Everyone on One Side of the Table in the Restaurant

Here’s one of my very favourite sketches from End of Part One, Renwick and Marshall’s magnificent sketch show which eviscerated contemporary television in much the same way Python did a decade earlier.¹ It’s from Series 2 Episode 3, broadcast by LWT on the 26th October 1980.

Warning: contains a slang term for gay men near the top which I think is entirely satirically justifiable, but some of you may not enjoy.

It’s difficult to pick my favourite thing in that sketch. Obviously, there are a million and one sketches in the world which would benefit from being cut in half and adding ETC in big letters to the end. But I think the most devastating line in it has to be:

Second Floor: randy men who try and talk like Hancock.

Because I hadn’t realised, but bloody hell, yes, of course. Mr. Lucas, you’re an oaf.

That’s not the line we’re discussing today, however. You might have guessed which one we are discussing from the headline of this piece.

Everyone on one side of the table in the restaurant. Going up…

*   *   *

Let’s take a look at a couple of scenes from the Fawlty Towers episode “The Anniversary”, broadcast on the 26th March 1979. Why is everybody standing in a straight line?

Answer: because it can be tricky to record such scenes in an audience sitcom any other way. John Cleese discusses the problem in his superb DVD commentary for the series:

“You see in television, you’ve just got to have that four cameras out the front, you can’t put them round the side or the back to get reaction shots, because then they’d be in shot from another camera. So that’s why so much of the blocking here consists of just four or five people just standing in a line. You can’t block it any other way in television. In a movie you could.”

In other words: if you place the cameras and your cast exactly where you’d like to, in order to make things look more natural, you’re going to end up with other cameras in shot. Of course, Cleese is talking about a very specific type of television here: material shot in a multi-camera studio, on mostly three-walled sets, where you’re cutting between different cameras “live”. In single-camera productions where each shot is set up separately, like the vast majority of UK sitcoms made today, this kind of issue doesn’t arise.

Are You Being Served?, as was standard for sitcoms of the time, was a multi-camera shoot in front of the audience. The problem above isn’t usually that obvious on the main shop floor set, although it can rear its head on occasion, such as when there’s a staff meeting. “The Think Tank” from Series 2, broadcast on 28th March 1974, is a good example of this:

As for the canteen itself? Oddly enough, it wasn’t part of the show to start with. We have to wait until the first episode of Series 3, “The Hand of Fate”, broadcast on the 27th February 1975, before we can see truly see what Renwick and Marshall are banging on about:

The obvious question is: if you decide you can’t live with blocking like this, what do you do about it?

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Depending on the situation, there’s actually a fair amount you can do. In 1988, a certain Harold Snoad wrote an internal BBC training manual, Directing Situation Comedy. I got hold of a copy the other day, and it quickly became one of my most prized possessions. He has the following to say about the problem of how to get the right angles when directing multi-camera:

“One solution is to use a door or window as a camera trap. This can be achieved by either having the relevant door or window open all the time. […] However, assuming circumstances permit, your cameras move into position to take their allotted shots through these voids and then pull back again having done so, thus avoiding being seen by cameras taking other shots with that part of the room in the background.”

This method can get extremely intricate, especially if you’re the kind of technical director Snoad was:

“If you need to have the door and windows closed (which is much more likely), then your cameras lurk behind them and you arrange for the door to be opened or the curtains drawn back (there are usually net curtains involved even in ‘day’ scenes) in time to take the relevant shot. Having done so, the door will have to be closed and the curtains adjusted. Needless to say, this should be done from off-stage and as surreptitiously as possible – for the sake of both the artists and the audience. It sounds difficult but, with careful planning, it is quite possible.

Kitchen hatches make very good traps and have the added advantage of being able to be used either way (assuming, of course, that you have another room on the other side of the hatch).

Traps can, in fact, be built very easily into any part of the wall and disguised as pictures. In this case, the most convenient way is to have the picture ‘frame’ (which edges the trap) fixed to the actual wall of the set whilst the ‘picture’ is hinged so that it can be swung open off-stage to allow the camera to use the trap. When the facility is not required, a member of the scene staff merely swings the picture back into its frame and the wall immediately becomes respectable again.”

From all the above, we can see that while John Cleese is making a sensible point above regarding the blocking of Fawlty Towers, there are ways round the problem which he doesn’t discuss. So surely, such techniques could be used to fix the issue with shooting the canteen scenes in Are You Being Served?, couldn’t they?

Not so fast. Snoad continues:

“But do think very carefully before requesting a camera trap in the rear wall of a set. To do so almost guarantees that you will be shooting off the downstage limits of your flattage and the ‘background’ will become the non-existent fourth wall (with the studio audience beyond). A drama director, of course, would be able to set the fourth wall in and solve this problem. Unfortunately, this tends not to work very well with a studio audience present and I strongly advise against it, except, perhaps, to achieve an isolated vital shot which can be quickly done at the end of a scene as a ‘pick-up’.”

In order to record the canteen scenes with everybody sitting right around the table without a gap, you would have to do exactly what Snoad warns about above. Unless you put a fourth wall into the set, then the studio audience is going to be visible in some shots. But if you include a fourth wall, it’s a pain in the ass when you’re recording with an audience, not least because you obscure their view of the action. They’d be forced to watch the scene on the monitors.

