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A Fly on the Wallpaper

Published 17th November 2021

TV Comedy

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:

The Meldrews' living room before the wallpaper is ripped off
Ditto


Here is the state of their living room when they return from picking up the tortoise:

The Meldrews' living room after the wallpaper is ripped off
Ditto


And here is the state of their living room by the end of the episode:

The Meldrews' living room once the wallpaper is put back up
Ditto


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.

Victor and Margaret in bed from Timeless Time, light on
Victor and Margaret in bed from Timeless Time, light off


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.

  1. For those not familiar with this kind of paperwork, those H numbers are the tape numbers that the material was recorded on. ↩

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The Thick Red Line, Part Two

Published 7th November 2021

TV Comedy

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.

[Read more →]

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The Thick Red Line, Part One

Published 31st October 2021

TV Comedy

Inspector Fowler at his desk, greeting the audience

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.

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  1. Let’s not discuss the bastardised widescreen versions sitting on Amazon Prime. Not today, anyway. ↩

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“Your Cock-up, My Arse!”

Published 27th October 2021

TV Comedy

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.

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“You Wanna Sing That Song, Right Here on MY Show?”

Published 24th October 2021

TV Comedy

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.

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By the Book

Published 17th October 2021

TV Comedy

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.

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“The Queen Had Been Hogging the Iron”

Published 13th October 2021

TV Comedy

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.

Gary and Tony on the sofa
Ditto, different angle


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 TX

TX 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.

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A Very Important Article Examining the Contents of Victor Meldrew’s Kitchen Cabinets

Published 26th September 2021

TV Comedy

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:

The kitchen, with vases in the cabinet
The kitchen, with a chicken in the cabinet


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.

[Read more →]

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The Strange Case of the Inaccurate Viewing Figures

Published 18th September 2021

Children's TV

Here is today’s bold and dangerous statement here on Dirty Feed: Danger Mouse did not get viewing figures of 21 million viewers in 1983.

To me, this statement would seem to be self-evident. The idea that Danger Mouse beat every single episode of Coronation Street broadcast that year would seem to be highly dubious. Many others, however, seem to disagree. Take this BBC News article from 2013, “How Danger Mouse became king of the TV ratings”:

“A curiously British cartoon, it parodied James Bond and was influenced by Monty Python’s anarchic humour.

Thirty years ago children’s cartoon Danger Mouse topped the TV ratings, beating even Coronation Street. But what happened to the legendary Manchester animation house Cosgrove Hall Films, which created the rodent secret agent?

Voiced by Only Fools And Horses star David Jason, Danger Mouse was the flagship of Cosgrove Hall Films, based in a quirky studio in the Manchester suburb of Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

Vibrant, surreal and deliciously silly, an astonishing 21 million viewers reportedly tuned in to watch it in 1983, a record for a children’s programme which has yet to be beaten.”

But the BBC are far from alone in reporting this. A quick Google search reveals this factoid to be absolutely everywhere. Sure enough, many people clearly grabbed it from the 2013 BBC News piece, as in this extremely recent piece in the Manchester Evening News, “Calls for a Danger Mouse statue in Chorlton”:

“A resident has called for a Danger Mouse statue to be erected in the centre of Chorlton.

A post by Andrew Jones in the Facebook group Chorlton M21 shared the idea of crowdfunding for a Bronze statue of the animated mouse on the corner of Barlow Moor Road and Wilbraham Road.

The idea proved popular and was met with more than 150 likes.

Silly, exciting and with a huge amount of custard, Danger Mouse was a huge success on screen, and in 1983, once racked up 21 million viewers, beating Corrie, and smashing records for the highest viewings of a children’s show.”

Other sources are rather more troubling. When I first started researching this article, I thought the 21 million figure might just be traced back to an over-enthusiastic fan, and we could just have a jolly good laugh at their expense. Unfortunately, this is very much not the case. In 2020, The Guardian posted “How we made Danger Mouse – by David Jason and Brian Cosgrove”.

And what does Brian Cosgrove, co-creator of Danger Mouse have to say?

“I worked with a small group of animators. We had certain rules. Danger Mouse was a mouse living in a world of humans. When he drives around London, his car is mouse-sized – he could get stepped on! That’s what I like about animation: you can ignore common sense. We never talked down to our audience. Children were mature people, just small. We didn’t realise were making something that would achieve such a level of affection. It certainly wasn’t due to the quality of the animation, but I think Danger Mouse had heart. At one point in the early 80s our viewing figures – 21 million – were higher than Coronation Street’s.”

Ah. Erm. Hmmmm. OK.

