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.
This year on Dirty Feed, I’ve talked about identifying the dates of some of my early TV memories.
Here’s a little tale about identifying the date of somebody else’s.
* * *
Long before Paula Yates invited people On the Bed, Emma Freud was doing the same on Pillow Talk, part of ITV’s late night programming Night Network.1 And who did she have on the bed in 1987? None other than a certain Chris Barrie, who spends much of the interview looking fairly uncomfortable. They should have just had sex in multiple different positions and had done with it.
A few things to ponder, then, before I reveal the real MEAT of what has turned out to be a rather remarkable little time capsule.
Previously on Dirty Feed, I took an in-depth look at the music used in Series 1 of The Young Ones. This turned out to be a surprisingly popular move. So, how about Series 2?
No preamble, let’s get on with it. Only pop music can save us now…
As before, there are some tracks that I just haven’t been able to identify yet. If you have any ideas, let me know in the comments or elsewhere.
It’s odd, the things you assume, with absolutely zero evidence whatsoever.
Take Red Dwarf repeats, for example. Over the years I’ve written countless stupid articles about the show. But one thing I never got round to is a full list of repeats Dwarf has had over the years. So if you want that, you should read Christopher Wickham’s excellent The Red Dwarf BBC Broadcasts Guide.1
Still, one self-confessed omission from that article is anything to do with cable/satellite repeats and the like. I don’t intend to provide a full list of these, because while I might be a moron, I am not an absolute fucking moron. It seems worth asking one question, however: when was the first repeat of Red Dwarf in the UK which was not on the BBC?
Before researching this post, my massively naive guess was: around 1992. UK Gold launched on the 1st November of that year; I’d just assumed that repeats of Red Dwarf had been part of the channel from the very beginning. But then, I never had access to the channel back when it started; the first time I ever experienced the wonders of multichannel television was in the late 90s, when we got NTL analogue cable, and even then we couldn’t afford any of the extra pay channels. Instead, I whiled away my days cheating the receiver into giving me 10 minutes of free Television X. Believe me, when you’re 18, 10 minutes is all you need.
Anyway, there is a very easy way of telling when Red Dwarf was first shown on UK Gold, and it doesn’t involve doing any hard research. Just ask people on Twitter, and get them to do that hard work for you. And here is the answer from Jonathan Dent, cross-referencing the Guardian’s TV listings and this Usenet post. The repeats of Dwarf on UK Gold started with a double-bill of “The End” and “Future Echoes”, and premiered on the Sunday 5th October 1997 at 11:05pm.
That’s a bloody great day of telly, isn’t it? But I digress.
What I find especially interesting about all this is that it coincides with the 1997 resurgence of Red Dwarf, which started with the first broadcast of Series VII 10 months previously, along with the programme’s first Radio Times cover. A resurgence which I look back on with mixed feelings, to say the least – but very much part of the second wave of the show and its fandom. Being someone who got into Red Dwarf during the 1994 BBC2 repeat season, I had no idea that I was already watching the show before it got its very first non-terrestrial UK showing. These repeats are all so much later than the history I had made up entirely by myself in my own head.
Now, would it be too much to hope for that this first broadcast on UK Gold was captured by someone on video? Maybe even with the accompanying – and presumably quite excitable – continuity announcement?
A version of this post was first published on Ganymede & Titan in September 2019.
In fact, you should read his blog Ludicrously Niche regardless. TV edits, gamebook analysis, and Radio Times capsules, who could want anything more from the internet? ↩
I’ve had it up to here with Twitter. This is not an in-depth article about the perils of social media. It’s just a simple statement of fact. I’ve had it up to here with Twitter.
I could list the many reasons why I’m bored with it right now. People coming into your mentions and explaining your own jokes back to you is a big one. People piping up with the ludicrously obvious take, when you’ve tried your hardest to tweet something more interesting, is another.1 The constant stream of unpleasant news is a third. I know the world’s going to shit, I am literally paid to put news bulletins on air, and monitor them closely. I don’t need to be told all this stuff in my free time as well. It’s just too much to cope with.
