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The Docklands, May 1984

Published 8th March 2023

Music / TV Comedy

Here’s a question for you. What’s the link between Bananarama and Spitting Image?

Clue: the answer is not that Spitting Image did a parody of them. Let’s take a look at this video for “Rough Justice”, released in May 1984, and featuring Peter Woods being very funny:

I’m obviously going to be a sucker for any music video which shows a pop group TAKING OVER TELEVISION. But the immediate question comes to mind – my mind, anyway – is: where exactly was this video shot? Was it in a real television studio? Or did they just set up a recreation on a film stage somewhere?

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Obsessively Tracing Chris Barrie’s Movements in Late-1987

Published 5th March 2023

TV Comedy

While watching a 1987 episode of Spitting Image the other day, something rather odd occurred. And something odd occurring during an episode of Spitting Image has rapidly turned into this site’s speciality.

A bit of background first. In 1986, the show took to frequently featuring a Kenneth Williams puppet, for some reason. A typical appearance is in Episode 4, broadcast on the 26th January 1986, where he’s parachuted into the Tory cabinet:

The unmistakable tones of Chris Barrie providing the voice are… well, unmistakable. And utterly delightful.

Which makes it all the more peculiar that the following year, in the second episode of the series on the 8th November 1987, we get the Kenneth Williams puppet with a distinctly un-Chris-Barrie-sounding voice. (People with keener ears than me identify it as Steve Nallon.)

Chris Barrie had been with Spitting Image from the very beginning. If Barrie is working on your show, and had done a brilliant Kenneth Williams impersonation in the past, why would you suddenly not use him here?

Answer: because Chris Barrie didn’t work on that second episode of the series. Or indeed the first episode the previous week, on the 1st November. But he is present for Episode 3 on the 15th November, and for the rest of the series. What gives?

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You Stupid Ugly Goit

Published 28th February 2023

Radio Comedy / TV Comedy

Close-up of a pixellated Holly

The origins of Red Dwarf are oft-told. Radio 4 sketch show, Son of Cliché, Dave Hollins, job done, right?

And true, one of the first sparks of life of something which turned into Red Dwarf appeared on Radio 4 on the 30th August 1983, with the very first sketch of Dave Hollins: Space Cadet.1


Download “Dave Hollins: Space Cadet – The Strange Planet You Shouldn’t Really Land On” (MP3, 3:41)

Nick Maloney’s corpsing at the end of that sketch is brilliant.

Still, Dave Hollins wasn’t a running sketch in that first series of Son of Cliché. We’d have to wait until the following year for that privilege. And when it did come back, on the 10th November 1984, I would argue that it was as something far more recognisable as Red Dwarf.


Download “Dave Hollins: Space Cadet – Norweb” (MP3, 3:35)

“Jan Vogels” in the first sketch did nearly made it into Red Dwarf – most notably, a far shorter version is present in the US pilot (“You know a guy called Harry Johnson?”).2 But that second Dave Hollins sketch is stuffed with ideas which later found a home in actual, broadcast Dwarf.

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  1. The research for Son of Cliché in this article comes almost entirely from material written in 2003 by Ian Symes, on an early incarnation of Red Dwarf fansite Ganymede & Titan. It’s a measure of how well that research was done that it hasn’t yet been surpassed as reference material for the series. ↩

  2. The 2007 Red Dwarf DVD release The Bodysnatcher Collection also includes a never-shot version of the sketch, recreated using storyboards. ↩

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I Hate Doing Research, Part Three

Published 22nd February 2023

Meta / TV Comedy

Thank you all for your kind words about my first piece on the flash frames in The Young Ones. Part Two is in the works, but is still a little way off publication. Perhaps the following will explain why.

Let’s take that missing flash frame for “Summer Holiday”, which I comprehensively examined in Part One. It’s something which definitely, never, ever, ever transmitted, or made it into any commercial release of the show, and I have the large pile of recordings here to prove it.

And yet take a look at the paperwork for the episode, back in 1984:

FILM:
1 frame from Shalako (+ BBC cap) property of EMI. Transferred to H25992.