As the whole point of them being there is to provide a reaction, it’s not the best idea to shoot a scene in such a way where you’re less likely to get a good one, unless there’s no choice.

*   *   *

There are, however, a few solutions… depending on whether you can live with the compromises.

In The Dick Van Dyke Show episode “A Nice, Friendly Game of Cards”², first transmitted in the US on the 29th January 1964, they have a decent stab at avoiding the Are You Being Served? problem. Everybody correctly sits all around the table during the card game. But we also have some slightly awkward close-ups of various participants, with the fourth wall behind them. These must have been recorded separately, either before or after the main filming of the scene; they feel pasted on in a way which is unusual for the show.

Note also that Jerry Paris is obscuring Mary Tyler Moore in the above wide shot. This shit is hard.

How about Series 3 Episode 4 of In Sickness and In Health, broadcast on the 12th November 1987? This includes a seance, again, with all the cast sitting right around the table. This time a combination of a high-angle shot, and putting people with the least dialogue with their back to the camera, manages to create a highly effective scene.³

The high angle shot, of course, is eminently suitable for a seance. It would be difficult to sell it with a normal family dinner. For that matter, the fact that the cast can convincingly say their dialogue in near-darkness here also helps.

*   *   *

None of this is an especially modern talking point. You only have to look at the reaction to “This Quiet Half Hour”, broadcast by BBC2 on 20th May 1973⁴, for proof of that. Derek Brandon had the following to say about it in The Stage, four days after broadcast:

“Director Basil Coleman came up with interesting variations of The Last Supper shot (you’ll have seen the kind, with four or five people sitting cramped on one side of a table, the other side being empty to enable the cameras to shoot unimpeded “full frontals”) by having his garden chairs facing away from the house towards us and, totally unbelievably, having his garden shed door facing the camera rather than the back door of the house. Even the moggy was looking in our direction!”

The above is most notable for proving that the reference to The Last Supper when it comes to this issue has been around for decades now. But then it’s an irresistible comparison: Renaissance artists having exactly the same problem as multi-cam drama and sitcom.

Was Renwick and Marshall’s specific observation about Are You Being Served? an original one? To me, it feels unlikely. I can’t help but feel we’re missing a particularly smug edition of Points of View. But maybe I’m wrong. Renwick and Marshall were certainly keen observers of the minutiae of television; not even Python did a joke about late opts away from the network, as End of Part One did with “BBC East Anglia”. Even if I’ve missed some references, it doesn’t seem to have already been a hoary running joke in the newspapers in 1980, when the sketch was broadcast.⁵

There is one thing we do know, though. Eventually, this issue became a bit of a sore point with the AYBS production team, or at the very least, something they were aware of. In Are You Being Served? A Celebration of Twenty-Five Years by Richard Webber (Orion, 1998), we hear the following from Martin Shardlow, director of that final series:

“In one episode I was determined to answer the biggest question of all time: ‘Why do all the people in Are You Being Served? sit down one side of the dinner table in the canteen?’ I wanted to address that one, so on one occasion I pre-recorded a canteen scene enabling people to see all around the table: it confused the cast because they’d never done it before!”

Sadly, he doesn’t say which episode this was… but we can easily work it out. The answer is “Friends and Neighbours”, broadcast on the 25th March 1985. The very penultimate episode of the show. Watching the canteen scene, we can clearly see all four walls:

There wasn’t really anything stopping the production doing this with the audience present, but I guess the point is: if you’re going to block their view anyway, why not just get it shot more easily, and play it in during the main recording?⁶

It is, however, extremely funny that the show waited well over a decade and until its penultimate episode before doing this experiment. But then, for a show which leaned into its theatrical nature even more than most shows from the Croft stable, it’s surprising that they ever bothered to do it at all.

After all, the above is a nice bit of fun… but hardly necessary. But a decent studio audience reaction and making sure your recording goes as quickly and painlessly as possible? For a show like Are You Being Served?, that’s far more important.

With thanks to Louis Barfe, David Brunt, Tanya Jones, Jonathan Morris, Phil Norman, and Steve Williams.

1. I remember once excitedly showing some friends the series… mainly to embarrassed silence. Similar also happened to me with Rutland Weekend Television. I don’t force people to watch half hours of comedy they’ve never seen before in my presence any more, it’s just too excruciating if they hate it. ↩

2. Yes, The Dick Van Dyke Show had a genuine studio audience. ↩

3. A scene which includes possibly the best fart gag ever transmitted. ↩

4. This was part of the Away From It All series of plays… every single one of which is now missing. ↩

5. For the record, I also did trawl through the Radio Times letters pages of the era, with no joy. ↩

6. “Friends and Neighbours” is also unusual for Are You Being Served? in that it had two days in the studio; the 26th and 27th May 1984. This may have also factored into the decision to pre-record the scene. Why this episode had two days is less clear; perhaps they couldn’t fit the apartment set into the studio alongside the shop floor and canteen sets? ↩

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