Right now, I’m deep in the middle of researching the stock footage used in the opening and closing titles of Hi-de-Hi!. Which, I’m sure you will all agree, is the best possible thing I could be doing with my life.
So as a little taster: have you ever wondered exactly where the footage which opens the pilot comes from, which the caption proudly proclaims is “Cambridge 1959”?1
Tough, I’m going to tell you anyway. I can EXCLUSIVELY reveal that it was taken from this short 1957 Pathé travelogue, called Cambridge Backs.
Which starts with a mild admonishment of the audience, because of course it does.2
Wait, so that was shot in 1957, but Hi-de-H! claims they’re showing Cambridge in 1959? MORE OUTRAGEOUS BBC LIES, CANCEL THE LICENCE FEE.
Incidentally, the music used on Hi-de-Hi! for this sequence is a specially recorded organ version of “Gaudeamus Igitur”. ↩
Today, I have another story for you. And like all the best stories, it starts with the DVD menu for At Last Smith & Jones: Vol. 1.
At Last Smith & Jones: Vol. 1 is a slightly odd but extremely watchable Best Of release for the duo, released in 2009. It comprises of material from all four series of the BBC2 incarnation of the show – two episodes per series, making a total of eight compilation episodes – along with the complete 1987 and 1988 Xmas specials.1 None of these compilation shows have end credits of their own, just a BBC logo and a copyright date – everyone who originally worked on the show is listed on the separate credits elsewhere on the DVD.
And as I was reading those DVD credits for Series 4, a certain part of my brain sparked into life.
A consequence of hanging around in Red Dwarf fandom for too long is a minor obsession with early Rob Grant and Doug Naylor material. I knew they had written stuff for The Grumbleweeds and Jasper Carrot, but I never knew they had written anything for Smith & Jones. And yet there were their names, large as life.
What the hell did they write?! I had to know. Time for some investigation.2
Recently, I wrote this ridiculous article about The Young Ones episode “Cash”. So while we’re on the subject, here is something else about the episode which has bugged me for years.
To recap: in order to earn some bread, the gang decide to send Neil to the Army Careers Information Office. In no short order, he is flung right back out onto the pavement.
NEIL: I only said I was a pacifist.
And as the gang help Neil to his feet again, there is a very peculiar edit. The following are two consecutive frames from this moment in the episode:
Everyone has changed position; most obviously Planer, who suddenly has his hands in his pockets. Clearly, something was cut at this point. But what?
Unlike our previous investigation, the raw footage is of no help to us here; no location material is present on that tape. Nor does the paperwork I personally have access to shed any light. But the answer is out there, if you look hard enough.
And I honestly think the cut moment could have gone down in history as one of those TV moments a whole generation remembers.
“I alter people’s perception of reality.” – Dr. Hypnosis
One recurring theme in Red Dwarf has always been the rather tenuous grip on real life the crew have. Whether it’s the Total Immersion Videogame of “Better Than Life”, the hallucinations suffered in “Back to Reality”, those damn reality pockets in “Out of Time” – to name three of many – people’s perception of reality is something which Grant Naylor return to time and time again.
What’s interesting, however, is that Red Dwarf is far from the first time Grant Naylor have explored this idea. In fact, we can trace their fascination with it right back to their very first solo writing credit: the first episode of Radio 4 sketch show Cliché, broadcast on the 16th March 1981. Though unlike Red Dwarf, it isn’t framed in terms of science fiction.
I present to you the strange adventure of Dr. Hypnosis: his real name… Dr. Hypnosis.
Today, we’re going to answer a huge burning question about The Young Ones. No, nothing to do with flash frames, or hidden fifth housemates. This is the really important stuff.
Exactly what is the farty neighbour watching on her television in “Cash”, just before she switches over to Andy De La Tour doing a public information film?
Squinting at it, it seems impossible to tell. Some kind of drawing of a car? Unless it’s some well-known cartoon, or mentioned in the paperwork for rights reasons, or specified in the script, how could we ever figure it out?
Spoiler: it’s not a well-known cartoon, or mentioned on the paperwork for rights reasons, or specified in the script. We have only our wits to go on here.
