Freeze-Frame Gonna Drive You Insane, Part Four

Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four • Part Five

It feels like ages since we last checked in with The Young Ones. A brief recap, then. Back in 1984, the BBC had just transmitted the show’s second and final series… but not without some problems. In particular, the final flash frame intended for inclusion in “Summer Holiday” was cut entirely, much to the displeasure of the team. But surely the show was now home and dry?

Well, what do you think?

A hint of what was to come can be found in the following from Hansard. It isn’t normal for questions to be asked of Ministers about a sitcom.¹ And yet on the 27th June 1984, just eight days after Series 2 of The Young Ones had finished airing, that is exactly what happened. Conservative MP for Cardiff West, Stefan Terlezki, was our ersatz Norris McWhirter.

“Mr. Terlezki asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department what safeguards there are against subliminal messages appearing on the British Broadcasting Corporation; and if he is satisfied that these are adequate.”

Douglas Hurd, then a Minister of State for the Home Office, gave the following reply:

“I am satisfied that clause 13(6) of the BBC’s Licence and Agreement of 2 April 1981, which requires the corporation not to include subliminal messages in its programmes, provides an adequate safeguard. It is for the BBC’s board of governors to ensure that the provision is observed. I understand that the corporation considers that some brief, unrelated inserts included in a recent BBC comedy series might have been regarded as in breach of the spirit of the provision, and steps were taken to prevent a recurrence.”

Which brings up an interesting question: were subliminal images really banned on the BBC at the time? The above suggests that they were. And yet Paul Jackson, on the 2007 DVD documentary The Making of The Young Ones, seemed to disagree:

“And although it wasn’t illegal at the BBC because the commercial issue didn’t arise, it was raised, and it went up to Bill Cotton… and the edict came down you’ve gotta take it out.

Meanwhile, the Nottingham Evening Post, on the 16th June 1984, reported the following:

“A BBC spokeswoman said the BBC’s Charter does cover subliminal techniques, from the political and advertising point of view, but that these pictures could not be deemed harmful.

“This is a joke flash-frame technique which is harmless”, she said.”

There’s only one way to find out the truth. We need to get hold of a copy of the BBC’s Licence and Agreement. Not this damn thing, dated December 2016, but the document quoted by Hurd from April 1981.

I have a copy. Clause 13(6) states the following:

“The Corporation shall at all times refrain from sending any broadcast matter which includes any technical device which, by using images of very brief duration or by any other means, exploits the possibility of conveying a message to, or otherwise influencing the minds of, members of an audience without their being aware, or fully aware, of what has been done.”

Which sounds suspiciously familiar. Let’s compare this to Section 4(3) of the Broadcasting Act 1981, which IBA-licensed stations were supposed to abide by:

“It shall be the duty of the Authority to satisfy themselves that the programmes broadcast by the Authority do not include, whether in an advertisement or otherwise, any technical device which, by using images of very brief duration or by any other means, exploits the possibility of conveying a message to, or otherwise influencing the minds of, members of an audience without their being aware, or fully aware, of what has been done.”

The similarity in language is obvious. At the very least, the intent for the BBC was exactly the same as for the IBA: to strongly discourage the use of flash frames. Whether it would have stood up in a court of law is a different question, and one which was never answered in practice.

There is one further point worthy of consideration. Note that the language above specifically admonishes flashes which exploit “the possibility of conveying a message to, or otherwise influencing the minds of, members of an audience”. There is a bit of wiggle-room here: the whole deal with the flashes for the first five episodes of The Young Ones Series 2 was that they had no point or message.

But remember that cut flash from “Summer Holiday”, which never transmitted?

That very much counts as a “message”, however ridiculous. There is a serious possibility that regardless of the wailing and teeth-gnashing of comedy fans, including myself, the removal of the flash from “Summer Holiday” by Bill Cotton really did stop the show from breaching the BBC’s licence agreement. Even if it did so entirely accidentally.

*   *   *

The following year, Spitting Image started its second series, transmitted between the 6th January to the 24th March 1985. We’ve already discussed their shenanigans in the third part of this series. But something else happened in 1985. Series 2 of The Young Ones got a repeat.

In fact, it’s worth being exact about this: The Young Ones started a weekly repeat run from the very beginning, the very first complete repeat run the show had ever had. The first episode “Demolition” was shown on 18th March 1985, the day after the penultimate episode of the second series of Spitting Image. So what would happen when they got to “Bambi”, and Series 2 of The Young Ones? With all the fuss the previous year, would they just edit all the flash frames out?

The answer is: no. “Bambi”, “Cash” and “Nasty” aired precisely as they did the previous year, including all the flash frames. And then something odd happens. In the original 1984 run of Series 2, “Time” was fourth, and “Sick” was fifth. In 1985, these two episodes were swapped round: on the 17th June 1985, “Sick” is aired in the fourth slot. Regardless of what the reason for this was,² “Sick” also aired in exactly the same edit as it did in 1984, with both flash frames intact.

“Time” then aired fifth, on the 24th June 1985. And here is where things start to unravel. Up until now, all the episodes have been as originally broadcast, including “Sick”. But “Time” has been changed. In 1984, it aired under the programme number LLV F597E/71. In 1985: LLV F597E/72.³ In other words, the episode had undergone a further edit for the 1985 showing. The flash frame of the gurning man had been entirely cut out.

Oh, have we got a video? YES WE’VE GOT A VIDEO.⁴

The obvious question is why, and I’m afraid I don’t have a smoking gun memo. Maybe there is one somewhere; I certainly haven’t run out of places to look.⁵ I do have some theories, though.