Then there’s the thing which pushed me entirely over the edge yesterday: making a crap joke about “nations and regions” in terms of television playout, only for someone who doesn’t even follow me to pipe up with some nebulous political point against me. And when I tried to politely explain I’m talking about something technical rather than anything wider, they block me. I got enough of this kind of aggressive, bad faith shit in the playground when I was 12. Right now, I don’t feel like willingly putting myself through it as an adult. I am bored of other people making their neuroses my business.
So for now, I’m deactivated.
Of course, it won’t last. I’ve not stormed off for good. Lots of people who I really like talking to, I only actually know on Twitter. And speaking entirely selfishly, Twitter is where I get the vast majority of hits for Dirty Feed from.2 At some point I’ll be back, like a dog eating its own fetid puke. But the longer I can take a break from it, the better for my mental health. So if you wondered where I’d got to, there’s your answer. I’m just trying to do something more useful for a bit.
“The Red Dwarf sets have been built on Stage G at Shepperton Studios, home of countless films and television projects, including The Third Man, Oliver!, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Mel Gibson’s Hamlet, for the past three seasons. Scattered amongst the workshops and sound stages at Shepperton are a number of disused backlots, which have proved to be a bonanza for the Red Dwarf production team. This year, they’ve already returned to the wooded glade used in last season’s ‘Terrorform’ to shoot exteriors for episode four, ‘Rimmerworld’, and next week they’ll be shooting segments of episode five, ‘Emohawk’, in a village of wooden huts – a set left behind by the short-lived American series Covington Cross.”
The Making of Red Dwarf, Joe Nazzaro, p. 17 (published 1994)
“The GELF settlement was a re-dressed medieval village set which had been created for the aborted British/American television series Covington Cross.”
Any self-respecting Red Dwarf fan has a few standard facts at their disposal. The first recording dates for Series 1 were cancelled due to an electrician’s strike. Robert Llewellyn was electrocuted on his first day at work. “Meltdown” was put back in the episode order due to worries about the Gulf War.
Slotting in among these standard set of facts is that the village scenes in the episode “Emohawk: Polymorph II” were shot on an abandoned set for a series called Covington Cross. And that’s… kinda it. That is The Fact, done, ticked, off we go.
I don’t think that’s good enough. Let’s take a proper look.
Sometimes a joke in a sitcom isn’t just funny, and doesn’t just reveal character. Sometimes, a joke is so good it literally seems to define your character. When Father Ted protests “that money was just resting in my account”, or Lieutenant Gruber sheepishly admits that “it was very lonely on the Russian front”, it somehow seems to be everything you need to know about them. A whole life, in a few short words.
For instance, take this joke in Series 1 of Red Dwarf (1988). As Lister prepares to watch Rimmer’s auto-obituary in “Me²”, he notices the following caption at the start.
HOLLY: “BSc, SSc?” What’s that? LISTER: Bronze Swimming certificate and Silver Swimming certificate. He’s a total lunatic.
In that moment, you feel like you know everything there is to know about Arnold J. Rimmer. His abject failure to achieve anything, and his desperation to hide that by any means possible.
The thing is with these kind of jokes: they stick. When a joke means that much in terms of defining a character, the writers often can’t quite let go of it.
Of all the scriptbooks that I own, Father Ted: The Complete Scripts is my favourite. Not only is it the actual scripts, rather than Blackadder: The Whole Damn Dynasty‘s lame transcripts, but soon as you open the book, its magic is revealed on the inside cover.
“Father Ted: The Complete Scripts is, uniquely, a collection of late, but not final drafts – jokes, characters and scenes that didn’t make it into the series are here, along with an introduction to each episode by the authors, which explains how the insane plotlines arose. So whether you’re a fan of the show, or simply interested in how a comedy programme makes the final leap from page to screen, this book is all you’ll need.”
Seeing as no deleted scenes ever showed up on any of the DVDs, or indeed any documentaries about the show1 , this scriptbook is the closest we’ll get to them. And there is indeed a fairly large chunk of stuff that never made it into the show. This includes entire scenes from “Song for Europe” featuring Jeep Hebrides, Craggy Island’s chief recording engineer, who leaps off the page so clearly that you just wish we could have met him for real.
