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A Brief Investigation into Recording Dates for Are You Being Served?

Published 13th January 2022

TV Comedy

At the end of last year, we talked a little about how some sitcoms were shot far closer to transmission than I ever expected. But sometimes, such stories just seem a little too unbelievable. Take Are You Being Served? – or, specifically, Wikipedia’s episode guide for the show. If you scan your eyes down that list until you reach Series 5, you will come across something rather odd.

Apparently, every single episode of Series 5 was recorded the day before it aired. For example, “Mrs Slocombe Expects”, shown on the 25th February 1977, was recorded on the 24th February 1977. This continues right up until the last episode of Series 5, “It Pays to Advertise”; this was shown on the 8th April 1977, and was apparently recorded on the 7th April 1977.

Something smells fishy. Being recorded close to transmission is one thing. The entire series being shot the day before TX is quite another. So let’s take a sneaky look at the paperwork for that first episode of the series, “Mrs Slocombe Expects”.

Paperwork for episode Mrs Slocombe Expects - all relevant information transcribed in main body text

Through that haze of atrocious reproduction, we can just about read the recording date for the episode: 18th February 1977. Actually very close to transmission – exactly a week before, in fact – but certainly not the previous day.

And the same holds true for the rest of the series. “The Old Order Changes” was recorded on the 11th March for transmission on the 18th March, “Goodbye Mr. Grainger” was recorded on the 25th March for transmission on the 1st April, and “It Pays to Advertise” was recorded on the 1st April for transmission on the 8th April. And while I’m missing information on two of the episodes, it’s not too difficult to work out from all this that “A Change is as Good as a Rest” was almost certainly recorded on the 25th February for transmission on the 4th March, and “Founder’s Day” was recorded on the 4th March for transmission on the 11th March.

As to how somebody updated Wikipedia with this particular piece of incorrect information, who knows. It could perhaps be a simple confusion between “a day” and “a week”. But despite it triggering my Spidey-sense, this kind of misinformation is all too easily believable to some, because it’s so damn specific. There’s no actual need to quote the recording dates in the first place; if somebody has bothered to do so, it’s extremely easy to just assume that they are the real deal. Indeed, this “fact” about some episodes of the show being recorded the day before TX has been quoted to me at least twice before.

It ain’t true. And to be fair, given past experience, Wikipedia will probably be corrected by somebody within an hour of me posting this.1

  1. I’ve been asked before why I don’t fix things on Wikipedia myself. Without going into too many details, I struggle a little with Wikipedia’s guidelines on various things. Not to the point where I want to do some massive rant about them… but I’m not going to get involved myself. Sorry, Wikipedians, but my work is best done here. ↩

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81 Take 2

Published 12th January 2022

TV Comedy

For 2022, I saw the New Year in right. Yes, I watched some comedy from exactly 40 years ago. Why, what did you think I was up to?

So thanks to Ian Greaves, here is 81 Take 2, a sketch show produced by Sean Hardie which was originally broadcast on BBC1 on 31st December 1981 at 11:20pm. Described by the Radio Times at the time as “guaranteed unrepeatable”, that is in fact exactly what it was.

I’m not about to do a lengthy, in-depth review of the programme. It fully deserves one, of course, but not today. Suffice to say that the Not the Nine O’Clock News and A Kick Up the Eighties DNA is supremely apparent. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, and it’s worth watching for the The Hee Bee Gee Bees segment alone.1

I do, however, want to draw your attention to the final segment at 27:43, after the fake end, where we join “Caesars Palace in Las Vegas”… and a certain Dicky Dynasty. Where Rik Mayall gives a quite astonishing performance. It’s by far the best part of the whole programme.

And anyone who knows anything about The Young Ones will recognise the character instantly. Nearly a year later in “Bomb”, broadcast on 30th November 1982, we get…

As has been pointed out by Mike Scott, amongst others: the whole programme, and the Dicky section in particular, really is a bit of a missing link when it comes to early 80s comedy. A programme which should have been clipped up and talked about endlessly, but really hasn’t.

It reminds me that there’s always something new to discover. No matter how much The Young Ones has been talked about over the years, the above has remained genuinely obscure for four decades now. Instead of going over the same old anecdotes, we should be digging up things like this.

*   *   *

In the spirit of the above then, here’s a brand new piece of information about 81 Take 2 which is relevant to this site’s interests. Because despite their absence in the credit roller, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor contributed a sketch to this programme. It isn’t their first broadcast TV material; for a start, they had contributed to Series 1 of A Kick Up the Eighties a few months previously. But it certainly counts as some of their very earliest.

