bbc100 – Dirty Feed

BBC100: Epilogue

Published 22nd April 2023

Right at the beginning of this project, I gave a bit of context about who these pieces were originally written for. It’s worth adding a bit more clarity to this: it wasn’t actually for the BBC themselves, but rather one of their many service providers.¹

But the end result is the same: it was meant to be read by fellow colleagues in the broadcast industry, rather than archive TV nerds. Of course there are some who are both, including yours truly. But I couldn’t assume a huge level of knowledge about the intricacies of old television. Indeed, I couldn’t really assume that everybody reading it was in the United Kingdom.

With that in mind, here’s what I wrote as my introduction to this set of articles, when it was originally published.²

Working in television sometimes requires a special kind of double thinking. It’s both extremely important, and not important at all.

Take a typical Sunday night, when I sit down to direct a busy shift on BBC One. Firstly: there can be millions of viewers watching, so you’d better get it right. Secondly: thinking about that too much will make you so nervous that you can’t actually talk, let alone direct a television channel. For that reason, during huge events like a recent overrunning FA Cup Final, there were only a few people watching in my head… and they were all sitting right next to me. I’ll only think of the rest of the country on the train ride home, thanks.

And yet there is something special about sitting in BBC One’s pres suite, known as NC1. You are essentially transmitting a service which has run uninterrupted since 1946, when television returned to the UK after the Second World War. That’s over 75 years of continuous service. The weight of history occasionally hits you when you sit in that chair, whether you’re broadcasting the latest events from Ukraine, or Homes Under the Hammer.

NC2 is different, of course. BBC2 was launched in 1964, so that’s nearly 60 years. A mere drop in the ocean.

Of course, the BBC is even older than the above would suggest, when you take into account pre-war television broadcasting, and the early days of radio. In fact, 2022 is the BBC’s centenary year. And while I might try and ignore the BBC’s long history during stressful moments of directing, it’s nice to recognise it in some way here.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be looking at some of my favourite programmes the BBC has made over the last few decades. Some of them are still well-known; others are less so. All of them mean a great deal to me, and stand as the reason why I’m proud to be a tiny part of this particular thread of history.

Because none of these programmes would have been seen by the nation, without people doing jobs like ours. And whatever part of the industry we work in, the same is still true today.

Reading it back, it does somewhat seem to be a rallying cry, doesn’t it?

But I post that introduction here because I want you to know. That despite the nonsense that inevitably happens, despite how stressful things get… there are people there who understand that when you’re in that chair, you’re part of something which stretches back over the decades. That your job is, as far as humanely possible, to protect something important.

And if that comes across as vaguely pompus, I’ll choose it over not giving a damn.

This isn’t a secret. ↩
Lightly edited to remove a specific detail. ↩

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BBC100: Richard Osman’s House of Games (2017-)

Published 21st April 2023

TV Gameshows

For more on this BBC100 series of posts, read this introduction.

BBC100 logo with Richard Osman PUSHING a BUTTON

So as these BBC centenary pieces reach a climax, and we wander blinking into the 2010s, it seems obvious what I’m supposed to do. To support the fact that the BBC is still relevant in a Netflix-obsessed world, I should grab some big, obvious piece of “prestige” drama. I May Destroy You, for instance, or Bodyguard. The BBC can still play with the big boys, aren’t they great, job done.

Sure, we need those programmes. Of course we do. But television can’t be those kind of shows alone. Forget the fact that the BBC couldn’t afford it; my brain couldn’t cope either. The idea of watching something of the intensity of I May Destroy You every evening brings me out in a rash. Television needs its quieter moments too.

And let’s be clear: getting those quieter moments right is hard. To call those kind of programmes “schedule-fillers” misses the point; they are vital parts of that schedule. It’s one thing to create good television by making an impact; to make good television by being a little quieter is a skill all of its own. And too many productions manage to fall foul of that old cliche: turning television into moving wallpaper. It’s all too easy, in the scramble for a cheap show which still entertains, to end up with nothing.

