More likely they were put through a standards converter, the older and less advanced the better. IIRC that’s what Banzai did, after initially spending ages trying to create that “converted from NTSC” effect using filters.
John Hoare on 3 January 2023 @ 2pm
Cheers Gareth. In retrospect, I’m not confident in that part of the article, and it wasn’t the main point of it anyway, so I’ve excised that section for safety. I may rewrite that whole section entirely one day if I can find out more concrete information.
Ian Brown on 3 January 2023 @ 2pm
As a former linear VT editor, how I would have got the “foreign TV” look would be to have used 2 channels of DVE, probably Abekus A53. On channel A I would shrink the image then on Channel B I would blow Channel As output back up to give no overall size change but with a loss of picture quality. Depending on the ratios you got, results ranged from sight degradation to absolute dog shit. Imperfect ratios introduce lots of line artefacts which could made a very convincing VHS, satellite or CCTV effect. Add a bit of colour correction and voila.
John Hoare on 25 January 2023 @ 10am
Article updated with some lovely, direct information from Gordon Murray.
So yes, proof that the material was never sent via satellite like this article originally stated, but done using standards converters in adjacent racks!
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