TV Comedy – Page 12

Tales From BBC North West’s Scene Dock

Published 10th July 2022

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?

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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.

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2point4 children, best of

Back to Basie

Published 26th April 2022

TV Comedy

Some people probably think I compile lists of recording dates for sitcoms in lieu of having anything interesting to say about them. These people are entirely correct.

Nonetheless, as I’ve just had a delightful time watching the whole run on iPlayer, let’s take a look at Series 1 of Andrew Marshall’s brilliant 2point4 children.

Episode	RX	TX
Leader of the Pack	21/4/91	3/9/91
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning	11/8/91	10/9/91
When the Going Gets Tough the Tough Go Shopping	18/8/91	17/9/91
Love and Marriage	25/8/91	24/9/91
Dirty Bowling	1/9/91	1/10/91
Young at Heart	8/9/91	8/10/91

The above are the main audience record dates for the series. Location work for the pilot was done between 10th – 12th April 1991, and location for the rest of the five episodes was done between 15th – 27th July 1991.

There are a few things to note about the above. Firstly: yes, “Leader of the Pack” was a genuine pilot, shot nearly four months before the rest of the series. This pilot was shot in the main Studio A at Pebble Mill, before the show moved down to TV Centre for the rest of the programme’s run.

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Police I.Q. Shocker

Published 8th April 2022

TV Comedy

In a surprising move, today we’re going to take another look at The Young Ones. But this little tale is a good example of how researching old TV shows can lead you down an alley you never really expected.

Let’s join Mark Arden and Stephen Frost as a couple of gormless policemen in “Boring” (TX: 23/11/82).

As the picture dissolves into the newspaper headline, anyone who has been following my recent nonsense knows what’s coming next. What newspaper did they use as a basis for the prop, and what original story did the “Police I.Q. Shocker” headline replace?

The Guardian newspaper - lead headline Police I.Q. Shocker

Unlike our previous examples, this one is pretty straightforward. There’s no replaced or altered mastheads here. Not only is the paper an actual copy of The Guardian, but the correct date of the edition is visible, clear as a bell: August 3rd 1982.

Which means finding the original front page of the paper is easy:

The only story the production team changed was the middle one; everything else on the page is identical. The replaced story concerned Philip Williams, a soldier who turned up alive after six weeks, having been presumed dead fighting in the Falklands. In fact, now we know this, the line “was missing, presumed dead” is clearly visible in the broadcast episode, underneath the new headline.

Now that’s comedy.

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newspaper props, the young ones

I Hope You’re Satisfied, Thatcher

Published 5th April 2022

TV Comedy

Some days, I like to lead you all carefully into another tale of a sitcom production oddity. Other days, I like to throw a load of recording dates at you, and leave you to fend for yourself.

Guess which one this is. Let’s take a look at when Series 2 of The Young Ones was actually made.

Episode	RX	TX
Sick	23-24/1/84	12/6/84
Cash	30-31/1/84	15/5/84
Nasty	6-7/2/84	29/5/84
Bambi	14-15/2/84	8/5/84
Time	19-20/4/84	5/6/84
Summer Holiday	24-25/4/84	19/6/84

Two of those dates are not like the others. What was a fairly standard weekly production schedule for the first four episodes, suddenly has a gap of two months, before the last two episodes “Time” and “Summer Holiday” were recorded. What gives?

Those of you familiar with the BBC strikes around this time will already have guessed the problem. Luckily, we have a contemporary report from The Times by David Hewson, which explicitly states what happened, and that it specifically affected The Young Ones:

“The BBC faces a great log jam of unfinished drama and light entertainment programmes as the strike by 700 sceneshifters enters its fourth week.

Its effects on broadcasts are minimal, but the strike could lead to a severe shortage of home-produced plays and shows if it continues.

Postponed programmes include the latest Shakespeare production Titus Andronicus, three plays of the month, a new series of The Young Ones, the Kenny Everett Television Show, and a Ronnie Corbett comedy Sorry.

The director of resources for BBC Television, Mr Michael Checkland, has written to all television staff giving a warning that the corporation will not contemplate a return to work under the old working arrangements demanded by the strikers.”