1. That there was tape damage, and an edit was made to remove it. This is technically possible, but what are the chances that the damage was exactly at the point where the flash frame occurs, when the flash frames were already a contentious topic? It simply doesn’t seem likely to me.
2. That our gurning man objected to his inclusion in the programme, and asked to be removed. This is rather more credible, but I’m not quite sure I buy that a man who not only enters gurning championships, but also features on news items about gurning championships, would really be that bothered.
3. That for some reason during this repeat run, people started getting upset about flash frames again, and demanded its removal.

I think the third option is the most likely. And I would also like to remind you of the following. The first newspaper report about the Norris McWhirter flash frame was in the Evening Standard on the 2nd July 1985. It said:

“Three weeks ago McWhirter was shown another videotape of a more recent [Spitting] Image programme in which his own features were superimposed on a naked woman’s body, presumably the lads’ idea of settling the score. At normal speed the flash lasts just 0.24 of a second.

This morning McWhirter applied at Horseferry Road magistrate’s court for another summons which was granted – Round Two. We now proceed to the next courtroom where the case will be prosecuted against Whitney.”

Three weeks before the 2nd July, when Norris apparently discovered the Spitting Image flash frame, would have been roughly around 11th June 1985. In other words: the same month as everything was kicking off about a second flash frame in Spitting Image, the BBC decided to edit out another flash frame in The Young Ones.

I’m not saying the above are definitely linked. What I am saying is that it’s possible. Especially as the flash frames had been on air for four previous weeks, which is more than enough time for somebody to realise what was currently being transmitted, and demand that something was done about it.⁶

If that’s true, then it makes the following even more bizarre, but somehow very BBC. On the 3rd July, just two days after the final episode “Summer Holiday” had been repeated, an episode of Points of View aired… which talks about the flash frames in The Young Ones. It doesn’t really give any new information, but is a fascinating insight into how the issue was discussed at the time.

Full marks to 13-year-old Alison there, for not only accurately describing the flash frames in “Nasty” and “Sick”, but also accurately giving the TX dates. Something which many others would fail to get correct. Maybe she should have met up with Norris McWhirter’s nephew and had a good old chat about it all.

Sadly, Barry Took missed out on doing this series of articles a few decades early, and didn’t get the memo about the removed flash frame from “Summer Holiday”. Instead of revealing the whole thing as an aborted running joke, he merely says:

TOOK: Now, why do they do it? Well, the answer is: just for the hell of it. It’s all part of the anarchy of The Young Ones.

I would suggest that it is grimly amusing that despite the fun of the flash frames being highlighted on Points of View, the last two flash frames of that repeat season had been cut: one freshly chopped out in 1985, and one right back before original TX in 1984. Joined-up BBC thinking at its best.

*   *   *

We’d have to wait three years before a full episode of The Young Ones was shown on the BBC again. This time, it was on BBC1; a complete, unedited repeat of “Bambi” during the second Comic Relief telethon on the 10th March 1989.

The next showing was a one-off repeat of “Time” on the 29th April 1989, as part of BBC2’s 25th anniversary.⁷ This was exactly the same edit as shown in 1985, with the gurning man flash frame missing, and I have an off-air from the time to prove it.⁸

Come Autumn 1989, and Series 2 got a repeat from scratch, missing out “Time” which was shown back in April. All of these were in exactly the same edits as seen back in 1984/85. The next time The Young Ones would get repeated on BBC2 was in the Summer of 1995, six years later.

And there lies another tale… and yet more trouble for our flash frames. But we’ll get to that next time.

With thanks to Ernest Malley for legal research, Phil Chappell, Dan Tootill, and Andrew Wiseman for Young Ones off-airs, Billy Smart for Points of View memories, and Tanya Jones, Darrell Maclaine, Mike Scott, and Milly Storrington for editorial advice.

1. Or indeed a variety show, but let’s not start all that again. ↩

2. There are all kinds of theories you could put forward as to why this happened. Some of them may even be true. I would advise caution, however. In the original 1984 run, “Sick” was billed in the Radio Times as coming first in the run, then it was billed fourth, and finally aired fifth. Nobody has ever really figured out the reason why it kept being put back, although worries about the riot scenes when the Libyan hostage incident was in the news is a possibility.

   The point is: as the placing of “Sick” in the original run is at best questionable, it seems foolhardy to assume too much about its placing in the 1985 repeats. It could even simply be that everyone thought the “correct” order was fourth, as was clearly intended at one point in 1984. ↩

3. You have to be careful when going by these IDs, because as ever, the paperwork can be wrong. For instance, according to some records, “Nasty” transmitted as LLV F593D/71 in 1984, and LLV F593D/72 in 1985. I don’t believe this is true; I think “Nasty” transmitted as a /72 version in both years, and there was no further edit made to the repeat.

   In the case of “Time”, however, the change in version number is backed up by what actually transmitted. ↩

4. Please give me credit for waiting until Part Four to do this joke. ↩

5. The BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham is the most likely place to find anything, and I’ll check there at some point. ↩

6. I do realise the above research isn’t the best in the world, but frankly, very few people had even realised the gurning man was cut out of the 1985 repeat until I did the research on it, so I feel I can be forgiven. ↩

7. As someone who sat behind the controls for part of BBC2’s 50th anniversary, I suddenly feel very old. ↩

8. The associated paperwork says that it was the /72 edit broadcast in 1989, exactly like 1985… but also mentions the “Two frames of gurning from BBC Newcastle”, which was long gone by this point, just because they never updated the form to reflect the new edit. This is why you can’t always trust the paperwork when it comes to what was broadcast. ↩

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freeze-frame gonna drive you insane, the young ones