At first, House of Games looks like a straightforward show, and that’s because it is. We have our host Richard Osman, fresh from Pointless, and four celebrities. They play five rounds of games – often word-based, but not always – each episode. At the end of each episode, the celebrity with the most points wins a terrible prize. (Think: any household object you can imagine, with Richard Osman’s face plastered over it.) The same celebrities play through five episodes, Monday – Friday, and the person at the top of leaderboard at the end of the week wins a trophy. That, in a nutshell, is it.

The beauty of House of Games is exactly how well it does the above format. For a start, it would be incredibly easy to get locked into doing the same rounds all the time. House of Games has literally dozens. (A particular favourite of mine is Highbrow/Lowbrow – an academic question and a pop culture question, both with the same answer.) Not only does this mean you can’t get easily bored of the games, but there are so many that it gives the feeling of a show bursting at the seams with ideas.

Secondly, the range of celebrities is extraordinary. It’s extremely generous in the kind of people it will have on. Steve Pemberton and Fern Britton don’t appear on many TV shows together. Much like the variety of rounds, the variety of guests means that what could be a programme with the same old faces each week never gets boring. It also means that the comedians of my childhood can make a reappearance on television, and I get a warm, fuzzy feeling. (Hello, Simon Hickson.)

Thirdly, it has a brilliant host. Being a good quiz show host is an incredibly hard thing, and British television currently has a dearth of them. This is obvious from the parade of actors and presenters who awkwardly squint their way through a series of afternoon quizzes across all channels. Including plenty of people who I otherwise like, when they’re in their usual habitat. Richard Osman makes it look easy, and that’s all you could ever want with this kind of show.

What’s more, it does all of this despite being shot on an extremely fast schedule: five episodes per day. This kind of shooting schedule is usual on daytime quiz shows, but the beauty of this schedule for this particular programme is that you only need to book each celebrity for a single day’s recording, and you get a full week of shows out of them. Of course, none of this matters for the audience watching at home, but it’s difficult not to admire a show that takes a budget limitation, and makes a virtue of it. If more programmes managed that as well as House of Games does, maybe cheap television would look a little less cheap.

At the beginning of this piece, I made a comparison of the BBC’s output with that of Netflix. This was not an idle comment. It’s worth remembering that making a show like House of Games is something that Netflix really does struggle to achieve. Take their brilliant Floor is Lava, a game show involving people who are less clever than they think, an obstacle course, and… lava. (Well, orange gunge, anyway.) Over the past two years, the show has managed to produce a grand total of 20 episodes across three seasons. House of Games manages to shoot more episodes than that in a week, and a grand total of 280 episodes over just the last two years.

Now, sure, Floor is Lava is a far more complicated show to shoot than House of Games, I grant you. It’s certainly a louder one, and a more expensive one too. But I think the comparison holds. Floor is Lava should surely be about having endless contestants falling into endless lava in endless different ways. I would suggest that 20 episodes over two years is a vaguely prissy way of approaching that aim. What that show needs is a real production line mentality.

Does that sound a terrible thing? Shouldn’t we be promoting a more artisanal way of making television? Tough: sometimes, a production line is exactly what you need. Making lots of good television quickly is not an embarrassing thing. It’s a deeply necessary one. The BBC needs its splashy, expensive shows. But it’s also vital that it can still make shows like House of Games.

So here’s to making all kinds of television, and doing it well. Whether it’s one-off plays, sitcoms, live entertainment spectaculars, or quiz shows. Or the many kinds of TV that I haven’t had the chance to cover in these articles, but are just as important. There may be more column inches in doing certain “important” kinds of shows, but it’s the BBC’s job to get all kinds of programming right.

It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. And hey, they’ve had 100 years practice.

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BBC100: The Quatermass Experiment (2005)

Published 21st April 2023

TV Drama

For more on this BBC100 series of posts, read this introduction.

BBC100 logo, with Professor Quatermass speaking to camera

Right at the beginning of this series of articles celebrating the BBC’s centenary, we looked at Nineteen Eighty-Four, a drama broadcast live to the nation some seventy years ago. Why was it broadcast live? Because that’s just how things were done. Videotape was still in its infancy, and not in use by the BBC at all back in 1954.

