TV Comedy – Page 10

Relative Time Dilation in an Amazingly Compressed Space

Published 18th October 2022

It’s Tuesday 21st November 1989 at 9pm, and the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned” is broadcast on BBC2 for the first time.

What was I doing? I have no idea. It was presumably a school night. I don’t think I even knew what Red Dwarf was. My Dad always watched the Nine O’Clock News at this time anyway. I had no rights over the television by that point in the evening.

The moment passed, unnoticed. By me, anyway.

* * *

It’s Friday 15th April 1994 at 9pm, and the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned” is broadcast on BBC2 for the third time.

What was I doing? Something very different than in 1989. This was the famous¹ repeat season, where BBC2 showed every single episode of the first six series of the show.² A lot of fans got into the series through this set of repeats, and I was no different. I quickly became obsessed with the show.

I was, however, only 12, verging on 13. My Dad still had a monopoly on the television, and still always watched the Nine O’Clock News. Luckily, I had a plan. I’d manually set the video recorder going downstairs, then rush upstairs to my bedroom to watch the episode… on an old black and white telly. It wasn’t as good as watching it in the living room on the proper TV, but it would do. And I could always watch the show downstairs later using my video. Which I did.

Endlessly.

* * *

It’s Saturday 14th June 2014 at 9:55pm, and the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned” is broadcast on BBC Two for the sixth time.

Lots has happened since 1994. I’ve long since been subsumed into Dwarf fandom, or at least, one particular corner of it. At this point, I’d been writing for fansite Ganymede & Titan for over a decade. But I’m not sitting watching the episode at home. And not just because I now own the episode on DVD.

Three months earlier, I’d finally got the job of my dreams: working in BBC presentation, in charge of originating most of the BBC’s domestic channels. And I just happen to be in work that evening. But unfortunately, I’m not doing BBC Two right now. I’m on another channel.

Luckily, just like when I was 12, I have a plan.

At 9:50pm, I gently appear at the door of NC2, the BBC Two pres suite. There is a very experienced director in the chair. The most experienced, longest-serving director we have, in fact. I ask if he minds if I sit with him for the next five minutes. He’s fine with it. I pull up a chair.

I watch, as I Love 1988 ends. The director runs a couple of trails: Shopgirls, Tigers About the House. Then there’s the ident; a special one, for BBC Two’s 50th anniversary. Duncan Newmarch, the duty BBC Two announcer, opens his mic and speaks: most continuity announcements are still done live. The director counts down through the ident. At 0, the picture fades down, then up again, and “Marooned” is on air, for the next 28 minutes and 35 seconds.

And two decades apart, two different parts of my life join together, briefly. Watching the same episode of Red Dwarf… but from opposite sides of the TV screen. And my teenage love of the show, and my brand new adult job, were now properly linked. Forever.

Sometimes, I’m aware enough of what’s going on around me to make sure a piece of personal history actually happens, rather than letting it slip from my grasp. Just sometimes.

With thanks to Christopher Wickham for the endlessly useful Red Dwarf BBC Broadcasts Guide, and Pip Madeley for inexplicably but brilliantly having the above video to hand.

In Red Dwarf fan circles, anyway. ↩
Minus “Psirens”, due to Craig Charles’ legal situation at the time. ↩

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best of, red dwarf, tv memories

Mmmm, Nice

Published 29th September 2022

TV Comedy

Hello there. Welcome to another exciting instalment of “interesting studio recording dates for audience sitcoms”. And if you’ve managed to get past that sentence and onto this one, I’m presuming you find them exciting too. Hey there. I like you.

Previously, we’ve taken a look at recordings for So Haunt Me, where part of Series 3 was shot just nine days before transmission. We also proved wrong some nonsense on Wikipedia about Series 5 of Are You Being Served? being shot the day before air – in fact, it was a week. Still close to transmission, but rather different than a mere day.

That particular situation is far from without precedent. Huge chunks of Series 3 and 4 of Dad’s Army were also recorded in studio a week before transmission¹; “The Day the Balloon Went Up” was recorded on 23 October 1969, and broadcast just a week later on the 30th October. A couple of weeks later, “Menace from the Deep” was recorded on the 7th November, and broadcast just six days later, on the 13th November.

All of which is worth noting. But there is a vague disappointment that I couldn’t find a normal sitcom which really did record the day before it was due to air. Sure, we could cheat and just say Drop the Dead Donkey, but that’s no fun. That was a topical show specifically designed to be shot close to transmission. The joy here would be an otherwise normal sitcom being made surprisingly down to the wire.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have one. Regular helpful person to this site David Brunt stepped in, and gave us a brilliant, highly unexpected example.

