Chanel 9: Unplugged

Just occasionally, it seems the comedy historian gods are smiling down at me.

Back in January, I wrote about the Chanel 9 sketches in The Fast Show, and how the degraded picture effect on the sketches was generated. In a pleasing piece of serendipity, the BBC have just uploaded every episode of The Fast Show to iPlayer, making it look like I’m writing about something vaguely of the zeitgeist for a change.¹

There are a few strange things about these iPlayer uploads, though. In particular, Episode 1.4 seems to be an early edit, completely different to the DVD release! In the first minute of the programme, we have:

• Unmixed sound on the initial “Ed Winchester” sketch,
• A click track and no visuals instead of the opening montage of the title sequence, and
• No cast member credits during the Kenny Valentine number.

A full list of the differences between the version released on DVD, and this incomplete version on iPlayer, I shall leave as an exercise for the reader.² But I do want to talk about one major difference later on in the programme. And here is where our smiling comedy gods come in.

Here is the Chanel 9 sketch from this episode, as seen on The Ultimate Fast Show Collection DVD release, the deliberate picture degradation fully intact. This was first transmitted on BBC2 on the 18th October 1994, in an identical edit.

As a reminder, here are the technical details about this effect, as told by Gordon Murray who helped create the 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. 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.”

Lovely stuff.

Now, here is how the same sketch appears on iPlayer version of Episode 1.4:

If any sketch ever deserved the description “incomplete”, it’s the above. The music is missing on the Cheesy Peas commercial³, which also doesn’t have the “foreign language dub” yet. The “Gizmo” sketches don’t feature their jingles yet either, and instead have temporary vocals.

But most obviously of all, the sketch in this unfinished state hasn’t gone through any of the standards converter nonsense described by Gordon, and just looks like any normal VT from a British show in 1994. And for me, the effect of the joke is ruined. The world of the sketch simply isn’t sold correctly any more. What remains is some great writing and performances… which never make the final leap into something truly magical.

And this is why I bang on tediously about this kind of thing, and why I complain if a parody in a sketch show doesn’t look like the thing its parodying – or, at the very least, what we think it looks like. Otherwise, the comedy will never quite work, no matter what else is great about it. The Chanel 9 sketches need to look like your worst nightmare of this kind of broadcast, so the gang can then hollow it out from within with utter nonsense. A normal TV studio with a crap set and people with silly hair doesn’t quite cut it.

The Fast Show knew that. What we see above was clearly never what was intended by the production team. And the fact that The Fast Show invariably got this shit right is a large part of what turns the show from “vaguely amusing” to “one of the best sketch shows ever made”.

With thanks to Lewis Cuthbert.