Home AboutArchivesBest Of Subscribe

Location, Location, Location

TV Comedy

Shooting audience sitcom has all kinds of unique production problems compared to other types of television.

After all, any TV show has to decide whether to shoot a given scene on location, or in the studio. Each choice has advantages and drawbacks: you don’t have the expense of building a set on location, but you also have less control than in a studio. With audience sitcom, though, you start running into further problems. Is there room in the studio for that extra set in front of the audience? And yet if it’s a dialogue-heavy scene, surely you want to do it in front of the audience, so the actors can play off their reaction?

Squaring this particular circle can lead to some interesting results. Let’s take a look at three of them.

[Read more →]

Read more about...

, , ,

Hello, Newman

TV Comedy

Last time we took a look at In Sickness and in Health, I spent a long time fantasising about a certain evening at Television Centre. Surely it’s about time we tackled the actual programme, in terms of the kind of ideas Speight was trying to get across with the series?

Yeah, yeah, at some point. Today, I want to be mildly irritating about the title sequence instead. Specifically, the title sequence for the show’s very first series.

If we check the paperwork for the pilot, broadcast on 1st September 1985, we discover something rather interesting about it:

Opening Titles:
Total Dur: 0.38″

Montage of shots of the East End
BBC Specially shot (16mm col) 9/16.3.85 (33″)
+ five stills from ‘HORIZON’ – “The Writing On The Wall” Orig. TX: 11.2.74 (5″)

Some of that title sequence was filmed specifically for the series, on the 9th and 16th March 1985. But other shots are stock footage, taken from an edition of Horizon broadcast over a decade earlier. Which sounds ripe for a Dirty Feed investigation, don’t you think?

[Read more →]

Read more about...

,

An Evening at Television Centre

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.

[Read more →]

Read more about...

, , ,