[Read more →]

As referenced in Graham McCann’s Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy. ↩

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some mothers do 'ave 'em

In Search of the Golden Brain

Published 28th August 2022

TV Comedy

I’ve never been very good at being a comedy geek. I think I’m supposed to have lain under my bedcovers at night, listening to obscure radio comedy. I never did that. I was also supposed to be addicted to double bills of Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show on BBC2 in the 90s. I never did that, either.

Spitting Image book cover

But if there’s one cliche I did manage to follow, it was my love for that rare thing these days: the TV comedy tie-in book. Even in the 80s and 90s, it was more difficult to rewatch the comedy you loved than it is now; at the very least, it was far more expensive. Books were your way to stay in touch with your favourite show. And among a certain demographic at least, something like Bachelor Boys seems quoted almost as much as The Young Ones itself these days.¹

Less talked about perhaps, was the series of Spitting Image books released in the second half of the 80s. (Ownership of which got me a conversation with a girl in secondary school, which is more than most books did for me at the time.) And out of all of them, the very first from 1985, The Appallingly Disrespectful Spitting Image Book, is the one I have the fondest memories of. After all, how can you resist a book which includes this?

That Quincy joke is perfect.

Still, among all the hilarity, one aspect of the book intrigued me. Because along with all the parodies of everything under the sun, there was one part where I just couldn’t figure out whether it was a joke… or whether it was real.

Decades later, we can finally decipher it. But we need to take a little detour first.

[Read more →]

Who farted?, My nob’s bigger than Heathrow Airport, and That-cher. There you go, I think I’ve covered everything. ↩

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best of, spitting image

Join the Dots

Published 6th August 2022

TV Comedy

It’s odd how things in your life can suddenly connect, completely unexpectedly.

Take the Red Dwarf episode “Timeslides” (TX: 12/12/89), which I’ve already written about recently. Short version of the plot: Kryten finds some photographic developing fluid which has mutated, and it now makes photographs come to life. Interestingly, this is one of the few times the series actually uses the fact things have been sitting around on the ship for three million years, and odd things might happen during that time.

But before we get into the meat of the episode proper – Lister going back and changing his own history – we get a series of gags about the kind of things you could do with the concept of living photos. So as well as causing trouble at Rimmer’s brother’s wedding, or pondering what they could do with a set of naughty beach photographs, we get the following amusing idea.

What if Lister had sent some photos to be developed, and got someone’s skiing holiday snaps back by mistake?

The official Red Dwarf site offers the following amusing titbit about this scene:

“But even the writers aren’t infallible, as Timeslides clearly proved. As production on the episode began, the scene where Lister claims he got somebody’s skiing holiday picture back by mistake was discovered to have an error by none other than Craig. The skiers had scripted lines about how they got Lister’s rather scary birthday snaps – which would have been fine, except, at that point in time, the skiers would not have received them yet. The lines were summarily cut.”

Very good Craig, well done. But this is no longer my favourite fact about this scene.

* * *

Recently, I’ve been doing some research on the very first Spitting Image book, published in 1985. Not that it was new to me. It was a favourite of mine as a teenager in the 90s. I once lent a girl my copy of it in one of my last years at secondary school, who I then proceeded to fail to have sex with.¹

Now, I knew that Rob Grant and Doug Naylor wrote Red Dwarf; even back then, I was as interested in who wrote something as who starred in it.² I also vaguely knew that they had something to do with Spitting Image, and clocked their names mentioned in the book. These days, I know all about how Grant Naylor essentially waded in halfway through Series 1 of Spitting Image and saved the show, but I didn’t really know the details at the time.

Nor did I notice the following. One of the double page spreads in that first Spitting Image book is a parody of teen photo story magazines; specifically, My Guy. They did a bloody good job too; the layout is identical. Click/tap for a bigger version:

But hang on, what’s that silliness, happening right at the end of the strip?

Yes, the story falls apart, because… the wrong film came back from the chemist, and they got some skiing holiday snaps instead!

Which is fascinating for all kinds of reasons. Partly because of something else I posted about recently; about how easily some of Red Dwarf‘s supposedly science fiction ideas turn out not to be rooted in science fiction at all. It’s also interesting because it specifically marks the photo story parody as being at least partially the hand of Grant Naylor; none of the individual pages in the book have author credits.