Tracing exactly which material they wrote is slightly tricky. The paperwork for the programme doesn’t give the names of each sketch, but just lists the duration and its writer roughly in order. Moreover, some of the durations don’t 100% match… because of course they bloody don’t.

I think we can have a stab, though. Here’s the last few credits listed in the paperwork:

Andy Hamilton: Sketch: Dur 2.35
Simon Holder/Dudley Rogers: Oneliner: 12″
Colin Gilbert: Oneliner: Dur 23″
Donnie Kerr: Oneliner: Dur 12″
Donnie Kerr: Oneliner: Dur 15″
Peggy Evens: Oneliner: Dur 8″
Niall Clark: Quickie: Dur 25″
Philip Differ: Oneliner: Dur: 10″
Rob Grant/Doug Naylor: Sketch: Dur: 39″
Mike Radford: Oneliner: Dur: 10″
Ian Pattison: Quickie: Dur: 15″

The big Hamilton sketch at the top of that list is at 21:38 into the YouTube video, and is the Godfather parody. Skipping a few, I think the 25″ Clark quickie is at 25:43, and the lethal package sent to Mrs. Thatcher. We then have the 10″ one liner written by Differ… meaning that the Grant Naylor sketch is almost certainly the cricket scores sketch at 26:22. It lasts 34″ and not 39″, but I put that down to the usual inaccuracies you get with this kind of thing. Moreover, the sketch feels very Grant Naylor to me.

Happy 2022 everyone.

  1. It is tempting to complain that BBC One should be showing new comedy on New Year’s Eve now, and that a best of Have I Got News For You doesn’t quite cut it. Then I just thought I’d check what BBC One Scotland were up to, and noticed that they not only had a brand new episode of Scot Squad, and also had a brand new sketch show Queen of the New Year. ↩

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Another Very Important Article Examining the Contents of Victor Meldrew’s Kitchen Cabinets

Published 28th December 2021

TV Comedy

To write one article about One Foot in the Grave recording dates which hinges on the items in the Meldrews’ kitchen cabinets may be regarded as a misfortune. To write two looks like carelessness.

Oh well, here we go again.

Let’s take a look at “The Broken Reflection” (TX: 16/2/92). That’s the one where Victor’s brother Alfred shows up, and David Renwick decides to break our goddamn hearts… again. Alfred Meldrew is played brilliantly by Richard Pearson, and in Richard Webber’s excellent book The Complete One Foot in the Grave, the following rather alarming anecdote about the recording is told:

“For eagle-eyed viewers, the sudden appearance of a small bandage on one of Pearson’s fingers in the scene where he was opening a parcel on the Meldrews’ kitchen table was the result of an earlier accident. During the recording, Pearson used a knife to open the package. ‘It was too sharp, which was a little naughty because all knives are supposed to be blunt on set,’ admits Susan Belbin. Pearson sliced his finger and the extent of the bleeding left the director no alternative but to stop the recording. ‘I had to get him to hospital, so we left the rest of his scenes that night because he needed stitches.’ He returned the following week and completed his scenes, hence the bandage. ‘He was so good about it and I felt sorry for him. It was a bad cut.'”

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The Life and Times of Derek Pangloss

Published 26th December 2021

TV Comedy

Right, you can take your Alfred Hitchcock and Stan Lee cameos, and stick them right up your arse. We only do the important ones around here. So did you know that David Renwick appeared in One Foot in the Grave not once, not twice, but a total of seven times?

Let’s take a look. You may know one or two of these. You might even know all the ones listed on IMDB. But I believe that two of them are previously entirely unpublished. Including our very first example.

Series 2, Episode 4: Who Will Buy?

TX: 25th October 1990

Renwick’s first cameo in the series is an odd one. Indeed, you can barely hear him at all. The production paperwork confirms that the TV playing Poirot at the beginning of the show isn’t an actual clip from Poirot, but is… Angus Deayton and David Renwick.

This is a double in-joke, as at the time this episode aired, Renwick was a writer on Poirot, credited on four adaptations: “The Lost Mine” (TX: 21/1/90), “The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim” (TX: 4/2/90), “Wasps’ Nest” (27/1/91), and “The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor” (3/2/91). And once you know that, “Who Will Buy?” becomes even more intertextual than usual for One Foot in the Grave.