And then read the relevant section of Roger Wilmut’s Didn’t You Kill My Mother-in-Law?, the seminal book on alternative comedy, published in 1989:

“The general style of anarchy, with cutaway sequences and a good deal of stunt work, was maintained: one new running joke was presumably for the benefit of the owners of expensive video recorders, since it consisted of cutting in four-frame flashes which cannot possibly be grasped in real time – they include a leaping frog, a dripping tap, a skier, a potter’s wheel and, finally, a notice signed by the video tape editor saying, ‘I never wanted to put all these flash frames in in the first place.'”

And finally, let’s listen to Young Ones producer Paul Jackson, interviewed on the DVD extra The Making of The Young Ones in 2007:

“It’s on the DVD, it’s on the video versions, but it never was broadcast.”

In other words: in order to find out the truth about whether that “Summer Holiday” flash frame was actually broadcast or commercially released, I’ve had to ignore a) the actual paperwork for the episode, b) a leading comedy historian, and c) the producer of the show. Brilliant.

I say all this not to point out how great I am, but simply to show how easy it is for these things to get warped and twisted down the years. Sometimes, the only way to get to the truth of what was broadcast is by watching the actual material, and seeing what’s there, and what isn’t.

And that’s only possible by getting people to dig out off-airs from 1984. Everything else is guesswork.

A version of this post was first published in the January issue of my monthly newsletter.

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Dwarf on Film

Published 14th February 2023

TV Comedy

I used to have a brilliant little trivia question about Red Dwarf, you know. One that you could ask to really try and trip people up. It’s not perhaps one you’d bring out at polite parties with normal people, but hey, we’re all friends here. And that question is:

“What is the only footage of actual actors shot on film in Red Dwarf?”1

The answer is perhaps not immediately obvious. Whether studio or location, the live action scenes in the show have always been shot on videotape – or from Back to Earth onwards, digital video, directly to file. There’s no “film outdoors/video indoors” look, like many sitcoms still had, even in 1988.2

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  1. Excluding stock footage, so things like this don’t count. ↩

  2. Indeed, One Foot in the Grave was still doing it in 2000. ↩

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Two Amusing Grant Naylor Sketches from Spitting Image

Published 6th February 2023

TV Comedy

The problem with being a mouldy old Red Dwarf fan is that you end up viewing every bloody comedy show from around that time through a Dwarf-shaped prism. With something like early Spitting Image, with Grant Naylor as script editors as well as Chris Barrie doing impressions, the links become utterly inescapable.

For instance, take this joke in the first episode of Series 2 of Spitting Image (TX: 6/1/85)1, in a sketch about Zola Budd:

VOICE 1: 2 hours 56 minutes! That’s a world record for a marathon.
VOICE 2: Pity she’s running the 100 metres.

And then remember this joke from Red Dwarf‘s “Future Echoes” (TX: 22/2/88), where Rimmer does a spot of running himself:

RIMMER: 6:47. Not a bad little time for the mile. Pity I was only doing the 300 metres.

Of course, it’s not just Red Dwarf. How about this sketch from the first episode of Grant Naylor’s Radio 4 sketch show Son of Cliché (TX: 23/8/83), and “20 Golden Indian Restaurant Tracks”?


Download “20 Golden Indian Restaurant Tracks” (MP3, 1:09)

Which bears a startling resemblance to this Spitting Image sketch from Series 2, Episode 10 (TX: 17/3/85), where KGB-TEL promise “20 Golden Pieces of Sombre Music”:

The rewrite on that sketch is fascinating in its own right, taking the same basic idea – how foreign music can sound identical to untrained ears – and adds a whole extra layer of political jokes. I don’t have writing credits for individual sketches here, but it wouldn’t surprise me if other writers were involved.2

Either way, as a fan of Grant Naylor’s work, it’s a very odd feeling to watch Spitting Image, and see shards of their earlier and later work suddenly pop up. And it’s also proof that people who say they wouldn’t bother watching the show as the topical references mean it’s “dated” – and this isn’t a straw man argument, I have literally seen exactly that – are somewhat missing the point.

