Location, Location, Location

Shooting audience sitcom has all kinds of unique production problems compared to other types of television.

After all, any TV show has to decide whether to shoot a given scene on location, or in the studio. Each choice has advantages and drawbacks: you don’t have the expense of building a set on location, but you also have less control than in a studio. With audience sitcom, though, you start running into further problems. Is there room in the studio for that extra set in front of the audience? And yet if it’s a dialogue-heavy scene, surely you want to do it in front of the audience, so the actors can play off their reaction?

Squaring this particular circle can lead to some interesting results. Let’s take a look at three of them.

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Til Death Us Do Part, “To Garnett A Grandson” • BBC1 • 13th September 1972
Oh dear, what’s Alf up to this week? Answer: complaining that he has to travel to the hospital in order to see his just-born grandson.

ALF: Look, I’m not saying anything about going up to see my daughter, am I? And my grandson. I want to go up there. All I’m saying is they could have put her a bit more nearer, somewhere a bit more convenient like.
ELSE: It don’t matter where it was, how far, it’d still be inconvenient for you.
ALF: Look…
ELSE: I remember when I had Rita. It was six days before you come to see her. And I was only upstairs.

Oh Alf, stop being a dickhead.

Now Johnny Speight being Johnny Speight, he manages to cause the production some issues with how he tackles this story. We don’t just have Alf moaning in the living room, cut to a brief location shot of the hospital, and then have him continuing to moan as he walks into the ward. No, Speight wants to see Alf moaning throughout the entire journey to the hospital. A total of eight minutes of screen time.

Which is all very well, but in 1972 for an audience sitcom, it was far easier – and cheaper – to do dialogue like that in the studio rather than on location. So what does the show do? It does a few film inserts on location, and recreates the rest of the journey in the studio.

Being an enclosed space, this works OK for the bus stop, although the cut from the studio on VT to location film is inevitably a little jarring:

As for this conversation underneath an umbrella, which starts off on film and then cuts to a CSO shot done in the studio, it’s perhaps best filed under “nice try”:

To get the full effect of this cut, it’s worth watching the video:

You do feel a certain amount of sympathy for the production here; I’m not sure transplanting eight minutes of dialogue into a grotty BBC film sequence of the time would have been any improvement. I’ll take getting the comedy right and living with the slight oddness. Speight should probably have rewritten most of this dialogue to take place at home, before they even started the journey.

But if a programme from 1972 isn’t allowed to be vaguely experimental in its production, what is?

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I’m Alan Partridge, “A Room with an Alan” • BBC2 • 3rd November 1997
25 years on, and all that oddness is gone. In the very first episode of I’m Alan Partridge, there is a perfect example of how you can combine studio and location work effectively so people can’t spot the join. Yes, it’s Alan’s trip round his potential new house, the one with the “Buck Rogers toilet”:

The DVD commentary reveals some of the thinking behind this:

IANNUCCI: This set is in the studio, but the stuff that happens straight after it, when Alan goes round the rest of the house, is on location. So this is one of those points where we had to try and match up the lighting of a location with the studio.

COOGAN: And we used the same lighting man for location and studio, to match it. Because normally, there was a huge difference between location and studio.

IANNUCCI: Usually you can tell when you’ve gone from location to studio on a sitcom when you hear the phrase “Dah-dah-dah…” And then you know you’re in the studio.

The difference between Till Death and this is stark; I think plenty of viewers who were technically-minded still wouldn’t have a clue that half this scene was studio, and half location. Obviously, the transition from a mix of film/video, to purely video is a huge factor, as is the lighting as mentioned above.

But one other thing makes it more convincing than what we see in Till Death. There’s another example of the location/studio mix later on in the episode, at the BBC restaurant:

Alan and Tony go round the corner on location, and seamlessly enter the studio set in front of the audience. Meaning you can sell the wider sense of the restaurant without building a huge set, and yet still do your big dialogue scene with the studio audience present.