But most of all, I love it because I’ve always loved that Spitting Image book. Like The Young Ones spinoff book Batchelor Boys, it was part of my comedy education growing up; a way of experiencing the show without the cost of endless blank tapes, or expensive commercial videos. Yet somehow, I’d never linked that skiing joke in the photo story to the Red Dwarf moment before, despite the knowledge that Grant Naylor worked on both shows. A brand new path suddenly opened up in my brain, connecting two things completely unexpectedly.

I find it utterly delightful.

Most of my teenage anecdotes end like this. I did once lend a girl a copy of Craig Charles’ The Log, in exchange for a feel of her breasts. This is the best thing that book ever achieved for anybody. ↩
If I’m honest, it still bemuses me today that everybody doesn’t think like this. ↩

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red dwarf, spitting image

Broken Dreams

Published 30th July 2022

TV Comedy

Discussing the influences and antecedents of Red Dwarf can be tricky. Do we look at the show in terms of its science fiction, or as a sitcom?

In terms of science fiction, albeit comic science fiction, Dark Star is the big one. The idea of having normal people rather than heroes, and in particular its portrayal of working class people in space, seems to have originated here for Grant Naylor. Alien also feeds into this, along with influencing many sets in the show, not to mention all the shenanigans in “Polymorph”. Holly clearly has his roots in HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey¹, and so does the first opening theme tune.

As for pure sitcom, there’s the classic “Steptoe and Son in space”, which is often thrown around as an early concept for the show. Porridge is also endlessly mentioned, in terms of the claustrophobic situation between characters which the show was trying to evoke. All of this is certainly true, but with the odd honourable exception, there’s typically very little analysis beyond mentioning a TV show or film, along with a one line description.

And then there’s Hancock’s Half Hour. A show which doesn’t immediately spring to mind when talking about Red Dwarf. Yet the episode “The Tycoon” (TX: 13/11/59) has a number of remarkable similarities to the Red Dwarf episode “Better Than Life” (TX: 13/9/88), broadcast nearly thirty years later. Moreover, I don’t just mean in terms of character work – the main plot beats of the episode are broadly identical, despite “Better Than Life” seemingly hanging off a science fiction idea which Hancock would find impossible to replicate.

Rather than vague hand-waving or simplistic single line reductions, let’s take a look at both episodes in detail, shall we?

[Read more →]

A fact made more obvious by looking at Red Dwarf‘s precursor “Dave Hollins: Space Cadet” in Radio 4’s Son of Cliché, featuring… Hab. ↩

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originally on G&T, red dwarf

Tales From BBC North West’s Scene Dock

Published 10th July 2022

Children's TV / TV Comedy

Sometimes, if I put on my magenta-tinted spectacles, I think that the most fun I ever had with Red Dwarf was in 1994. That was the very first time I watched the series, and indeed the very first time the show had been repeated from the beginning at all. So I could blithely enjoy the show without being troubled by what other people thought of it… or specifically, what the writers thought of it.

So the fact that Rob Grant and Doug Naylor hated the grey sets by production designer Paul Montague in the first two series of Dwarf was unknown to me. I really liked them. I also liked the new sets from Series III onwards, by Mel Bibby. I just… liked Red Dwarf an awful lot. And Grant Naylor poking fun at the sets of their own show in Me² (TX: 21/3/88) entirely passed me by.

LISTER: But why are they painting the corridor the same colour it was before?
RIMMER: They’re changing it from Ocean Grey to Military Grey. Something that should’ve been done a long time ago.
LISTER: Looks exactly the same to me.
RIMMER: No. No, no, no. That’s the new Military Grey bit there, and that’s the dowdy, old, nasty Ocean Grey bit there. (beat) Or is it the other way around?

Truth be told, I still love those early Red Dwarf sets, and no amount of people who actually worked on the show slagging them off will change that. In particular, I think the endless permutations of the same basic sections did a really good job at selling the ship as something genuinely huge, and I don’t think this is acknowledged enough. I didn’t even mind the swing bin.

