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The Dull Religious Music Programme

Published 12th August 2020

Music / TV Comedy

Back in June, I published the first part of my Young Ones Music Guide, detailing every single piece of music heard in Series 1 of The Young Ones. Some of you may be wondering why the second part is taking so long to appear.

By way of explanation, I have a tale for you today. It is a thrilling tale, tracing a piece of comedy history, full of twists and turns, with a stunning climax. It also features Gregorian chanting and incorrect paperwork, but don’t let that put you off.

Here is how complicated tracing the specific music used in television programmes can be.

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That’s the Joke

Published 29th June 2020

TV Comedy

With all my WILD and CRAZY opinions, what do you think the most pushback I’ve ever had to something I’ve posted here on Dirty Feed? Saying something nice about That Puppet Game Show? Slagging off a beloved element of Animal Crossing? Posting BBC Micro porn in living colour? (Please believe me when I say that last link is genuinely NSFW.)

No. The most pushback I’ve ever had is when I said I agreed with John Cleese. No, not about those comments. About a perfectly innocuous Fawlty Towers joke. Specifically, the bit in “Gourmet Night”1, where Basil faints while trying to introduce the Twichens to the Halls.

MR. HALL: No, no, we still don’t know the name.
BASIL: Oh, Fawlty, Basil Fawlty.
MR. HALL: No, no, theirs!
BASIL: Oh, theirs! So sorry! I thought you meant yours! [maniacal laughter] My, it’s quite warm, isn’t it? I could do with a drink, too. So, another sherry?
MR. HALL: Aren’t you going to introduce us?
BASIL: Didn’t I?
MR. HALL: No!
BASIL: Oh, sorry. This is Mr and Mrs… [mumbles]
MR. HALL: What?
BASIL: Er, Mr and Mrs…

Basil faints.

For years, I thought the joke was that Basil simply forgot the Twitchens’ name – him having forgotten his own name in the previous scene. But no. John Cleese explains all in the DVD commentary:

CLEESE: Now, what’s interesting here is that one of the best-loved jokes in Fawlty Towers, which is Basil fainting, is I’m afraid totally misunderstood by everyone who’s ever seen it, because – it is entirely Connie’s and my fault – it’s not set up properly. When Basil faints because he cannot remember Mr. Twitchen’s name, it’s not actually because he can’t remember Mr. Twitchen’s name. He can – but he’s talking to a man whose head is constantly twitching… and he doesn’t like to say “this is Mr. Twitchen” to someone whose head is twitching because that might annoy that person. So that’s actually what the joke is.

Anyway, in this piece on those commentaries, I made the error of admitting that I had misunderstood the joke too. And despite John Cleese literally explaining that it was a bad joke because too many people misinterpreted it, I’ve never had more people hinting that I was a bit of a moron. Someone even called me a “dunce”. I can only hope that my subsequent work examining exactly what was reshot of the Fawlty Towers pilot, and a long investigation into an early incarnation of the show now absolves me of dunce status.

All this got me thinking recently. If I sat here detailing all the jokes in sitcoms I’ve misunderstood over the years, I’d be here all day. But one particular example has always stayed with me, because it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out. And unlike the above example, it’s set up entirely correctly, and I should have no excuses.

So let’s take a trip to Red Dwarf – specifically, “Kryten”, and learn about decimalised music2:

RIMMER: It’s because you’re bored, isn’t it? That’s why you’re both annoying me.
HOLLY: I’m not bored. I’ve had a really busy morning. I’ve devised a system to totally revolutionise music.
LISTER: Get out of town!
HOLLY: Yeah, I’ve decimalised it. Instead of the octave, it’s the decative. And I’ve invented two new notes: H and J.
LISTER: Hang on a minute. You can’t just invent new notes.
HOLLY: Well I have. Now it goes: Doh, ray, me, fah, soh, lah, woh, boh, ti, doh. Doh, ti, boh, woh, lah, soh, fah, me, ray, doh.
RIMMER: What are you drivelling about?
HOLLY: Hol Rock. It’ll be a whole new sound. All the instruments will be extra big to incorporate my two new notes. Triangles will have four sides. Piano keyboards the length of zebra crossings. Course, women will have to be banned from playing the cello.
LISTER: Holly: shut up.