— The Times, “BBC drama delayed by scenery strike”, March 13th 1984

This particular strike is well-known by Top of the Pops aficionados, as it affected the on-screen look of the show, with a vastly reduced set. The strike’s effects on The Young Ones are far less known about – in fact, it’s not widely-known that the strike had any impact on the show at all. And why should it be? This isn’t a Top of the Pops situation – the show ended up being produced unscathed.

Well, more or less unscathed, anyway. Let’s prod a bit deeper.

[Read more →]

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best of, the young ones

Website Says No

Published 21st March 2022

Meta / TV Comedy

If I was really interested in getting hits here on Dirty Feed, I would write a long series of articles detailing every last edit made to the new iPlayer version of Little Britain.

Ostensibly, it’s exactly in this site’s ballpark. Edits made to old comedy shows? I’ve dabbled once or twice in that topic. It’s something that deeply interests me. Why they are made, who has the right to make them, what the end result on any given show is. With the edits made to Little Britain being part of the news agenda right now, I imagine I could write something which would end up being the most popular thing I’ve ever written on the site. It seems an obvious thing to do.

I ain’t touching this one with a bargepole.

Sure, in terms of subject matter, it’s absolutely the kind of thing Dirty Feed would cover. But in terms of everything else, it’s as far away from anything I want to publish as you can get. Over the last two years especially, I’ve aimed to make this site some kind of calm retreat from the nonsense you get elsewhere. In particular, I took pride in updating this site with free, fun stuff during the height of the pandemic. It just felt like the right thing to do.

Little Britain edits aren’t a calm retreat from anything. They’re shrill, and in the news. And if I wrote about them on here, I would get swarms of bad faith arguments of all persuasions battering this site something rotten. Even if I thought what I had to say about the topic was valuable, I 100% cannot face turning this site into something which will attract that kind of attention. The thousands of hits I would get would absolutely not be worth it.

This is also why I never wrote anything about the edits made to “The Germans” episode of Fawlty Towers either. I have a great number of opinions about that – probably enough to piss everybody off – but I think this website might be a bit more useful as place away from that kind of thing. If the only opinions you have about edits made to comedy consist of the squawking you get in some areas of the media or on Twitter, then this place isn’t really for you. And the people I might convert to the cause to look at things a bit deeper wouldn’t be worth sticking my head into the shitstorm. I’ll stick to Thin Blue Line edits, thanks.

So if you think a place which avoids that kind of thing is valuable, and you like anything I’ve written on here, then I’m grateful for anything you can do to spread the word about this site. Whether it’s on Twitter, Facebook, or rude messages daubed on bus shelter walls. It’s difficult to get noticed if you deliberately stay away from the heat… but I like to think that’s a worthwhile thing to do sometimes. And not just for my mental health. Talking about stuff other people aren’t talking about has its own rewards.

As for Little Britain… well, maybe I’ll write something about it in twenty years, when nobody cares any more. Anyone interested in the toned-down BBC One edits of Series 3 that most people have forgotten about?

Tonight’s Special Guest Star: Adolf Hitler as Himself

Published 20th March 2022

TV Comedy

It is perhaps a mark of the kind of show Red Dwarf is that an episode can start with having Lister climb into a living photo featuring Adolf Hitler, beat him up, nick his briefcase, and accidentally foil an assassination attempt.

Nevertheless, ten minutes into “Timeslides” (12/12/89) that is exactly what has happened, leading to Rimmer’s memorable line: “You can’t just stick one on the leader of the Third Reich.” But we’re not here to talk about the actual comedy in the episode. That would be ludicrous.

No, we’re here to talk about this prop newspaper:

News Chronicle newspaper: headline Hitler Escapes Bomb Attack at Nuremberg

In grand time travel story tradition, this is the shot that tells us that what Lister did is real. His leap into the living photograph had actual, lasting repercussions for the universe; it didn’t exist in its own little bubble. It’s the revelation that powers the whole rest of the episode.

It’s also the kind of shot which makes me think: hang on, did they make that newspaper front page from scratch, or is it based around a real one? Of course it made me think that. I have form.