Thank you all for your kind words about my first piece on the flash frames in The Young Ones. Part Two is in the works, but is still a little way off publication. Perhaps the following will explain why.
Let’s take that missing flash frame for “Summer Holiday”, which I comprehensively examined in Part One. It’s something which definitely, never, ever, ever transmitted, or made it into any commercial release of the show, and I have the large pile of recordings here to prove it.
And yet take a look at the paperwork for the episode, back in 1984:
FILM:
1 frame from Shalako (+ BBC cap) property of EMI. Transferred to H25992.
And then read the relevant section of Roger Wilmut’s Didn’t You Kill My Mother-in-Law?, the seminal book on alternative comedy, published in 1989:
“The general style of anarchy, with cutaway sequences and a good deal of stunt work, was maintained: one new running joke was presumably for the benefit of the owners of expensive video recorders, since it consisted of cutting in four-frame flashes which cannot possibly be grasped in real time – they include a leaping frog, a dripping tap, a skier, a potter’s wheel and, finally, a notice signed by the video tape editor saying, ‘I never wanted to put all these flash frames in in the first place.'”
And finally, let’s listen to Young Ones producer Paul Jackson, interviewed on the DVD extra The Making of The Young Ones in 2007:
“It’s on the DVD, it’s on the video versions, but it never was broadcast.”
In other words: in order to find out the truth about whether that “Summer Holiday” flash frame was actually broadcast or commercially released, I’ve had to ignore a) the actual paperwork for the episode, b) a leading comedy historian, and c) the producer of the show. Brilliant.
I say all this not to point out how great I am, but simply to show how easy it is for these things to get warped and twisted down the years. Sometimes, the only way to get to the truth of what was broadcast is by watching the actual material, and seeing what’s there, and what isn’t.
And that’s only possible by getting people to dig out off-airs from 1984. Everything else is guesswork.
A version of this post was first published in the January issue of my monthly newsletter.