For an embarrassingly long time, I didn’t understand that last cello joke. I first saw the episode in February 1994, when I was 12, and maybe I should have got it then. Regardless: I didn’t. I can’t remember exactly when I did, but it had clicked by 2007.

There’s an odd thing, when you’ve watched a sitcom from an early age. An age where you get the idea of the programme, and many of the jokes… but miss a few obvious ones along the way, as well. Because my mind has a tendency to get a little – for want of a better word – stuck. When watching the same show as an adult, I hear the words, but the joke isn’t always heard afresh. The result: a joke that you would have got if you were coming to it for the first time remains impenetrable, long after you should understand it.

Well, that’s my excuse, anyway, and I’m sticking to it. Leave me alone.

  1. “Gourmet Night” also contains perhaps the harshest and bleakest joke in the whole of Fawlty Towers. “How’s that lovely daughter of yours?” / “She’s dead.” Very rarely remarked upon amid the rest of Basil’s nonsense, but it’s properly horrific. ↩

  2. A joke that Grant Naylor used in various forms for years. ↩

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The Young Ones Music Guide: Series One

Published 16th June 2020

Music / TV Comedy

Madness on the set of The Young Ones

STANDARD YOUNG ONES MUSIC FACT™: Did you know that the reason there’s a band performing in nearly every episode of The Young Ones is so the programme could claim to be a variety show instead of a sitcom, and get a higher budget?

Yes, I did. Right, now that’s out of the way, let’s move on, shall we?

While working on a different project recently, I found myself in need of a complete list of music used in The Young Ones. Sadly, nobody had already written this. After some research, it soon became clear why nobody had already written this.1 Of all the things I’ve done for this site, this has been one of the most difficult and complicated. The Young Ones has a lot of music in it, and a fair amount of it is obscure, sometimes absurdly so.

Not that I was starting entirely from scratch; I do own a copy of the official paperwork listing the music used in each episode. While this was of enormous help, the paperwork is also incomplete, and occasionally incorrect. Luckily, with a combination of that, my own ears, and an army of helpful people on Twitter, I’ve been able to identify the vast majority of the tracks used in the show. This includes chart music, library tracks, and specially written material by Peter Brewis.

There are a still few instances where I’ve unfortunately drawn a blank. These missing tracks are listed like this, along with an audio clip. So if anybody can identify any of these pieces, let me know in the comments, or drop me a line elsewhere. I will love you forever.

Let’s get going. This article covers Series 1; Series 2 will be dealt with separately, because I feel a responsibility not to over-excite you.

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  1. No, Wikipedia, a list of band performances in each episode does not count. ↩

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A Few Musings About the Young Ones Pilot

Published 26th May 2020

TV Comedy

Right now, I’m working on a piece for Dirty Feed which might be deemed Actually Useful™ – at least, for certain definitions of the word “useful”. A complete guide to every single piece of music heard in The Young Ones, right down to the most obscure library tracks which aren’t even mentioned in the paperwork.

But there’s something bugging me about the music used at the start of the very first episode, Demolition. Something deeply obscure, even for someone writing, say, a complete guide to every piece of music heard in The Young Ones. So rather than derailing that particular piece right at the beginning, let’s get all this nonsense out the way now.

Demolition, as I’m sure most people reading this will know, wasn’t just the first episode of The Young Ones. It was a pilot, in the true sense of the word – shot months before the rest of the series, in the hope of getting a commission. But the version which was finally broadcast in late 1982 isn’t the original edit of that pilot. A moment’s thought proves that it couldn’t be – the episode as we know it contains the regular title sequence for the series, which includes clips from episodes which simply hadn’t been made yet. I’ve been wondering what the original opening titles were for Demolition for nearly 20 years now.

Perhaps there is an echo of them left in the episode as transmitted, however. An echo that was staring me in the face for years, but I never even noticed until it was pointed out to me. The title card for the episode is highly unusual; nothing else like it appears anywhere else in the series. The gang, mildly awkwardly pasted into the windows of the original house:

Demolition title card

It looks like part of a title sequence, but it’s difficult to imagine this was created anew for the final broadcast version; it sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the episodes. Whether the entire pilot title sequence was just that shot with music over it as a placeholder, or something far more involved, is the kind of question which keeps me up at night.

