Series IV of Red Dwarf in 1991 saw many interesting developments. For a start, the show moved down south from BBC Manchester to Shepperton. For another, Grant Naylor Productions took control of the show. There’s a whole wealth of important things to write about.
So I want to talk about some fish.
You know the ones I mean. These ones, brand new for Series IV, on monitors around the ship:
Our question today: where did this footage come from? Surely it wasn’t shot specifically for Red Dwarf?
And so we reach the third and final part of this series of articles looking at the extended VHS/DVD versions of The Thin Blue Line.1 To recap: Part One looked at the first three episodes. Part Two looked at the next three episodes. There’s just one more episode to go. Why does it get its own article?
The answer becomes clear when we look at the sheer amount of footage in the extended version compared to the broadcast. There’s fully 10 minutes of extra material here. This, then, is the tale of how you can edit down a 40 minute sitcom episode to a 30 minute sitcom episode for broadcast, and still have it make sense. More or less, anyway.
As ever, deleted material in the broadcast version is rendered [like this].
In answer to a question I was asked about these pieces: only Series 2 got these extended edits. None were released for Series 1. ↩
Shooting in front of an audience poses all kinds of unique problems for a sitcom.
Take the One Foot in the Grave episode “We Have Put Her Living in the Tomb” (TX: 11/10/90). That’s the show which burns one tortoise to death, and buries another one alive. But what we’re more interested in today is… the Meldrews’ living room wallpaper.
Because here is the state of their living room at the beginning of the episode:
Here is the state of their living room when they return from picking up the tortoise:
And here is the state of their living room by the end of the episode:
The question: how do you record that middle scene with all the wallpaper ripped down in front of an audience, when you have other scenes to shoot on that set? Sure, there’s time during the recording session to redress the set a little. But there’s surely not time to pull off all that wallpaper, let alone put it all back on again.
The answer is: you don’t record the scene in front of that particular audience. But it’s how they don’t which is interesting.
Let’s look at the main studio recording dates for Series 2 of One Foot in the Grave, as detailed in the production paperwork:
| Episode | RX | TX |
|---|---|---|
| In Luton Airport No-One Can Hear You Scream |
4/8/90 | 4/10/90 |
| We Have Put Her Living in the Tomb |
8/9/90 | 11/10/90 |
| Dramatic Fever | 11/8/90 | 18/10/90 |
| Who Will Buy? | 18/8/90 | 25/10/90 |
| Love and Death | 25/8/90 | 8/11/90 |
| Timeless Time | 1/9/90 | 15/11/90 |
In general, the series was shot in the order it was transmitted in; the only difference is that the sixth episode recorded – yes, “We Have Put Her Living in the Tomb” itself – was moved up to the second broadcast.
The dates listed in the above table are for the main studio records, done in front of an audience at TV Centre. But these weren’t the only dates material for the series was recorded on. The most obvious example is the location film sequences, which were shot between the 1st – 20th July. But the paperwork also details some of the studio pre-records, done without the audience present. “Love and Death”, for instance, had an entire pre-record day on the the 24th, the day before the main studio recording.
So what about our scene with the wallpaper ripped down? The paperwork gives the following details:
Pre-recording 1.9.90 (Sc. 3) – H.105087/H.105373
Afternoon Pre-recording 8.9.90 – H.194931H/H.194141
Both edited onto H.192160 for insert into main studio.1
The second line is fairly standard; it tells us that there was at least one scene pre-recorded in the afternoon, before the main studio record of the episode. (Sadly, it doesn’t say which scene or scenes.) The third line tells us that all the pre-record material was edited onto one tape for playing in during the main audience record.
But the first line is the one which interests us. This tells us there was material shot on the 1st September; the week before the main record of “We Have Put Her Living in the Tomb”. And it indicates that it was Scene 3 which was pre-recorded. I don’t have access to a camera script of the episode, but the scene with the wallpaper ripped down is in fact the third scene in the transmitted programme.
And what else was recorded on the 1st September? A certain, famous episode called “Timeless Time” (TX: 15/11/90). An episode set entirely in Victor and Margaret’s bedroom.
All of a sudden, what the production was doing clicks into place. If you have to record a scene where the living room set looks entirely different, why not record it on a day where you’re not recording anything else in that set? Recording it in the same session as an episode set entirely in the Meldrew’s bedroom is perfect. And so production decisions taken in the last half of 1990 slide quietly, but satisfyingly, into place within my head.
A bit too satisfyingly, actually. Off for a lie down. Excuse me.
For those not familiar with this kind of paperwork, those H numbers are the tape numbers that the material was recorded on. ↩
Good evening, everybody.
“Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” Of course, these days, it seems that comedy equals tragedy, full stop. Gone are the days when BBC1 regularly broadcast harmless comedy hijinks on a daily basis. These days, it seems to be nothing but swearing, people looking depressed, and unwanted bodily fluids.
But I digress. There’s nothing like a good, classic half hour of sitcom to raise the spirits. But as we shall see, editing down your sitcom to half an hour is like becoming a royal eunuch: more cuts are needed than you would strictly prefer.