Well… wits, and a certain video of Young Ones raw studio footage, sitting patiently on YouTube. I wrote recently about the section of this video containing material for the episode “Nasty”, but the second half of the video is entirely dedicated to “Cash”. And crucially, it includes the entire recording session for this scene.
It’s January 1999, and Ronald D. Moore – writer/producer on Star Trek: Deep Space 9 – is chatting on AOL, answering fan questions about the show.
One particular question catches my eye. You don’t need to know the actual storyline, or have watched any of the episodes – that isn’t the important bit here.
Ron, I read on the boards that there was a scene in “To the Death” in which Weyoun somehow slipped Odo some virus that eventually resulted in his having to return to the Link in “Broken Link.” I read that this ended up on the cutting room floor. Is this true or just a wild rumor?
It’s just a rumor.
Now, one delightful thing about DS9 is that – unlike most TV shows – every single script is available for us to read. Not a boring transcript. The actual script, as used in production, including cut material, and the scene descriptions. Which means we can check and see if Moore is correct in this instance.
So, in the script for “To The Death”, we can read the following1:
Weyoun looks at Odo for a beat, then gives him a good-natured clap on the shoulder. (In case anyone’s interested, when he touches Odo, Weyoun is purposely infecting Odo with the disease that almost kills him in “BROKEN LINK.”)
WEYOUN: Then it’s over. After all, you’re a Founder. I live to serve you.
And with that, Weyoun steps back into his quarters.
True, this scene didn’t end up on the “cutting room floor” – it’s in the episode as broadcast, just without the physical act of Weyoun clapping Odo on the shoulder. But the main thrust of how most people would interpret Moore’s response – that the episode never intended to contain Weyoun infecting Odo – is incorrect.
I very much doubt it was a deliberate lie. There’s certainly no obvious reason to try and hide anything. Moore almost certainly just forgot. That’s what happens when making TV shows; you can’t remember everything, there’s far too much important stuff jostling for position in your head. It’s completely understandable.
Still, the moral is clear. Don’t trust people’s recollections. Always trust the paperwork.
* * *
It’s 2020, and I have decided to trace every single piece of music used in The Young Ones, for some godforsaken reason. But not to worry. I have some production paperwork to help me out, which should list every track cleared for use in the show.
So let’s take a look at part of the sheet for the episode “Summer Holiday”:
Ah, “Tension Background”. Wonder what that was used for? Let’s take a listen, I’m sure all will become obvious.
Oh. That literally doesn’t appear anywhere in the episode at all. Brilliant.
To cut a long, tedious story short: the paperwork is wrong. Not entirely wrong; a track from the Conroy library album Drama – Tension is actually used in the episode. But the cut used is Track 3, “Chase Sequence”, not Track 15, “Tension Background”.
And that piece of detective work means that we can enjoy the full version of the music used when Neil goes all Incredible Hulk:
So, the moral is clear. Never trust the paperwork.
It’s the 6th February 1984 in studio TC4, and Rik Mayall is having a circular saw aimed at his knackers.
I write a lot about comedy on here. Sometimes I write some very silly things about comedy indeed. Take, for instance, this analysis of one of the main sets in Blackadder Goes Forth, and how it showed up in various forms throughout the series. You have to have a certain kind of mind to find that interesting, and admittedly, part of it is a pure puzzle box mentality: “What bit goes where?”
But there is also something a little deeper going on there. For all the careful explanations of what writers were hoping to achieve with their work – which for the avoidance of doubt, is something I’m also extremely interested in – what I really want to be able to do is transport myself back, and be present in the room where the comedy was actually made. I get obsessed with wanting to know how a room felt, either in the writing, or in the shooting. Trying to figure out what piece of wood went where while recording a sitcom is an attempt at nothing less than time travel, however ludicrous that sounds.
Which is where your good old fashioned studio recording tapes come in. Whether it’s just clips in documentaries, longer extracts released as DVD extras, or bootlegs passed quietly around as though we’re all crack dealers, there’s nothing quite seeing the raw footage of how a show is made to get a sense of how things felt. An incomplete sense, of course. Nothing can quite replace a real time machine. But it’s something.