But as television matured, and videotape became standard, making fiction this way slowly fell out of favour. There were still plenty of live programmes, sure – sport, news, entertainment – but drama fell by the wayside. Of course productions wanted more control over what they were making, and once it became easier and cheaper to pre-record everything, that’s exactly what they did. Besides, what did being live add to the experience anyway?

The answer is: rather a lot. And sure enough, slowly but surely, we began to see a revival. Live drama, not made because it was the only possible way to make something, but because it was a fascinating way to make television in its own right. We just needed some distance in order to see it.

The clear catalyst for this revival was the American medical series ER, and their 1997 episode “Ambush”. Charting a day in the life of the unit through the lens of a PBS documentary film crew, this was a stroke of genius for their big experiment: this kind of story meant that the show didn’t need to replicate its traditional look. Instead, the handheld documentary style was the point, and its rough and ready nature could work in the show’s favour.

Three years later, for Coronation Street‘s 40th anniversary, ITV decided to pull a similar trick. After all, its very first episode in 1960 had gone out live – what better way to celebrate than to replicate how the show used to be made? This time, there was no documentary cheat: the show had to look like a normal episode. Still, with Coronation Street still being shot multi-camera as it always had been, rather than in a more cinematic single-camera style, such cheats weren’t necessary. Any given scene was essentially shot the same as it always was: it was doing those scenes one after the other without a recording break which was the real work. And, of course, getting just one chance to get it all right.

The episode was a success, and both sides of the Atlantic seemed eager for more. In the same year, CBS broadcast Fail Safe starring George Clooney; a one-off drama rather than part of a continuing series. It seemed obvious this was where UK television would go next. And yet nobody quite seemed able to take the plunge. ITV aired a live episode of The Bill in 2003, to celebrate 20 years of the police drama. But when would someone in the UK dare to do a standalone live play?

That moment finally came on the 2nd April, 2005. As the continuity announcer intoned:

“Live drama on the BBC for the first time in over 20 years, here and now on BBC Four. Not for the faint-hearted – on the sofa or in the studio – thrills and chills, and some flashing lights, as Jason Fleming, Mark Gatiss, and David Tennant star in The Quatermass Experiment.”

The Quatermass Experiment was the perfect choice. The original serial was broadcast live on the BBC in 1953, and – like the Nineteen Eighty-Four adaptation – was written by Nigel Kneale. It was the first science fiction series specifically written for an adult British television audience, it being neither aimed at kids, or an adaptation of a previous work. And while it’s gone down as a seminal piece of television, and was later adapted into a film, only the first two episodes of the original serial survive. The last four aren’t even lost – they were simply never recorded in the first place, the results of the experimental process of recording the first two being deemed unsatisfactory.

Inevitably, the 2005 version is slightly condensed; the original serial was three hours long, while the 2005 remake is a shade over an hour and a half. But the increased pace of the production means that far less is cut than you might think, and indeed the original scripts were used as the basis for the adaptation. Moreover, the central story of an alien presence travelling to earth via a manned mission to space, and the horrific mutation of the single remaining crew member, remains as chilling as ever. The biggest change from the original production is swapping the original climax at Westminster Abbey for one at the Tate Modern. Ostensibly done for production reasons, it makes a certain amount of thematic sense too; many people in 2005 would find the Tate Modern rather closer to their spiritual centre.

Indeed, the fascinating thing about watching the production, much like Nineteen Eighty-Four, is just how quickly you forget that the programme is live. Oh, it’s there in the back of your mind, sure. But the show isn’t interesting because it was live. It’s interesting and it was live. Watching a production performing a high wire act of keeping a live drama from collapsing around its ears doesn’t keep your interest for an hour and a half. Story and characters do. Same as it ever was.

Instead, the effect is more subtle; the live nature gives the drama a life that is difficult to replicate any other way. Characters speak with an urgency and a reality which is sometimes difficult to achieve when you’ve got a whole day to get it “perfect”. Perfection in drama can be a fool’s errand; if every cut is perfect, sometimes all you can feel is the artifice. Artifice is not always a bad thing in drama, but neither is it a universally good thing either. The trick, surely, is to have a range of approaches to our television.