When the co-creator of the show is literally stating the 21 million viewing figure as fact, the onus is on me to prove that the figure is false, rather than pointing and saying “don’t be ridiculous”. And sure, we can easily have a first stab at that. If we look at the Top 10 rated programmes in 1983 from BARB, we can see that the highest rated programme that year was Coronation Street… with viewing figures of 18.45 million. And 18.45 million is a figure which is lower than 21 million, I am fairly confident in stating.

But I think we need to go deeper. Where exactly does this 21 million figure come from?

*   *   *

I’m not sure I can answer that for sure. But I can pinpoint a relatively early reference to it. Much earlier than 2013, at least.

From the BBC itself, we have this image gallery published in 2006, which confidently states:

“Danger Mouse (1981 – 1992): The world’s greatest Mouse detective Danger Mouse with his trusty sidekick Penfold achieved cult status and in 1983 viewing figures topped 21 million!”

But we can go further back, and to a rather more primary source to boot. The old Cosgrove Hall website – now long gone, but preserved on the Wayback Machine – has this to say about Danger Mouse, published right back in 2002:

“At one stage in early 1983 Dangermouse viewing figures hit an all time high of 21.59 million viewers. In the same week the movie Superman managed a mere 16.76 million!”

Which suddenly gives us some extra information to work with. We have a very specific figure of 21.59 million, and – crucially – we now know that Superman was broadcast in the same week as the supposedly record-breaking Danger Mouse figures.

Superman – its UK television premiere, no less – was broadcast across ITV on the 6th January 1983. And Danger Mouse was also on that week: in fact, it was the opening episodes of Series 4.1 Between the 3rd – 7th January 1983, the five part serial “The Wild, Wild, Goose Chase” were broadcast. And all of a sudden, we’re not waving vaguely at “21 million viewers in 1983” – we have a very specific week we can investigate.

Reader, I have investigated. I have gone beyond the annual figures on the BARB website, and asked them for anything they could provide for this specific week. Incredibly, they actually indulged me. Here is the Top 10 programmes for ITV, for the week ending 9th January 1983 – figures not publicly available anywhere else online, as far as I am aware:

BARB viewing figures for week ending 9th January 1983 - all relevant details discussed in body text

Danger Mouse is nowhere on that list. Moreover, the top-rated programme of the week – Coronation Street – had viewing figures of 17.25 million, significantly below 21.59 million. As far as I am concerned, case closed. Danger Mouse wasn’t pulling in viewing figures of 21 million viewers. It wasn’t even close.

As to why Cosgrove Hall were claiming that figure… I can’t say. 21.59 million is an extremely specific number. Moreover, Cosgrove Hall’s claim of Superman getting 16.76 million is pretty much correct.2 It is rather tempting to suggest that somebody with a dodgy grasp of mathematics added up all the figures throughout the five episodes shown that week, and that each episode got a rather more reasonable 4.3 million instead. Sadly, BARB seem to have no record of Danger Mouse figures at all from 1983, so there’s no way of proving or disproving that theory.

Other potential solutions are available. Maybe the 21 million includes overseas viewing figures. Or, y’know, maybe the decimal point is just in the wrong place. Who knows? All I know is that Danger Mouse very much did not beat Superman, at least on its own terms.

I will, then, leave you with one final thought. Recently I received copies of the 1984 and 1985 Danger Mouse annuals. If the show had been getting 21 million viewers back in 1983, you would think there would have been at least some mention somewhere in those annuals. Frankly, you’d expect it plastered across the front cover.

There is nothing.

Danger Mouse didn’t get viewing figures of 21 million. Tell your friends.

UPDATE (9/11/21): The great thing about writing this site is that I can put together an article, fail to quite reach the end of the story, and then have a reader step in and do the final part for me.

So many thanks to Anthony Forth, who has done some further research on all this, and actually managed to prove what we all suspected. Consulting the full BARB Weekly Report for the week ending 9th January 1983 – available at the BFI library – the viewing figures for the Danger Mouse episodes in question are as follows:

  • Mon 3 Jan: 7.281
  • Tues 4 Jan: 2.524
  • Wed 5 Jan: 2.980
  • Thu 6 Jan: 4.105
  • Fri 7 Jan: 3.985

Those figures add up to 20.875 million. Which doesn’t quite match the 21.59 million that Cosgrove Hall quoted, but is very much near enough to conclusively prove where the erroneous 21 million figure came from. And let’s be very clear about this: it is erroneous. You don’t get to add together your five different episodes across the week, and say you beat a single showing of anything else. That’s not how viewing figures work.