All of which preamble is leading up to this glorious video on YouTube. Two hours of raw studio recordings of The Young Ones, precisely none of which is officially sanctioned for release, and precisely all of which is fascinating.
Let’s be very clear about what the above footage represents. Each episode of The Young Ones – unusually for a sitcom of the era – had two days in the studio. These consisted of a pre-record day for the complicated technical bits, without an audience, followed by an audience record the very next day. The above footage is the bulk of the pre-record days for the episodes “Nasty” and “Cash”. The fact that these are the pre-record days explains the lack of audience laughter on the footage, something a few people in the YouTube comments are a little confused by. An edited version of this material would have been shown to the audience the next day on the studio monitors, along with recording the rest of the show in front of them, in order to get the laughs.
Not that what we are seeing is the edited footage that the audience would have seen, either. This is the complete – or near-complete – recording of the day, featuring multiple takes of the material. In short: this really is as close as we can get to skulking around in the studio for the day, silently watching as the team shoot one of the best sitcoms ever made. We even know exactly when everything occurs; the timecode at the bottom of the screen is literally the time of the recording.
There is no substitute for simply watching the video embedded above. But I thought it might be useful to write some notes to go alongside it. Here then, are some observations on the first half of the video, covering the pre-record day for “Nasty”. In particular, I’ve tried to identify any part of the script which don’t make it into the final edit, along with which of the multiple takes were actually used in the finished show.
I really need to get back to watching Orange is the New Black, you know. I got bogged down at the end of Season 4. Is she gonna shoot him? Is she? IS SHE?
So in order to get back on track, recently I… erm, watched an old IBA Engineering Announcement from 1990 instead.
I feel I’m supposed to be nostalgic for the Engineering Announcements – those hidden, weekly 10 minute programmes on your local ITV station, giving the trade all the latest news and transmitter information. I’m supposed to say that I watched them through my childhood, that they got me interested in how telly works, and are responsible for me working in the industry today. Truth be told, I don’t think I ever actually saw one as a kid. If I did, it left no impression on me whatsoever. I was rather more interested in Central Television idents instead. (Well, I had to show my TV geek credentials at that age somehow.)
Which means that watching them online now is a faintly bizarre experience. Broadcasting ephemera that I feel I should have seen, but never did. For example, take this one, broadcast on Tuesday 26th April 1990, at 5:45am. I would have been eight years old. Why didn’t I just get up early? I didn’t need sleep at that age, surely?
“Beam me up Scotty” was never said in original Star Trek. “Play it again, Sam” was never said in Casablanca. Or how about my least favourite example: “Don’t tell him your name, Pike” is not the actual line in Dad’s Army. A sentence which is so lacking in comic rhythm that I could punch somebody… so obviously, it had to be plastered in large letters inside the audience foyer of New Broadcasting House.1
This article is about another misquote. But unusually, it’s about a very recent misquote. One which we can see spreading before our very eyes.
So let’s take a look at this article in the Metro on the best Basil Fawlty lines in Fawlty Towers, published February 2018. I have to be honest: it is not an especially good article. I don’t plan to eviscerate it; I will leave that fun as an exercise for the reader, if you so desire.2 I merely want to point you all towards the very first quote that the article gives as an example of Basil at his best:
“For someone called Manuel, you’re looking terribly ill…”
Here’s the thing. That line doesn’t appear in any of the 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers.
Between Doctor in the House, Doctor at Large, Doctor in Charge, Doctor at Sea, and Doctor on the Go, LWT made a total of 137 episodes of medical sitcom between 1969 and 1977. And I think it is virtually impossible to make 137 episodes of sitcom, without going a little strange at some point.
This is not a bad thing.
Take, for instance, the Doctor on the Go episode “It’s Just the Job” (TX: 8/6/75), written by Bernard McKenna and Richard Laing. The TV Times capsule merely promises us “another epidemic of of medical mayhem”. Which, sure enough, is true as far as it goes.