How I experienced The Thin Blue Line originally is lost to the mists of time. Did I actually watch it on its first TX in 1995/6?
I can’t help but feel I must have done. But I have no memories of it. I was 14 when it first aired; I was probably too busy worrying about whether anybody would like to touch my testicles. No, my first real memory of watching the show was in 2004 – newly moved in with my girlfriend, and no longer worried about my testicles. I distinctly remember lying on her bed; we had no telly in the bedroom, so we just watched the DVD on her PC. I remember us both absolutely screaming in hysterics. It’s one of my fondest memories.
It perhaps explains why I can occasionally be so defensive about the show: however and whenever I first watched it, it’s now mine.
All of which means that my experience with the show is very much with the version released on DVD. And for Series 2, that version is really quite different from the originally transmitted versions of the show. Indeed, most of the episodes have at least three full minutes of additional material added. These extended versions were first released on VHS in 1997, and have become the generally familiar edits of these shows for most people over the years.1 Indeed, for a fair amount of time, the original transmitted edits became genuinely obscure.
That is, until the BBC recently decided to upload the whole series to iPlayer. And sure enough, the iPlayer versions are the original broadcast versions, not the extended versions we’ve all been watching on DVD for years. Which gives us a nice easy way of seeing what the extra bits were on the VHS/DVD releases, without having to find off-airs from the time. It also gives us the chance to ask: is either edit clearly a superior version of the show?
Let’s find out. With this piece I’m assuming that people are most familiar with the DVD versions, so I’ve labelled things as [cut for broadcast/iPlayer], even though the broadcast versions were available first. All times are taken from the DVD versions. Programme synopses are taken from the Radio Times. Bad opinions are taken from my head.
Let’s not discuss the bastardised widescreen versions sitting on Amazon Prime. Not today, anyway. ↩
The problem with articles getting ever-more-complex on Dirty Feed is that sometimes, a quick video embedded within a piece of writing would be far more useful than 1000 words trying to explain what the bloody hell I’m on about. This issue reached a head recently with a complicated three-part article I’m currently working on, trying to compare the broadcast and DVD edits of a particular show.
Problem is: I can’t edit video. Not properly.
Time I learnt, then. So, what would be a suitable subject to have play with?
I feel publishing this is essentially a net gain for the internet.
Old TV shows gather anecdotes over the years. They gather anecdotes until it’s sometimes difficult to see the real story through the detritus. It’s not really anybody’s fault. It just happens.
A case in point. Why were there bands in The Young Ones? If you’ve read much about the show or watched any documentaries, you already know the answer. Take the second episode of A History of Alternative Comedy (TX: 17/1/99):
PAUL JACKSON: It had kinds of quirky elements in it already in that first script, but I said if we could just put a band in or something, because then we’ll be a variety show, and we’ll get slightly more money. So we put Nine Below Zero in, playing in the boys room.
Nearly two decades later, in Gold’s How The Young Ones Changed Comedy (TX: 26/05/18), this story is still being repeated:
ADRIAN EDMONDSON: It got funding from the variety arm of the BBC budget, which meant it had to have a band in each week. So it wasn’t us putting a band in: it had to have a band in.
The best and most comprehensive version of the tale is also told by Paul Jackson, in this BFI panel from 2018. (To his credit, he labels it as an old story by now.)
PAUL JACKSON: By having a band in, we came under the Variety department, and the Variety shows – Two Ronnies, Morecambe and Wise and so on – used to get two days in the studio, and more money. We never knew how much money, because the BBC didn’t tell you at the time, but bigger budgets, two days in the studio. A standard sitcom had one day in the studio… so we had a much bigger canvas.
Certainly, it is true that The Young Ones was made by the Variety department, rather than Comedy. Let’s take an obvious example: the day that BBC2 first broadcast “Oil” (TX: 16/11/82), the Terry and June episode “Playing Pool” was premiering over on BBC1. Let’s take a quick look at the programme numbers:
LLV indicates a programme was made as part of the Variety department at the Beeb, and LLC indicates that it was made by Comedy. As we can see, The Young Ones gets an LLV code, and Terry and June gets an LLC. Moreover, it’s clearly stated that The Young Ones got two days in the studio, while Terry and June only got one. Everything matches up nicely.
Well sort of, anyway. Let me throw a couple more programme numbers into the mix. Firstly for Filthy, Rich & Catflap, and secondly for Bottom.
Both of these were made under the auspices of Variety, with an LLV code, and with two days in the studio. And yet you never hear, for instance, people talking about bands being forced into episodes of Bottom. Because it didn’t happen.
Please don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying that the anecdote about why bands are in The Young Ones is false. Nor am I saying that Bottom et al being made under the auspices of Variety without there being bands in the show is inexplicable. Far from it, in fact. I can imagine a situation where unproven talent needs to be beholden to certain rules that proven talent does not. I can also think of ten other possible reasons.
I’m merely arguing that the way this anecdote is usually told gives an incomplete picture. Which is absolutely fine for a while… but when the same story keeps being told over and over again, it deserves a bit of a poke with a large stick every so often.
Reshoots. The problem is always damn reshoots.