Inevitably, there was the odd issue with the production. Pope John Paul II had the temerity to die that day; a caption was placed over the programme pointing viewers to the BBC’s news channel. (It’s difficult to imagine similar news warranting such a caption today.) One scene ended with an unscripted off-screen crash. And poor Adrian Bower as journalist James Fullalove forgot his lines during one scene, resulting in a few agonising seconds of the programme going entirely off-piste. But overall, it was an absolute triumph.

And yet, if you buy the programme on DVD today, none of the above issues are present. Sure, the caption about the Pope was put on by BBC presentation rather than the actual production; you wouldn’t expect that to be included. But the crash has mysteriously gone, and the scene where Bower dried has been entirely replaced with a recording from the dress rehearsal. More seriously, the entire programme has been recut; shots changed, removed, or trimmed. It is no longer a representation of how the programme looked on the night. If you watch that DVD, don’t be fooled: despite the caption at the beginning claiming to be a live production, by the time the editors had done their work, that simply isn’t true any more.

Sadly, our fabled revival of live drama in the UK seems to have stalled somewhat as well. In 2015, I had the pleasure of being in BBC presentation for a live episode of EastEnders; the same year, ITV did a beautiful live version of The Sound of Music. But since then, things have tailed off. The BBC’s centenary would have been the perfect chance to put on a production much like the 2005 Quatermass; perhaps an adaptation of its sequels Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit? Or perhaps, God forbid, something entirely new? Instead, we got nothing.

Oh, there have been rumours. Casualty was supposed to do a live episode to celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2016; this never happened, and was replaced by a decidedly non-live episode in 2017, albeit done in one take. Over on ITV, there were rumours of a live episode of Emmerdale last year to celebrate the show’s 50th anniversary, after the success of the one for their 40th in 2012; instead, the show’s executive producer Jane Hudson gave interviews to the press specifically explaining that they wouldn’t do another.

Instead, over the past few years, comedy seems to have taken up the space. Mrs Brown’s Boys did live episodes in 2016 and 2021; Not Going Out did a live episode in 2018, as did Inside No. 9. The latter was certainly more of a drama than a comedy, but the other two examples are audience sitcoms; and specifically, the kind of audience sitcoms where, if things go wrong, it doesn’t matter. Both Brendan O’Carroll and Lee Mack are the kind of performers who can make hay out of mistakes. The potential destruction of the show’s reality is a boon for them, not something to fear. In today’s social-media-driven world, where mistakes by actors can easily be amplified, maybe it’s all eminently understandable.

So yet again, TV takes the safe way out, and everyone’s happy. And something like 2005’s Quatermass becomes not part of the new vanguard, but of something that we can happily place in the past. Again.

Until next time?

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BBC100: Smashie and Nicey – the End of an Era (1994)

Published 20th April 2023

TV Comedy

For more on this BBC100 series of posts, read this introduction.

BBC 100 logo with Smashie and Nicey at their press conference

I get the idea with this project that I’m not really supposed to have favourites. The whole point is to celebrate a range of BBC programmes across the decades. Having a best one is a bit naughty, really. But on a good day, Smashie and Nicey – the End of an Era stands as my favourite TV show ever made. It somehow seems to represent everything that television can do as a medium, in 45 minutes of utter joy.

And yet those 45 minutes didn’t spring out of nowhere. Like so much brilliant comedy, it has its roots in something rather more ordinary, at least at first glance. Harry Enfield’s Television Programme (1990-92) is the kind of sketch show which used to be de rigueur on telly, and now very much isn’t. The number of famous characters which sprung from this series and its successor Harry Enfield and Chums is extraordinary: Tim Nice-but-Dim, The Slobs, Mr Cholmondley-Warner, Kevin the Teenager… the list is endless.

But two of the very best were Smashie and Nicey, played by Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield. Radio DJs for Fab FM – an extremely thinly-disguised parody of BBC Radio 1 – sketches typically went as follows:

NICEY: I love Tuesdays, don’t you mate?
SMASHIE: Certainly do mate, it’s one of the best between-Monday-and-Wednesday-type days we’ve got.
NICEY: It’s the only between-Monday-and-Wednesday-type day we’ve got mate. It may not have the glamour and excitement of a Saturday night, or the mournfulness of a Monday morn, but it’s our Tuesday, the good old-fashioned honest-to-goodness down-to-earth Great British Tuesday.