But in some ways, it’s the smaller changes which are the most interesting. Take “Tentacles of Doom”, where three bishops come to Craggy Island to upgrade a holy relic, only to be destroyed by our heroes. Arthur Mathews tells us a delightful tale of an over-egged joke:
“Jack being taught to say ‘That would be an ecumenical matter’ was the inspired suggestion of (by now ex) producer Geoffrey Perkins. We were just going to have him saying ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, but that phrase really lifted it. There was a third line, ‘Temptation comes in many guises’, but it didn’t add anything so we dumped it in the end.”
– Arthur Mathews, Father Ted: The Complete Scripts, p. 120
You can already feel how the comic rhythm of the joke would be destroyed by the extra line. “That would be an ecumenical matter” is funny partly because it’s the only longer answer Jack gives. Learning what a show gets rid of is just as instructive as what a show keeps. Sometimes more so.
There is one thing that the scriptbook doesn’t reveal about this missing idea, though. Because a vestige of it actually appears in the final, broadcast episode. And I didn’t notice it for over two decades.
So let’s join Father Jack, shortly before he inserts the Holy Stone of Clonrichert up Bishop Facks’ rectum:
FATHER JACK: Temptation, ecumenical, yes!
Clearly, the “Temptation comes in many guises” lines were still in the script when the location shoot was taking place. The word does appear in the scriptbook in this scene, but nowhere else in the script – a script described as a “late, but not final draft”. So presumably the rest of the lines were deleted between the location shoot and the audience recording night.2
I confess that vestigial remnants of this kind utterly delight me. The glimmer of a road not taken, going unnoticed for decades. And it’s a sign of what you can get away with, if your show is firing on all cylinders. The above word should stand out like a sore thumb – the entire joke, as revised in the final version, is that Jack only has three answers. The mumbling of a fourth deleted one should ruin things, by rights. But it passes by without even being noticed, let alone feeling awkward.
The merest ghost of an alternate path, that never gets spotted… unless you’re on a deleted scenes orienteering course.
To my knowledge, anyway. Let me know if I’m wrong. ↩
Other parts of the book are more explicit that rewrites happened during this time; in the scriptbook’s introduction to “Hell”, Linehan talks about how the small/far away gag was thought up while shooting the episode’s location inserts. Not that that’s much of a surprise. I was at IT Crowd recordings where Linehan did rewrites between the first and second take in front of the audience. ↩
Just how many quotes from “Elstree” by The Buggles can I use as headlines on Dirty Feed? (It’s two and counting, so far. There will be more.)
But in 2014, I did indeed used to work for the BBC, at BBC Elstree Centre on Clarendon Road.1 That stopped at the end of 2017 unfortunately, which means I don’t get to accidentally walk through a Holby City shoot and get yelled at. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
As for what I actually did at Elstree, that’s a tale for 30 years time. Still, while I wandered those corridors, I began to piece some things together in terms of the television shot there over the years. Which meant that I could take a look at this shot from Series 2 Episode 4 of Alexei Sayle’s Stuff (TX: 09/11/89):
And notice that the same corridor was used 27 years later in Eric Idle’s The Entire Universe (TX: 26/12/16):
But that’s not really what I’m talking about today. This is a short story of a very specific prowl around the building. Although it is linked to the above corridor.2
What is now known as BBC Elstree Centre has a long and illustrious history, starting in 1914 as the site for the studios of Neptune Films. For the full version of that history, check out this section of Martin Kempton’s excellent ‘History of TV studios in London’; but here’s the short version. ATV used the site between 1958 and 1983, and then the BBC took it over in 1984. And being a TV geek of a certain flavour, I am rather interested in anything to do with ATV.
My challenge: could I find any obvious remnants of ATV at Clarendon Road, even though they had left the site 30 years before I got a chance to take a look around?
I can’t say I had a free run of the place. As much as I’d have loved to poke around in the galleries, plenty of doors were locked. And I was always wary of a burly security guard or two appearing behind me and giving me a good telling off. Still, I looked in the places I had access to. And for a while, it seemed like I wouldn’t find anything.