We do have one other piece of information about that original pilot edit. A certain Peter Brewis used to have an unused version of the theme on his website, as originally used in the pilot. Sadly, his website has long since been deleted, but luckily someonee kept a copy and uploaded it to YouTube. And it’s fucking brilliant. (Visuals mocked up by the uploader, of course.)

I mean, who knows how it would have worked in the episodes as broadcast – it’s bloody long – but it’s lovely to hear for its own sake.

Which leads us – finally – to the oddity. Listen closely to the start of Demolition, as the strains of the broadcast title music start skipping, and then fade away:

[mejsaudio src=”https://dirtyfeed.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/s1e1-opening.wav” volume=”false”]

The Young Ones, Demolition Opening

Nine seconds into that clip, just before the DJ starts speaking, there’s a snatch of a different version of the title music. It doesn’t sound like the broadcast version. It doesn’t sound like Cliff’s original version. It doesn’t even sound like the pilot version, as heard in the video above.

So… presumably, there was yet another version of the song, used for the original opening titles of Demolition? And once the opening title music was changed for the series, the new version was just pasted over the top… leaving that tiny fraction of the original version from the first pilot edit, to confuse us all decades later. Why else would it be there?

Yes, I am keeping myself busy during lockdown, why do you ask?

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“Feeling Poorly Again, Are You?”

Published 2nd May 2020

Life / TV Comedy

My dad died when I was 13. Which is a rotten age to lose your dad.

Not that there is any brilliant time, of course. If he’d died when I was 18, I’d say it screwed me up for university.1 If he’d died when I was two, I’d be upset I never got to know him at all. Still, at 13, I was just starting to have the occasional adult conversation with him. There was the vague sense of the beginning of the relationship we could have had, where I really got to know him. To have him snatched away right on the cusp of that moment makes the sense of loss all the more terrible.

And over the years, I’ve learnt that one of those things we really could have connected over was comedy. I have flashes of my dad’s love for it. There’s the time when I crept downstairs well past midnight, and found him watching Carry On Again Doctor. There was the revelation I learnt from my mother recently that he loved Python. (Being as technical as he was, would have adored the Blu-ray.) And then there was making Hitchhiker’s references in official documentation he wrote for the Medical Research Council:

But one moment stays with me more than any other. And on my recent full rewatch of Bottom, it came flooding back. Specifically: the episode Digger.

*   *   *

I distinctly remember sitting with my dad in the living room. I didn’t watch the whole episode, I don’t think. I just remember the last scene, with Richie and Eddie sitting in the ambulance, Richie having nearly died in his latest attempt to actually have sex with a lady. My dad turns to me, a grin on his face.

“Watch this.”

I watched, as Eddie reveals to Richie that he ended up having sex with the Viscountess2 instead. Richie takes this about as well as you would expect, and asks Eddie to hand him the defibrillator.

Richie electrocuting Eddie

My dad chortles away. I also laugh, but not just because of what was on the telly. I just liked that my dad had let me in on what felt like an adult joke.

*   *   *

Because this is me, I feel the need to track down the date of the above event. We definitely weren’t watching it on commercial video – for a start, Series 2 was released on VHS in 1995, the year after my dad died. I can’t guarantee he hadn’t recorded the original broadcast of the episode to watch later, but unlike me, I don’t think he watched the same things over and over again, so it seems unlikely that he would have kept it. And we obviously weren’t watching the original broadcast on the 1st October 1992; otherwise, how could he have known what was going to happen?

So a bit of work with Genome reveals that the day this happened was almost certainly Friday 5th November 1993, which is the very first repeat of the episode. I think my dad remembered that moment for a whole year, and on a whim decided to share it with me.3 A moment of extreme violence about sexual frustration. I was 12.

He died less than a year later. And the stuff I missed out on still makes me sad, nearly three decades on. A sense of a lost part of my adolescence, when I could have discovered comedy with him. Instead, I had to do it by myself. And whenever I watch that scene, it hits me all over again.