Let me explain. Over the last few years, I’ve been doing various bits of research into some of the nitty gritty about Red Dwarf‘s production. (Stuff like this article on the BBC Manchester studios is the result of that.) And once you get into the really complex stuff, knowing exactly when a scene was shot starts to become important.
But no problem, right? By this point, the production dates of Red Dwarf – at least for most of the studio material – are widely known. When telling the story of Series III, for instance, we can easily thread our way through the production order of the episodes, rather than the transmission order.
The issue: reshoots. Just because the majority of an episode was shot on a particular date, it doesn’t mean all of it was. Because productions have this nasty tendency to reshoot things they think they can do a better job of, weeks down the line. Damn them.
It’s always nice when a suspicion of yours is finally proved correct.
This one has been lingering in my head for a while. Back in 2016, I published this examination of the script for the Men Behaving Badly episode “Stag Night”. This detailed all the material which was changed or cut between the second draft script of the episode, and the final broadcast programme. And out of all this changed or cut dialogue, one section really stood out to me.
Straight after the opening titles, we were originally supposed to see the following:
A FEW WEEKS LATER. TONY AND GARY ARE SITTING IN A SIMILAR POSITION ON THE SOFA WATCHING THE TV, LAGER PROBABLY IN HAND. GARY IS IDLY LEAFING THROUGH A COPY OF BRIDES MAGAZINE.
TONY: You know Mark Phillips married Princess Anne in his uniform. Do you reckon he’d forgotten to pick his suit up from the dry cleaners so he thought, oh bugger I’ll have to wear what I had on yesterday?
GARY: Yeah. Still, it could have been worse, he could have ended up in a tank top.
TONY: Yeah. And you know Princess Di’s dress was all creased when she went up the aisle, I reckon that was because the Queen had been hogging the iron.
GARY: Uh huh.
TONY: ‘Cos you’re not telling me, when you’re nineteen odd, you’ve got the confidence to barge over to a Queen and say “How long are you going to be ironing that… top? Queen.”
GARY: No.
TONY: So is Dorothy going to wear white?
If that doesn’t raise alarm bells for you, let me throw a few dates at you. The second draft script for “Stag Night” is dated 7th May 1997, and the episode was first broadcast on the 6th November 1997. Right bang in the middle of those two dates was the death of Princess Diana, on the 31st August 1997. It always seemed very likely to me that this dialogue was shot, and then removed before broadcast due to Diana’s death.
Very likely… but that’s all the information I had to go on, back in 2016. I had no access to any documentation which might prove or disprove this. And as we all know, when you assume, you make a twat out of you and me. It seemed destined to just be one of those things which just seemed almost certainly true, but would never actually be properly nailed down.
Well, it’s now 2021, and I do have access to a little more information than I did five years ago. And the first pertinent piece of information we have is the studio recording date. As stated before, that second draft script is dated 7th May 1997; we also now know that the studio date was the 22nd June 1997. In other words: the episode was definitely recorded before Diana’s death.
And then I struck gold. Buried away among the paperwork for the episode is the following:
“Recorded on location and in Studio 1, Teddington on BetaSP with OB and Tape Inserts
Edited to DigiBeta and transferred to D3 for TXTX Tape No: DGN401307
Total Duration: 28.40″NB Original version exists on DGN233507 – 29.10″ – edited for ‘Diana’ reference”
So there we have it. Not only was that dialogue shot, but it made it into the first edit of the show, which of course never aired. Once Diana’s death occured, there was a second edit made to remove this dialogue, which became the version which was initially broadcast. Case closed.
Another little sitcom mystery ticked off the list. Just another 10,284 to go.
I blame David Renwick entirely for this one.
Let me explain. Series 5 of One Foot in the Grave starts with one of the best episodes they ever made: “The Man Who Blew Away”. First broadcast on Christmas Day 1994, the unfortunate fate of Mr. Foskett surely has to be one of the grimmest things ever radiated to the nation under the guise of festive fun and frolics.
But Mr. Foskett – and Brian Murphy’s brilliant performance – isn’t what concerns us today. Instead, we want to focus on the opening scene in the kitchen between Victor and Margaret, where Victor rants about people being bad at comedy. A scene which plays out in my own kitchen daily, of course.
Now, the DVD release of Series 5 contains a commentary for “The Man Who Blew Away” from David Renwick and Richard Wilson. And among all his examinations about the nature of comedy, Renwick has this to say on the opening scene of the episode:
RENWICK: Another thing I remember here was: didn’t we have to do a retake of half this scene? I think for the eagle-eyed one of those china chickens goes missing from the corner of the shelf unit there in the kitchen between takes… I’ve got a feeling we had to redo some of it, something to do with the framing of the camera. There’s a little jug there just behind his right shoulder… and I’ve got a feeling in some of the shots there’s a chicken. (laughs)
And indeed, this is entirely correct. Just before the scene ends, a chicken magically appears in the cabinet as Margaret walks past it:
But there is one thing which Renwick fails to mention about this scene, because he’s not a complete loony about this kind of thing. Unfortunately, I am. So: can we figure out exactly when this scene was reshot?
Spoiler: yes.