Ah, yes, the famous swing bin. Of all the elements made fun of with those first two series, this one is a perennial. You can see it in action during the very first episode, “The End” (TX: 15/2/88), in McIntyre’s funeral:

It is undeniable: McIntyre’s remains are blasted into space through the medium of a kitchen swing bin, built into a circular table-like object. The commentary on this scene in the 2007 DVD release The Bodysnatcher Collection is brutal:

DOUG NAYLOR: The idea of this is was that it’s supposed to be quite moving, wasn’t it?
ROB GRANT: Yeah, I liked this scene in the script, because it was tender, and a different tone.
DOUG NAYLOR: Yes, but obviously it’s not working as conceived? Now first of all…
ROB GRANT: The canister.
DOUG NAYLOR: The canister, and then the… kitchen bin.
ROB GRANT: Just fantastic! But he pressed that button good, that’s good button-pressing acting… I mean, what is that? It’s not even a good bin, is it?
DOUG NAYLOR: And because there’s nothing in the bottom of the kitchen bin, it just thuds to the bottom, and I think eventually they put tissues in so it didn’t make that terrible clanking noise.
ROB GRANT: Oh dear Lord.

The above scene did actually go out as part of the first episode. But our notorious swing bin also played a big part in what has become one of the most famous deleted scenes in the whole history of Red Dwarf. Shot during the original recording of the first episode, but cut from transmission, we see Lister trying to give a respectful send-off to the crew.

Rimmer’s “What a guy. What a sportsman” is one of the great lost lines of Red Dwarf, as far as I’m concerned. Swing bin or no.

So, what happened to our notorious prop, after the first episode was completed? Well, it hung around in the Drive Room set for the rest of the series, sometimes used as a table whenever the need arose:

Waiting for God

Confidence & Paranoia

But once those first six episodes were over, that was it. Series 1 was recorded at the tail end of 1987; when Series 2 started recording in May 1988, not only was our famous swing bin prop nowhere to be seen, but the entire Drive Room set had been replaced, with something rather less… grey.

Series 1 Drive Room

Series 2 Drive Room

Surely our swing bin was never to be seen again?

[Read more →]

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best of, red dwarf, red dwarf sets

Rapped Knuckles All Round

Published 5th July 2022

TV Comedy

I don’t spend all my time trying to prove people wrong on here, you know. Sometimes there’s joy in being able to prove somebody right, too.

Take this little anecdote about Yes Minister in Paul Eddington’s autobiography:

“There were rapped knuckles all round on one occasion. We had finished the recording one night and were waiting for the tape to be checked before the audience could be released and we could all go home when someone doing the checking noticed a slight mistake in one of Nigel’s long speeches.

The poor man came back with it all to do again, took a deep breath and did it, perfectly. We got our clearance and shot off home. But what no one had noticed was that since Nigel recorded the speech the first time there had been intervening scenes with costume changes, and Nigel was wearing the wrong tie. It was a viewer who spotted the mistake when the episode was shown.

– So Far, So Good, Paul Eddington, p.168

Unfortunately, Eddington doesn’t go into such piddling little details such as which episode he’s actually talking about. We’ll have to do the work for ourselves. Or at least cheat by grumpily searching Google.

Sure enough, “yes minister” bloopers tie comes up with the following IMDB entry. Apparently, during the Series 1 episode “Big Brother” (TX: 17/3/80)¹, “Sir Humphrey’s tie changes several times during one scene with Jim Hacker.”

“Several times” is an exaggeration. In fact, it changes once, and then back again, as we can see in this clip:

Humphrey’s “Yes, quite so, Minister” is the funniest part of the whole episode.

Anyway, we can clearly see the tie change for Hawthorne’s mildly difficult speech, and then change back again, indicating the reshoot. From blue and burgundy, to burgundy with white spots:

Tie in original scene, blue and burgundy

Original shoot

Reshoot

And what’s more, the errant tie genuinely is the same one as that worn in the final scene, indicating the reshoot took place exactly as described by Eddington:

Reshoot

Final scene

And there you have it. Proof that Paul Eddington wasn’t talking bollocks. Why bother fact-checking actual ministers who run the country, when I can fact-check pretend ones instead?

In all seriousness, though: it really is just as pleasurable for an anecdote to slip neatly into place as fact, as it is to prove somebody wrong. Poking away at these things isn’t an exercise in self-importance. The truth about something, no matter how inconsequential, is always worth striving for.

Yes, I’m no fun at parties, what’s your point?

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Just out of interest, the episode was recorded on the 13th January 1980, a shade under two months before transmission. ↩

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yes minister

Medium, Message, Etc

Published 29th May 2022

TV Comedy

Right now, I’m buried in a load of research on early Spitting Image. In particular, I have been carefully examining an original off-air of Series 1, Episode 11 (TX: 10/6/84), for reasons which will prove extremely interesting. But we’ll get to that in its own sweet time.