Anthony also points out that the Bank Holiday Monday figure of over 7 million is very high for the series – twice that of what the BBC was getting at the same time, and more than the programmes which followed on ITV. His theory that this success got conflated and exaggerated over time into “beating Superman” seems to me to be a very sound one.

It’s also worth noting that the figures for the following week’s serial, “The Return of Count Duckula”, are as follows:

  • Mon 10th Jan: 4.041
  • Tue 11th Jan: 4.381
  • Wed 12th Jan: 4.556
  • Thu 13th Jan: 4.115
  • Fri 14th Jan: 4.535

The total for this serial comes to 21.628 million… or more total viewers across the week than the supposedly famous serial in the same week as Superman. And with that, I think we can safely put this nonsense to bed.

After all: over 7 million viewers for the first episode of the serial is still pretty damn good for the slot. We don’t need to misrepresent anything for that to be considered a success. Danger Mouse did well enough without all that.

  1. Out of interest, this week was also the launch of the Children’s ITV branding – in fact, the first episode of this serial was the very first programme shown under the new name. ↩

  2. 16.75 million according to BARB, but who’s counting? Oh, they are. ↩

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Raw, Trembling, Naked Sketches

Published 10th September 2021

TV Comedy

It’s official: I talk about Red Dwarf too much on here. But sometimes it’s just too difficult to resist, if only to make a point about how absurdly lucky Red Dwarf fans actually are.

For example, with Dwarf‘s first series, glimpses of footage beyond the actual episodes themselves are plentiful. Across various VHS and DVD releases over the years, we can see an earlier version of the opening scene of the show… and an outtake from the closing moments of the final episode in that first run too. Both ends of the series, represented with extra footage giving insight into the production of the show.

Rimmer and Lister in corridor
Alternative opening…
Danny John-Jules, Craig Charles, and Chris Barrie in Drive Room set
…and an outtake from the last show

Sadly, with the first series of A Bit of Fry & Laurie – shot and broadcast just a year later – we’re not so lucky. There are no DVDs full of deleted scenes available here, nor any outtakes. Indeed, the only bit of extra footage beyond the the broadcast shows that I’m aware of for Series 1 is this trail, shown in the week leading up to broadcast.1

To get our deleted scenes for A Bit of Fry & Laurie, we have to work a little harder. And yet they exist, at least in written form. The script book for Series 1, first published in 1990, might frustrate some completists a little, as not every sketch from the series was included. I confess to being mildly irritated that it doesn’t contain a single sketch from the 1987 pilot, which is one of my favourite single shows Fry & Laurie ever did.2

But that is tremendously unfair, when I’d kill for a book like this for most shows. It’s worth it for the brilliant stage directions alone – these are the actual scripts, not dodgy transcripts. Moreover, the vast majority of sketches in Series 1 are there, along with plenty of sketches which never made the broadcast episodes. So while we may not have our deleted scenes in video form, we do have them, sort of. And while I suggest you pick up a secondhand copy of the book if you don’t have one – Fry & Laurie practically demands to be read in a civilised manner – all the sketches have been transcribed and are available online, albeit extremely unofficially.

Having wallowed in Series 1 of Fry & Laurie for the last month, the unused sketches spring out at me like a… spring. So if you love the series but have never read the book, I’ll say that you should be reading “Operations”, “Toaster”, “Maternity Ward Ten”, “Remembering Lines”, “Little Chat”, “Sex Change”, “Forward to the Past”, “The Old Folks”, “Ignorance”, “A Bit of a Pain in the Bottom”, “Orthodoxy”, “A Frank Talk”, “Café”, “Fascism”, “Jeremiah Beadle”, “Architect”, “Naked”, and – most famously – “Spies Five”. And that’s plenty to be getting on with.

Still, what interests me today is: can we imagine what any of these sketches actually looked like on the screen, rather than merely on the page? Indeed, can we figure out which audience sessions they might have been recorded in? In two cases3, I think we can get a pretty damn good idea.

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  1. From the Boat Show 89 slide, we can ascertain that this particular broadcast of the trail was on the 10th January 1989, at around 7:25pm – just before The Rock ‘n’ Roll Years. As for when it was shot, the set is the same as “Gordon & Stuart Eat Greek”, so it was almost certainly done during the very first recording session of the series, on the 10th December 1988.

    The mention of “January and February” is a little odd for a series when you’re already in January; it would have made a lot more sense broadcast in December. Productions providing material for trails which doesn’t quite fit with what’s required is an evergreen problem, it seems. ↩

  2. “Blimey, you’re ugly.” ↩

  3. In fact, more than two, but we’ve covered “Inspector Venice” and “Naked” before. ↩

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