Starting off gently… until you’re suddenly watching a scene between Owen Brennan and Janine Duvitski with the actual Poirot theme playing in the background.

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A Brief Investigation into Recording Dates for So Haunt Me

Published 19th December 2021

TV Comedy

As we come to the end of the year, it’s a time for reflection, and pondering exactly what you have achieved with your life. It’s a shame, then, that this is exactly the moment that I find myself digging through the paperwork for 90s BBC1 sitcom So Haunt Me. It wasn’t intentional. It just happened.

Still, as I was idly flicking my way through, something caught my eye. Series 1 of the show was broadcast between February and March of 1992. The location material was shot between 12th – 16th January of that year. And when were the studio dates for each episode?

Episode RX TX
1.1 1/2/92 23/2/92
1.2 8/2/92 1/3/92
1.3 15/2/92 8/3/92
1.4 22/2/92 15/3/92
1.5 29/2/92 22/3/92
1.6 7/3/92 29/3/92

Although the series only started transmitting at the tail end of February 1992, every last shred of material in the series was shot that same year. Even the location stuff. Moreover, studio sessions for the series only started three weeks before transmission of the first episode. When the first episode was broadcast, they still had the last two episodes of the series left to shoot.

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“This Saturday Night on ITV!”

Published 10th December 2021

TV Comedy

VICTOR: You know what I’m like with weddings. It was bad enough at your nephew’s last year when that organ exploded.
MARGARET: Don’t remind me.
VICTOR: Then there was the father of the bride coming down with that unfortunate fungal infection. Your mother turned round and thought it was the Phantom of the Opera. Thought we’d never going to get her to stop screaming. God, that bloody video cameraman they hired. Got us to pose under a tree, and a bird’s nest fell on my head. Stood there like Jesus of Nazareth. Egg yolk dribbling down my nose.

Sometimes, making a TV show will pose a very particular production problem, which will take some creative thinking to solve.

Take the ending of the One Foot in the Grave episode “Monday Morning Will Be Fine”, broadcast on the 2nd February 1992. The brilliant payoff to the above discussion between Victor and Margaret is that we think it’s Renwick writing one of those gags which happen off-screen, and it’s funny because it’s merely reported. He then brings back the gag as the climax of the episode, entirely unexpectedly. My expectations were confounded and from thence the humour arose.

And the way he brings the gag back is through a trail for You’ve Been Framed!, which Margaret just happens to see in the TV shop as she’s ordering their new telly.

The question, then: how can a TV show broadcast on the BBC fake a section of ITV output, while using the bare minimum of material from ITV itself?

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“Tell Me More About These Buttons: Are Some Illuminated?”

Published 28th November 2021

TV Comedy

HOLLY: Emergency. Emergency. There’s an emergency going on.
LISTER: What is it, Hol?
HOLLY: There’s an emergency, Dave. The navicomp’s overheating, and I need your help in the drive room.
RIMMER: Oooh-ooh-ooh!
LISTER: Come in number 169, your time is up. OK, what was I wearing?
RIMMER: Ahhh… that jacket, and that red T-shirt.

Lister pulls out his hat and places it back on his head, then yanks a hefty length of piping off the wall.

LISTER: You said yourself, I can’t stop it. Let’s get it over with.
RIMMER: (Pointing at the pipe) Ah, Lister, what’s that for?
LISTER: I’m going out like I came in – screaming and kicking.
RIMMER: You can’t whack Death on the head!
LISTER: If he comes near me I’m gonna rip his nipples off.

Poor old David Lister. “Future Echoes” (RX: 17-18/10/87) is a particularly unpleasant business for him. But as he plugs in the drive computer into the navicomp and faces down Death – with or without nipples – he can at least be sure that he’s starting off a chain of events which makes a sad old Red Dwarf fan very happy.

Let’s back up a bit. Last time we looked at the wonderful word of Red Dwarf props and sets, we managed to trace a couple of EXCITING PANELS from Series 1 in 1987, right through to Series VII in 1996. Frankly, this was a bit too exciting, and I had to have a lie down for a bit.

But when I recovered, I was left sweaty and dissatisfied. To trace part of a set through nearly the entirety of the BBC years, but missing out Series VIII, was absolutely infuriating. Surely there must be something which made the trip through the whole eight series?

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“What about Other Optical Effects like Split-Screen, Slow Motion, Quantel?”

Published 27th November 2021

TV Comedy

The other day, I was browsing some paperwork for the Red Dwarf episode “White Hole” (TX: 7/3/91) , as you do. And something interesting caught my eye.