Inevitably, every sketch ended with them playing Bachman-Turner Overdrive and “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”. If inane DJs were an easy and at times unfair target, it was an exceptionally well aimed one nonetheless, and the characters became a byword for what mainstream Radio 1 was doing in the early 90s.

But events quickly overtook Enfield and Whitehouse. In 1993, Matthew Bannister became the new controller of the real Radio 1, replacing Johnny Beerling who had been with the station since its launch in 1967. His remit was simple: get rid of the Smashie & Nicey image. Things started changing immediately. At a stroke, Enfield and Whitehouse had managed to create that rare thing: satire that actually achieved something.

And yet the success of their satire also seemed to signify its downfall. What was the point of continuing the Smashie and Nicey sketches, when what they were satirising was now dying? It was a point well taken by Enfield and Whitehouse. They decided to do one last special to say goodbye to the characters, and then move on.

That special was End of an Era, and they were given a gift of an opening. In August 1993, Radio 1 DJ Dave Lee Travis resigned live on air, with the immortal words “Changes are being made here which go against my principles, and I just cannot agree with them.” It was a short leap to change this to a press conference, and for Dave Nice to talk about “the current backstabtrocious policies” instead. What follows is a mockumentary – essentially in the style of the then-current BBC series Omnibus – looking both backwards and forwards at Smashie and Nicey’s career.

And what we end up with – and bear with me on this one – is British comedy’s version of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Before you close the browser and consider reporting me to the authorities, let me explain. Ulysses is often described as just as much of an encyclopedia as a novel; as “complete” a description of Dublin in the early 20th century as you would ever be likely to need. End of an Era is pretty much the same, but for British light entertainment from the 1960s – 90s. Less comprehensive, sure. But somehow, watching it, you feel you now know everything you need to about its development.

So we get Smashie’s ill-advised stint as an actor in live drama, Nicey interviewing the Beatles, their early days on Radio Fab in the 60s, their 70s Top of the Pops years, Smashie’s brief fortray into punk records (“On the ruddy rotten dole”), Nicey throwing himself into the world of advertising… all the way through to 90s Comic Relief, and Noel’s House Party. (Erm, sorry, Smashie’s Saturday Smiles.) All expertly recreated, either shot from scratch as pitch-perfect parodies, or by splicing together existing footage with newly shot-material of Enfield or Whitehouse.

One section in particular is just a perfect combination of picture research, special effects, and comic acting. To show Nicey’s career as a Blue Peter presenter, the team took an actual performance of Freddie and the Dreamers on the show (originally transmitted 23rd March 1963), and added Enfield dancing next to Freddie Garrity. It’s an astonishing piece of work which looks incredible today, let alone in 1994. It’s not just the brilliant compositing of the two pieces of footage; Enfield is moving in perfect synch with Freddie’s original distinctive leg movements. You just would not believe the footage was shot 30 years apart.

And then we get the big admission. Towards the end of the programme, we cut to the birthday party for 25 years of Fab FM, and meet a bunch of Smashie and Nicey’s replacements. (“Simon Northern-Accent, serious world music evening slot…”) And we are suddenly, utterly on Smashie and Nicey’s side, as we realise that their replacements are just as bad… or far worse. Enfield and Whitehouse weren’t out to destroy a section of British light entertainment after all. They just meant to poke a bit of fun.

Paul Whitehouse gave an interview to The Telegraph in 2015 which confirms this:

“I remember [former director general of the BBC] John Birt approached me at some award ceremony in the mid-Nineties… He said, “Oh well done, thanks for giving me the idea about the DJs. Now I can get rid of them.” And I said, ‘We actually quite like their rambling antics.'”

The characters of Smashie and Nicey weren’t inspired by hatred, or a desire to change things. They weren’t created in order to kill anything off. They came about through affection.

Perhaps people should have taken the satire a little less literally.

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BBC100: Paul Daniels Live at Hallowe’en (1987)

Published 20th April 2023

Other TV

For more on this BBC100 series of posts, read this introduction.