Because the above examples show both a topical joke being re-used in a decidedly non-topical way… and a non-topical joke being transformed into a topical one. It’s all part of the same thing. Which is a far more fascinating realisation than merely sulking about a reference to Zola Budd.

  1. In all these posts about Spitting Image on Dirty Feed, I’m going by the DVD numbering for the series, rather than Mark Lewisohn’s rather different numbering in the Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy. In particular, Lewisohn states there are two different series in 1984 rather than one, and ditto in 1986. The series numbers aren’t really that important anyway; just go by the TX dates. ↩

  2. Possibly Hislop and Newman? ↩

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Freeze-Frame Gonna Drive You Insane, Part One

Published 27th January 2023

TV Comedy

Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four • Part Five

On the 8th May 1984, at 9:15pm1, something very odd happened on BBC2. As Mike The-Cool-Person sat at the kitchen table, discussing the gang’s laundry situation, The Young Ones briefly flashed to the end caption of Carry on Cowboy. It then flashed back as though nothing had happened. “Dirty duvet, dirty mind.”, says an oblivious Mike.

This wasn’t just random Young Ones anarchy. It was intended as the start of a weekly running gag, with a proper pay-off and punchline at the end of the series. A punchline which would never end up being transmitted, and was cut from the final show just days before air.

This is the story of what happened to that punchline… and how a certain show called Spitting Image managed to cause even more trouble than usual.

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  1. At exactly 21:15:12, if my calculations are correct. ↩

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“Of Course There’s Too Much Duck!”

Published 8th January 2023

TV Comedy

Assumptions are the enemy of research everywhere. Beware of anything which is “obviously” true. You can find yourself in a whole world of trouble.

For instance, take the two Fawlty Towers script books below.

Two Fawlty Towers scriptbooks - all relevant information in the article

For years, I owned the one on the left, The Complete Fawlty Towers (Guild Publishing, 1989), which contains the scripts for all 12 episodes. I never bothered getting the one on the right, simply called Fawlty Towers (Contact Publications, 1977), because despite only covering three episodes1 – “The Builders”, “The Hotel Inspectors”, and “Gourmet Night” – the actual content was going to be identical, right?

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  1. A “Book 2” published in 1979 covers the rest of Series 1. Series 2 was never published in this form, and had to wait for The Complete Fawlty Towers to make it onto the shelves. ↩

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Foreign News Sketch

Published 2nd January 2023

TV Comedy

One of my favourite things about The Fast Show is how many different textures it has.

For instance: it isn’t just a programme which knows which sketches need to be shot on location, and which sketches should be shot in the studio. This is a programme which knows that certain location sketches should be shot on film (Ted & Ralph, Unlucky Alf), and certain location sketches should be VT (The Off-Roaders, Fat Sweaty Coppers). And while I could wax lyrical about how shooting each sketch the right way helps sell the joke better, part of the joy here is even simpler: your eyes don’t have time to get bored.

And then we have Chanel 9. A parody of every foreign news broadcast you might imagine you’d seen on holiday, with accompanying dreadful picture quality, it adds yet another texture to the show. Let’s take a look at the first Chanel 9 sketch, from the very first episode of The Fast Show, broadcast on the 27th September 1994.

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An Evening at Television Centre

Published 16th December 2022

TV Comedy

There is a certain kind of deranged comedy fan, who has a very particular kind of deranged list. It’s a list which can bring you nothing but pain. “Which sitcom episodes would you love to have been in the studio audience for, but weren’t?” Bonus points if you hadn’t even been born at the time of the recording.

I am a deranged comedy fan. And my deranged list includes the Fawlty Towers episode “The Kipper and the Corpse”, the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned”, and the One Foot in the Grave episode “The Trial”. Somebody seriously needs to invent a time machine. Screw killing Hitler, I’ll spend most of my time hanging around various TV studios.

But one show has just leapt right to the top of my list. Not because it’s a seminal episode of sitcom, although it is very, very good. But because of what I’ve discovered about the studio recording itself.

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