“This programme was recorded on Composite Betacam SP videotape.
Original tape numbers: 83 – 101 (with tape no: 90 being the master insert audience tape). Tape No: 124 + 126 additional graphics tapes.
Tape no: CV37898 (Mirage FX tape).”

Mirage FX tape? What’s that?

I know that some of you are already screaming at me. I have to admit, I am far from an expert on this kind of thing. I do, however, know enough to throw a few search terms into Google. I think we can trust Wikipedia with the basics, at least.

“The Quantel Mirage, or DVM8000/1 “Digital Video Manipulator”, was a digital real-time video effects processor introduced by Quantel in 1982. It was capable of warping a live video stream by texture mapping it onto an arbitrary three-dimensional shape, around which the viewer could freely rotate or zoom in real-time. It could also interpolate, or morph, between two different shapes. It was considered the first real-time 3D video effects processor.”

I also know that sometimes, the best way to get a grip on the capabilities of things like this is to search for demonstration videos on YouTube. In 2021, we’re in a far better situation than we were even a decade ago with this stuff: so much reference material has been uploaded by some extremely helpful people.

I was not disappointed.

And at 1:38 into that video… oh, that’s the bit they used in “White Hole”. Does that explosion effect remind you of anything?

Yes, when Holly is going through the intelligence compression procedure:

Or to be more specific:

Explosion effect in Mirage demonstration video
Same explosion effect in Red Dwarf, White Hole, for Holly's IQ transformation


At this point, my mind was blown in much the same way as Holly’s. But there’s more. How about this segment from Tomorrow’s World (TX: 30/12/82)1, for instance?

What happens at 2:49? Well, see if you can guess. Clearly, exploding the image was a signature effect of the Mirage.

And that’s what I really love about this. In 1990, when “White Hole” was made, the Quantel Mirage was already eight years old. The year before, when Series III was made, Red Dwarf had already made use of Harry, a later, more advanced bit of kit from Quantel. If it’s overstating things to say that the Mirage was old by this point, it most definitely wasn’t new, groundbreaking kit.

Red Dwarf makes the effect look great, though. Far better than either the example in the demonstration video, or in Tomorrow’s World. And it’s better because the effect works perfectly to tell the story. Holly is being dismantled to her very essence in order to increase her IQ; her visage being blown to smithereens and then put back together is a brilliant way to portray this.

A standard Quantel effect, turned into story. That’s some of yer actual, real television magic.

UPDATE (14/12/21): Some days, silly things I write lead to the most wonderful revelations. Here’s a remarkable piece of information on this effect, from the creator themselves:

I think I just need Dirty Feed to be a big list of bullet points stating topics I’m interested in, and then people who are actually clever can fill in the rest.

  1. The YouTube upload itself only said “1982”, so I thought I’d research the full date for you. Don’t ask me why the video is cropped to widescreen either, despite being uploaded by the BBC. I haven’t a clue. ↩

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Sorry, I Was Looking at the Wrong Panel

Published 25th November 2021

TV Comedy

It’s odd, the stuff you just make up in your head about a TV programme, without any actual evidence. Even a programme you’re supposed to know plenty about.

Take Series III of Red Dwarf. Out goes Paul Montague as Production Designer, and in comes Mel Bibby. The look of the show changes almost completely, the grey submarine aesthetic replaced by cream, Alien-inspired sets. At first glance, the show could barely look much different.

Series 2 bunkroom

Series 2 bunkroom

Series III bunkroom

Series III bunkroom

And so, over the years, your mind runs away with itself. You imagine Mel Bibby getting a massive skip, chucking every single last shred of the old sets into it, and starting from scratch. After all, not only do the sets look entirely different, but it’s on record that the show’s new producers – a certain Rob Grant and Doug Naylor – hated the old sets.

Nobody’s ever actually said that no part of the old sets remained in the new look. But clearly they didn’t, right? The new regime would want nothing to do with them.

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Fish!

Published 22nd November 2021

TV Comedy

Series IV of Red Dwarf in 1991 saw many interesting developments. For a start, the show moved down south from BBC Manchester to Shepperton. For another, Grant Naylor Productions took control of the show. There’s a whole wealth of important things to write about.

So I want to talk about some fish.

You know the ones I mean. These ones, brand new for Series IV, on monitors around the ship:

Kryten and Lister with the fish in the background
Lister with the fish in the background


Our question today: where did this footage come from? Surely it wasn’t shot specifically for Red Dwarf?

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