But one reason all this is seamless: unlike Till Death, you’re not asked to accept two different representations of the same space as the same thing. The kitchen of Alan’s potential new house is on location, but the living room is in the studio. Similarly, one part of the restaurant is on location, but the section with Alan’s table is in the studio. There simply isn’t the jarring effect of having to accept two different versions of Alf and company hunched under an umbrella.

The question is: is it possible to do what Till Death attempted… but done right?

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Keeping Up Appearances, “Hyacinth Tees Off”¹ • BBC1 • 22nd September 1991
The weird thing about Keeping Up Appearances is that its broad reputation among comedy fans as a series which was running out of steam is unwarranted. In fact, it’s the final series of the show which has some of its strongest episodes, and it’s the show’s sophomore series which has some of the weakest.

This episode is from that second series, and while there are far worse half hours to spend with Hyacinth, the most interesting aspect of the episode is technical. Set in a country hotel, it features none of the usual standing sets for the show. It’s a rare episode indeed which doesn’t feature Hyacinth’s house, even just briefly.

For the technical goss, let’s turn to Producer/Director Harold Snoad’s quite amazing book, It’s Bouquet – Not Bucket!, which I highly recommend spending an absurd amount of money on. Snoad tells us TV nerds what we REALLY want to know:

“The reception area, corridors and bedroom we needed for this episode were built in the studio but we also required the use of a large lounge for Hyacinth to go round testing the various settees and armchairs, not only for comfort but to ensure that they had been dusted to her satisfaction. We didn’t have enough space left in the studio for such a large set to be erected so I needed to film this element on location.

The Chesford Grange Hotel² didn’t have a lounge that would be suitable but, in the course of our location recce, my production manager and I called into the Regent Hotel in Leamington’s main street. The lounge was perfect and they were happy to let us film there. In reality, I only did the material that involved Hyacinth wandering around checking the furniture – watched by two fascinated guests – on location. My designer at that time (Tim Gleeson) then reconstructed one wall of the lounge in the studio. This was used for the dialogue elements of the scenes when Hyacinth sat down and started to bore the couple rigid by talking about her husband’s important job with the council – a great exaggeration – and by showing them photographs of Sheridan. We had taken the sofa and the chairs we were going to use in the studio element with us to the hotel so the continuity was right. Even the most discerning viewer would be hard pressed to see where the studio element of the lounge took over from the real thing on location.”

In other words: here, we have an example of a combination of the techniques used in Till Death and I’m Alan Partridge. We have the video location/video studio approach of I’m Alan Partridge, along with their care taken to try and match both types of footage properly… but like Till Death, it’s also asking the viewer to accept two different representations of part of the hotel as the same physical space.

Does it manage it?

At first glance, perhaps the pictures above look slightly strange. When placed side-by-side, all you can see are the differences in picture texture and fittings. But you get a better sense of how the scene works when watching it properly:

And I have to be honest: I consider myself fairly sensitive to this stuff… and I had absolutely no idea when I watched this episode what they’d done. I think I just assumed that it was all location; I had no idea that part of it was in the studio at all. If it’s obvious now, it’s only obvious because Harold Snoad told us about it.

But this is the kind of thing audience sitcom was doing in the 90s. Pushing the boundaries of what an audience sitcom actually meant. Instead of obvious studio sequences interspersed with obvious location material, sometimes it attempted to blend the two in interesting ways, in order to tell the story in the best way possible.

Among comedy fans, I’m Alan Partridge often gets credit for this, because everyone loves talking about Alan Partridge, and Iannucci’s DVD commentaries are always interesting. But let’s give Keeping Up Appearances its due as well. A show which is clearly more traditional, but doing very interesting things within that framework.

And if nobody noticed… well, that was the point.

The bulk of this article was written before the death of Harold Snoad was announced. It seems appropriate to dedicate it to his memory, considering the piece is all about how clever he was. I suspect he would have liked that.

1. This episode title is not seen on-screen or published in the Radio Times, but has been retrospectively given to the episode, and is used on bbc.co.uk. ↩

2. Used for the exterior elements of the hotel, and was also – conveniently enough – the unit hotel for the location shoot. ↩

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alan partridge, alf garnett, best of, keeping up appearances