BBC 100 logo, with Paul Daniels, Debbie McGee, and an owl

“Tonight is Halloween when strange things can happen, and even here live on BBC1, all is not what it seems.”

And with those foreboding words on Halloween night 1987, the BBC1 globe transformed into a pumpkin, and one of the most remarkable pieces of television ever transmitted began. Because this was the night that Paul Daniels was killed, live before the nation. Nobody who saw it would ever forget it.

Oh, the show starts simply enough, if atypically. The Paul Daniels Magic Show had been running since 1979 on the BBC. But instead of the usual bright, light entertainment studio, we’re greeted with a horse and carriage moving through the smoky blackness. Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee exit the carriage, in what only can be described as gothic evening dress. And after a mild levitation trick outside the main entrance, they enter a grand mansion, where we will be spending the next 40 minutes.

Yet once the show gets going, most of the programme isn’t that much different to a normal episode of Paul Daniels. Paul tells us a story about a Houdini seance, which is an excuse for some messing around with props. Eugene Berger makes two lovely appearances and does some close-up magic. Perhaps the most intriguing section is an extended setup involving a battery powered video camera, television, a representative from Panasonic… and, of course, a ghost. But even this isn’t really outside the bounds of the kind of thing his show usually does; three years earlier, he’d done a “disappearing camera trick” which is really in the same, erm, spirit.

But this is all a lead-up to the final six or so minutes. After some short film of a Houdini escape, Daniels is revealed standing in front of a huge iron maiden, the famous medieval torture device. This is to be an escape trick. “The spikes themselves – there’s 110 of them – and they’re all metal”, Daniels says, matter-of-factly. As he gets get securely fixed into the contraption, he asks Debbie to leave the room entirely. “We have people here from all walks of life. If anything at all goes wrong, don’t move from your seats unless instructed to do so.” A screen is placed in front of the iron maiden, and the escape attempt starts.

Unfortunately, something goes hideously wrong. After a few seconds, the absurdly heavy door slams shut. There is a nasty pause, and no sign of Daniels. The picture fades to black. “Ladies and gentlemen”, an unknown voice intones, “Please leave the room in an orderly fashion.” And the end credits roll, to silence. Paul didn’t complete his escape, and is now rather intimate with those solid, 110 spikes he was boasting about just a few moments ago.

Except, of course, he wasn’t. The lack of escape was the trick; a macabre piece of black theatre, perfect for Halloween. It was, however, not a piece of theatre that some viewers appreciated. Indeed, outrage was so strong that Paul ended up sending in a letter to The Times explaining himself. It’s a brilliant piece of writing, and one which not only talks about the specifics of his Halloween show, but also talks in philosophical terms about the problems faced by all television across the decades:

“In television we are, for the most part, in a no-win situation. If we continue to turn out the same format, week in week out, we are heavily criticised along the lines of “same old faces, same old scripts”, “very boring” etc, and yet when someone decides to change the format and step outside the “norm” the criticisms still come.”

As for the show itself, he provides a robust defence:

“Please remember the following facts. You were warned in the final announcement before the show started that all is not as it seems. You received definite instructions to switch off before the final trick happened if you were of a nervous disposition (If you ignored that warning that is your fault not mine). Didn’t you think it amazing that within two or three seconds of the trick ending, the BBC had on standby all the credits on a black background instead of our normal credit sequence…?”

Indeed the thing that strikes me most about the programme is how utterly fair it is on the audience. The continuity announcement all but tells you what is due to happen, if you interpret it correctly. Daniels does indeed warn you before the final trick takes place. (“I have to warn you – this can go wrong. That is not a joke. Switch off if you are of a nervous disposition…”) This is not a programme which pulls a nasty stunt with no warning. It gives you all the information you need, and then does things so perfectly that it still ends up as a shocking piece of television.