And then, I saw it. Tucked away in the same corridor pictured in the TV shows above – although little further down, just outside Studio C – I came across the following. With apologies for the terrible image quality…
And if you actually got to the end of this post, I’m sure you got just as much of a kick out of that as I did.
Well, more or less. I won’t bore you with the details of outsourcing, at least not today. ↩
I seem to spend my entire life writing about corridors in some fashion or another. A trait I share with most Doctor Who fans. ↩
Before I knew what library music was, I used to get awfully confused, you know.
There was the time when I was watching Live & Kicking, and music used in Red Dwarf suddenly appeared. Then there was the time when I was at a show in Cadbury World, and, erm, music used in Red Dwarf suddenly appeared. (If you think I have a limited range of reference now, that’s nothing on me at 17.) More amusingly, there was the time when I was listening to Trent FM, and an advert came on… using the music from Central News East a few years previously. (Was that deliberate, to give the ad some already-bought legitimacy in the minds of the audience? Probably not, but it’s fun to ponder.)
These days, I know exactly what library music is, thank you very much, and the world seems a less puzzling place. And recently, a particularly pleasing strand was joined up in my head, as I was clicking around searching for library tracks used in The Young Ones.
That track was “Drama Heights” by John Scott. I first heard it on Spotify, on a 1976 library album called Drama – Tension, but the entire thing is available on Soundcloud for easy embedding::
And it’s a track virtually anybody of a certain age who lived in the UK will recognise, as the main theme for Trev and Simon’s eternally amusing “World of the Strange” sketches:
So, let’s trace things back a little. Where did “Drama Heights” actually come from originally?
The Soundcloud embed above gives a clue as to at least one use: in the film Mark of the Devil Part II, a 1973 German horror/exploitation film that very few people seem to have anything positive to say about. (“Medieval torture and witch-hunting have never been so boring” seems to be the general gist.) The film is so well-loved by its rights owners that, erm, the whole thing has been uploaded to YouTube, and nobody seems to give a damn.
To be honest, the film is exactly the kind of film I don’t want to watch, so I hope you APPRECIATE the fact that I have gone through it, and found the section which uses the track:
Which means that hilariously, we now have a link between German exploitation flicks, and, erm, Fruitang:
At 29 seconds into that advert, Trevor Neal is this: funny.
So, was “Drama Heights” written for Mark of the Devil Part II? Certainly, the official soundtrack release seems to indicate that it was, without outright stating it:
“John Scott too contributed some music for the score, Scott who is now a seasoned film music composer respected by many, began his career in film scoring as a composer by writing the music for another horror movie A Study in Terror, which was released during the mid 60s. John also had another career as being the legendary sixties producer who recorded several artists like Tom Jones, The Hollies, The Beatles, etc. John is also known for his saxophone work on films like Goldfinger and several Henry Mancini projects. Mr. Scott won 3 Emmys throughout his career.”
You would be forgiven for thinking that John Scott wrote the track specifically for the film, from that paragraph. But “contributed” isn’t the same as “written”, and I was suspicious.
So, the obvious thing is to turn to Discogs. That turns up one very obvious-looking release – the album called Drama – Tension from Conroy in 1976. This is an album which has escaped out into the digital age – indeed, it’s the album I mention above which is on Spotify, which is where this whole little tale started. So, that’s the answer then, yes? That it actually was written for the film, and then became library music a few years afterwards?
No. We can trace it back further. To 1968, in fact – five years before Mark of the Devil Part II. It’s still a Conroy release, and it doesn’t appear to have a name, just a catalogue number. So hello to BMLP 056:
It’s worth noting that “The best of the backgrounds” isn’t the album title – it’s a slogan which was also used on other releases – so we can save ourselves a rabbit hole of thinking this was some kind of Best Of release. As far as I can tell, this was the very first release of “Drama Heights”. Not 1976, not 1973, but 1968.
And who would have guessed in 1968 that the same piece of music would be used in dodgy horror films featuring gratuitous torture scenes, and a Saturday morning kids TV show?
The joy of where library music ends up never seems to fade.