As though Bottom wasn’t melancholy enough.

  1. Luckily, I managed to do that all by myself. ↩

  2. Lady Natasha Letitia Sarah Jane Wellesley Obstromsky Ponsonsky Smythe Smythe Smythe Smythe Smythe Oblomov Boblomov Dob, third Viscountess of Moldavia, to be precise. ↩

  3. One other thing strikes me about all this, years down the line. My dad was born in 1928; that makes him 65 when we were watching this episode. That is… outside the target age range for a show like Bottom. The show is often compared to Hancock’s Half Hour; my dad almost certainly watched both of them when they were first broadcast. Which shows a certain omnivorous taste for comedy that is deeply pleasing to me. ↩

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One Foot in the Edit Suite

Published 27th April 2020

TV Comedy

I had a dream for Dirty Feed, you know. A dream to document every single edit made to pre-watershed showings of One Foot in the Grave on the UKTV network: specifically, Gold, Drama, and Yesterday. OK, it’s not a dream many people have, I admit. But it was mine. They’d been bugging me for bloody years.

So in 2018, I saw that Series 1 was coming up for yet another repeat run, and took my chance. And sure enough, the first two series were broadcast in quick succession. I patiently waited for Series 3. And waited. And waited. And waited. It never seemed to appear. Nor did the 1990 Christmas Special, Who’s Listening? Series 5 came up, bizarrely, and I diligently recorded it. But Series 3 and 4 never appeared.

Well, it’s two years later, and I’m bored of waiting for them. Moreover, my Series 5 recordings got lost when my Sky+ box decided to break just as the country went into lockdown.1 So instead of this sitting on my WordPress backend any longer, here’s what UKTV had edited out of the first two series of the show, as broadcast pre-watershed in 2018. If they ever get round to showing the rest of the episodes again, rather than The Green Green Grass on endless repeat for some reason, I’ll finish this little project.

Cut dialogue is indicated like this. Let’s get going.

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  1. Fucking piece of crap. ↩

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Here’s to You, Mrs. Littlefield

Published 3rd April 2020

TV Comedy

Title page for Cheers pilot script

After nearly four decades, what is there new to say about the pilot of Cheers – widely regarded as one of the best television pilots ever made?

We can tick through the Standard Series Facts™ pretty quickly. Sam Malone was originally going to be an NFL player, until Ted Danson was cast. John Ratzenberger originally auditioned for the part of Norm. Before they decided on a bar in Boston, the initial idea was for a show set in a hotel. And you probably know what George Wendt is actually drinking at the bar, right?

If we dig a little deeper, however, we come across the strange tale of Mrs. Littlefield. A character scripted, cast, and shot for the pilot… but cut before air. Well, mostly cut, anyway.

Let’s find out a little about her from Sam Simon, writer and producer on Cheers1:

“There was another regular that was cut out of the pilot, did you know that? Boston is a very racist town, and there was an old woman in a wheelchair, whose name I don’t remember. I think you can see her in the pilot, in the first episode, I should say, because it wasn’t a pilot.2 They wanted to do the reality of Boston a little bit, and the racism of the town is certainly a valid topic for comment.”

Sam Simon, Television Academy Interview (49:24 – 50:05)

Then there’s this reader question on Ken Levine’s blog, another writer and producer on Cheers3:

“In Sam Simon’s amazing Emmy TV Legends interview, he talks about a character that was cut out of the Cheers pilot: A racist woman in a wheelchair. She was supposed to be a regular character, but apparently the Charles Bros/Burrows agreed that her harshness didn’t gel with the rest of the show.

Do you know anything about this?

Yes. The character was named Mrs. Littlefield. She was an opinionated old broad from the D.A.R.4 She was in the pilot and the decision to drop the character was made after it was filmed. Politics just didn’t fit with the mix. So they cut out her part, but there are a few shots here and there where she is still in the background. Just look for a sweet white-haired little old lady who used to have lines.

Since several back-up scripts were in the works before the pilot was filmed, we also had to go back and write her out of those episodes as well.

Again, it was a case of an actor being let go not because they gave a bad performance or did anything wrong. It’s just that the character didn’t mesh with the others.”