Then there’s the final moment, after those silent end credits roll. Paul Daniels himself pops back up, and does a short piece to camera. But it’s no naff “Here I am, don’t worry, I’m fine!” moment. (At least, not yet – the production did have to do one of those to be transmitted after the subsequent programme of the evening, which is a bit of a shame.) Instead, it’s altogether more subtle:

“Well, what you have just been watching was a live magic show. But this, outside here, was recorded yesterday, and all I can say is: I hope that the last illusion goes well tomorrow…”

And Daniels winks to camera. And not only is it a great joke, but it’s the utmost in treating the audience with respect. It relies on people understanding the difference between the live parts of a programme, and pre-recorded inserts in the same show. Clearly, some people didn’t get it. But I’ll choose programmes which overestimate their audience to ones which underestimate them, and maybe we could do with a bit more of the former today.

The show started something of a trend for the BBC to mess with its audience during Halloween. Five years later, the infamous Ghostwatch aired; a drama presented as a live broadcast which slowly becomes haunted itself, ending in a national mass seance. And in 2018, Inside No. 9 produced “Dead Line”, a hoax which many had thought the BBC was incapable of still doing. What other show has not only featured a fake channel breakdown, but our friendly continuity announcer being killed live on air?

But Paul Daniels was first. And for my money, best. He could have settled for doing a spooky version of his normal show, with a few pumpkins dotted around. It still would have been great fun: even his standard shows were superb TV. Instead, he pushed the boundaries of television as far as they could possibly go. All under the innocuous guise of light entertainment.

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BBC100: Fawlty Towers (1975-79)

Published 19th April 2023

TV Comedy

For more on this BBC100 series of posts, read this introduction.

BBC 100 logo, with Basil, Sybil and the health inspector

I admit it. When writing about old television, there is often the desire to pick out something obscure nobody has heard of in decades. It’s not an attempt to be clever. (Well, not always, at least.) It’s just that sometimes, you really want to highlight a programme which you feel deserves more attention than it’s been getting lately.

Not today, though. Fawlty Towers, John Cleese and Connie Booth’s masterwork, is as obvious a choice as you can get, if your task is “pick something brilliant that the BBC made in the 1970s”. What is perhaps more surprising is how many lessons the show has for the kind of comedy we could make today. But we’ll get to that in all good time.

The genesis of Fawlty Towers is oft-told, but worth revisiting. Let’s take a short trip back to Torquay, May 1970. The Monty Python team are busy shooting location material for their second series. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately for Cleese – they have booked into the Gleneagles hotel, run by a certain Donald Sinclair. He proceeded to be rude to pretty much everybody: insulting Terry Gilliam’s eating habits (“We don’t eat like that in this country!”), staring bemusedly at Michael Palin when being asked for a wake-up call, and most memorably, hiding Eric Idle’s bag behind a wall in case it contained a bomb. “We’ve had a lot of staff problems lately”, stated Sinclair, in an attempted explanation of the latter.

While most of the team moved to a different hotel in the morning, John Cleese stayed… and Connie Booth, his then-wife, joined him a few days later. They sat and watched. And little by little over the years, elements of Sinclair started appearing in John Cleese’s work. In 1971, he wrote an episode of LWT’s Doctor at Large set in a hotel, featuring a proto-Fawlty character called Mr. Clifford. It went down rather well. The character was clearly destined for his own sitcom.

That sitcom was Fawlty Towers. And it’s an incredibly simple series on the face of it, with only four main characters. There’s Basil and Sybil Fawlty, who are uneasily married. There’s Polly the waitress, usually the voice of sanity, and Manuel the waiter, who isn’t. Together they run a hotel, or in Basil’s case, use running a hotel as an excuse to bully the guests. That, in a nutshell, is it.

And yet it isn’t. Fawlty Towers is many things. It’s an exquisitely-written farce. (The camera scripts were twice the size of a typical BBC sitcom of the time.) It’s a character study, particularly of Basil. But it’s also a sitcom where the “sit” is actually important, rather than just a place to put your characters. This is one thing which isn’t appreciated enough: the show is partly a satire of the service industry, where (as Cleese is fond of saying in interviews) hotels are often run for the convenience of the staff instead of the guests. It’s not a topic which sounds immediately entertaining at first glance, but that’s the joy of comedy: it makes the driest of subjects fun. This point was not lost on Cleese, who three years earlier had set up Video Arts, a company which used comedians to make training materials based on that exact principle. Fawlty Towers can genuinely be viewed as a 12-part hotel management training course, if you desire.