Instead, I want to talk about the two sketches in this episode before and after the ad break. Before the break we get our very first look at the puppet of Diana, Princess of Wales, who had hitherto just been heard off-screen. After the break, we get the ad parody “There’s an indifference at McGregor’s you’ll enjoy”, about the contemporary head of the National Coal Board, Ian MacGregor. The miner’s strike had started just three months previously.

Below is the sequence as presented on the DVD, released in 2008:

The link the sketch draws between the Scottish-American MacGregor, and applying certain American business practices to the UK, gives it a little more depth than a fair number of ad parodies manage.

While it’s obvious that the McGregor’s sketch is a McDonald’s parody, and of a very famous ad campaign which had been running for years, it’s still startling to compare an ad from the actual campaign, and realise the jingle really is virtually identical.

Finally, let’s take a look at this sequence in Spitting Image as it originally transmitted – ad break fully intact – on LWT in 1984:

And all of a sudden, what the production was doing with the McGregor’s sketch is obvious. By putting it at the start of Part Two, it’s right up against a load of other ads, and feels part of them. I highly suspect that it’s only the Spitting Image logo at the beginning keeping the thing compliant with IBA rules. What was merely amusing on DVD starts to feel genuinely subversive when viewed in its originally broadcast form.

Now sure, if you’re actually thinking about the material, you could make the link anyway. It is easy to forget that back in 1984, you didn’t tend to get trailers for other programmes during the centre ad breaks like you do now, which would completely ruin the effect. But if you did remember that, you could easily put two and two together and understand what the programme was up to.

But it’s one thing knowing that logically. It’s another actually seeing the effect it has on the show. It’s the difference between having merely having the facts at your disposal, and feeling them. Original off-airs for Series 1 of Spitting Image are very difficult to come by. Things like this give me a new appreciation for just how cheeky the show was being at this point.

And it’s a reminder that when making comedy, you need to consider how everything feeds into it. Context is vital. If you can get the format of your chosen medium to add meaning which is impossible to achieve in any other way, then so much the better.

With thanks to Nigel Hill for the original recording of this episode of Spitting Image.

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spitting image

Bad Teenager

Published 14th May 2022

Life / TV Comedy

It’s funny, the things you remember. The things you remember when everything else surrounding is a dull haze. Standing out in the middle: a conversation with someone who I used to know at primary school, but saw less often now I was at secondary.

I can’t even remember how old I was. I got into Red Dwarf in 1994 when I was 13, so it must have been after then. A couple of years later? We’d talked about the show before, anyway. And then once, during a normal conversation, he suddenly informed me that he didn’t like Red Dwarf any more. He’d grown out of it, you see. The show was for kids.

I was confused. I mean, the show definitely wasn’t made for kids. Even forgetting its teenage audience, the show was clearly made for adults. But he was adamant. He’d grown out of the show, and – by heavy implication – I was a baby for still liking it. Oh well.

Looking back, that was the moment when I realised that some people won’t be honest with you about this stuff. That some people will worry more about how they look, than about what they like.

This guy’s contempt for a show he used to enjoy was just teenage posturing.

* * *

A few years later, I was standing in a bowling alley, attempting to be an American teenager. I was in a group. A… mixed group.

Somehow, the conversation got onto the Spice Girls. My best friend slagged off “Mama”. I was confused.

“But I thought you said you liked that one!”

Awkward silence. My friend was livid. But I fancy that even the girls thought I hadn’t really played ball with society’s expectations.

I never was very good at that pesky teenage posturing.

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red dwarf

A Few Random Thoughts on 2point4 children

Published 1st May 2022

TV Comedy

What is the first thing that comes into your head when I say 2point4 children to you?

There is one obvious answer. “Great show, which never got the credit it deserved.” I’ve heard this said over and over in different ways. And I don’t think it’s wrong, per se.

But whenever I’ve talked about the show over the years – on Twitter and elsewhere – I’ve found something slightly different. So many people have told me that it was… erm, a great show, which never got the credit it deserved. Moreover, enough people watched it and loved it at the time that it managed to rack up eight series.

At some point, does it not stop becoming a great show which never got the credit it deserved, and merely become a great show?

Of such questions are comedy flame wars made. The answer, of course, is that it depends which people you hang around with. And it proves the risk of generalising about the kind of reaction to any given show. Among plenty of my friends, I’m not sure 2point4 children even needed any reappraisal when it was made available on iPlayer earlier this year. It got the right appraisal from them at the time.

If that isn’t a universal truth either, then we should be wary of trusting any one narrative of the show. There are a million of them.