Ken Levine, Friday Questions (3rd January 2014)

Sure enough, if we go looking for her, we can indeed see Mrs. Littlefield in her wheelchair throughout the pilot:

Mrs. Littlefield

All of which is fascinating. But what nobody has done – at least as far as I can tell – is examine the original script of the pilot, and written about what Mrs. Littlefield actually said. But surely that script wouldn’t be readily available online…

Oh, hello. Final Draft, dated 16th April 1982. And it contains all of Mrs. Littlefield’s dialogue, every single line of which was edited out of the final episode.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

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  1. Among a million and one other things ↩

  2. You may note that I’m ignoring Sam Simon here, and refer to the first episode as the pilot throughout this article. I don’t know exactly why he doesn’t class it as a pilot; the episode was shot a few months before the rest of Season 1, as detailed here. Many other people who worked on the show refer to it as the pilot, so I’m going to follow their lead. ↩

  3. Among two million and one other things. ↩

  4. Daughters of the American Revolution. ↩

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An Exceptionally Important Piece of Analysis About Blackadder Goes Forth

Published 24th March 2020

TV Comedy

For a sitcom, Blackadder Goes Forth has inspired a great deal of scholarly debate over the years. In particular, the series’ portrayal of Field Marshal Haig as a callous murderer has become massively controversial. Is this simply devastatingly effective and truthful satire, or a fundamental misrepresentation of history which everyone has taken as fact?

It’s certainly an interesting question. So in true Dirty Feed spirit, let’s ignore all of that and investigate the show’s set design in painstaking and pointless detail instead.

One specific set, in fact. Because in my recent rewatch of the show, a few things struck me about Melchett’s office, back at British HQ. I am now going to share my findings with you, because you are special and you deserve it.

So let’s take a trip through each episode – in order of recording date, rather than broadcast.

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Songs in the Key of S

Published 11th March 2020

Music / TV Comedy

Whenever I watch Look Around You, I’m almost more amazed by the music than anything else.

Don’t get me wrong. The idea that I could write anything like Look Around You is thoroughly ridiculous. But I at least feel I understand it, and a little of how it works. Gelg’s musical talent is magical and mysterious to me. My brain can’t even begin to comprehend it.

Sadly, despite the odd suggestion from Serafinowicz over the years, there has never been a Look Around You album released. (You’d think Warp would have been an obvious home.) But that doesn’t mean that – scattered across the internet – there aren’t ways of hearing lovely, clean, extended versions of some of Gelg’s finest.

So in lieu of that album – which I still hope will happen at some point – let’s see what we can scrape together.

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A Weekly Look at the World of Science and Technology

Published 15th February 2020

TV Comedy

Today, we’re going to go down a particularly odd rabbit hole, even for this site. On the plus side: here is a 15 year old mystery, definitively solved.

So let us take a trip to my favourite comedy of the 2000s, Look Around You. Specifically, the DVD commentary on the first episode of Series 2, Music. But hey, Peter Serafinowicz, was Music really meant to be your first episode?

SERAFINOWICZ: This wasn’t meant to be our first episode, was it?
POPPER: No, and a lot of people on the net sussed that as well, didn’t they?
SERAFINOWICZ: Yeah. I don’t know, we…
POPPER: We were going to start with Sport.
SERAFINOWICZ: We were going to start with Sport, but… yeah, we changed it, didn’t we? Maybe it was a bit of a mistake to start with this one, cos it’s such a different one…
POPPER: I wonder if we should have started with the next one, Health. Medibot.1
SERAFINOWICZ: Yeah, probably.

Discussion about transmission orders is like catnip to me. I am the person who wrote this particular monstrosity, after all. And personally speaking, I think Serafinowicz is correct here. I love Music, but – Live Final aside – it’s definitely the most format-breaking of the episodes. It feels weird to break your format when you haven’t even established it yet.2

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  1. MED-I-BOT! ↩

  2. Having Sport go out first would also make sense for another reason – it contains the “Thanks ants / Thants” joke. That version of the joke going out in the third episode always felt a bit strange, being a straightforward replication of the famous Series 1 moment – the show had already moved past it. ↩

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