Then there’s the true heart of the show: Basil Fawlty, a desperately appalling man. Stuck between strata of the class system, looking down at the “riff-raff”, and desperately fawning upwards at lords or doctors, we laugh at him because most terrible things that happen to him are his own fault. Basil’s problem isn’t just that he is ludicrously uncomfortable in his own skin; it’s that he inflicts the results of that uncomfortableness on everybody else. If he got on with running a hotel instead of sitting in judgement over everybody who walked through the door, his life would be rather more satisfying. But his neuroses are his – and everybody else’s – downfall.

As was standard for sitcoms at the time, Fawlty Towers was shot in front of a live studio audience. (A real studio audience too – no canned laughter here.) It’s a style of programme which has rather fallen out of fashion in the UK these days; only a few stragglers like Not Going Out and Kate & Koji remain. I will admit to being an unashamed ambassador for what a studio audience can bring to comedy. For a start, an audience forces your sitcom to actually be funny; you can’t get away with inducing a wry, silent smile. It also helps the timing of the performances – actors can react to the room, rather than a vacuum. Obviously you don’t want every TV show to have an audience; different material suits different production methods. But for certain kinds of comedy, nothing quite matches the atmosphere of an audience sitcom. It brings the whole thing alive.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly controversial in the above. But to some people, it really seems to be. And it’s when you hear the arguments against doing any sitcom in front of an audience that I begin to get infuriated. One persistent canard is the idea that “I don’t need to be told when to laugh”. Which is not in any way the point of a show having a studio audience, and starts to reveal the said person’s own neuroses in a manner which would make Basil Fawlty proud. To decry the presence of audience laughter in a sitcom under any circumstances seems to me to be a profoundly anti-creative thing to do. It’s the same as criticising all musicals because “people don’t just suddenly start singing in real life”. To demand some petty interpretation of realism just because a viewer has no imagination doesn’t seem to me to be the best way of creating good television.

Fawlty Towers demands an audience for all kinds of reasons, not least because there are huge laugh lines which utterly demand a reaction. But here’s one big reason why I feel a studio audience is so important to the show: because humiliating Basil is so much more satisfying when it’s done in public. The sound of hundreds of people laughing at his ludicrousness is important. We can understand Basil, we even can feel sorry for Basil, but crucially: it’s important to laugh at Basil too. After all, do you want to end up like him? The studio audience is a vital part of his ritual humiliation.

That’s why Fawlty Towers stands as a template of how to do a mainstream sitcom today. People often focus on the show’s ludicrously complicated plots, and yes, they’re fantastic, immaculately constructed things. But a large part of the joy of the show is poking a character who deserves to be poked, over and over again, while he continues to embarrass himself. That was valid comedy in 1975, and it’s equally as valid in 2022. Giving a kicking to one of the less attractive parts of being British is surely what our comedy is designed for.

People are obsessed with the idea that old comedy easily becomes “dated”. I usually find this to be at best an overstated phenomenon. Humans don’t change that quickly, and some things are eternal. Fawlty Towers is essentially about an incompetent, angry sycophant. It’s not like that breed of human has disappeared in the last few decades.

And they still need to be made fun of. Perhaps more than ever.

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BBC100: The Nigel Barton Plays (1965)

Published 18th April 2023

TV Drama

For more on this BBC100 series of posts, read this introduction.

BBC 100 logo, with Nigel Barton walking with the road

Very few things change overnight in television. Sometimes, it takes decades.

We’ve just talked about Nineteen Eighty-Four, a drama broadcast live to the nation in 1954, just because that’s just how things were done. Over the following few years, recording your programmes beforehand began to become a thing you could sensibly do. But it took a very long time for live drama to go away entirely. As late as 1983, BBC Two broadcast a run of five weekly plays, live from Pebble Mill in Birmingham.¹

But there became a tipping point where live drama, once the norm, became markedly less common. By the time of The Wednesday Play (1964-70), an anthology series of mostly-original single stories, every episode of the programme was pre-recorded. But live or not, it’s the scripts that matter, and enough scripts were needed to create a valuable opportunity for writers new to television. Stand up, a certain Dennis Potter.

Dennis Potter became that rare breed of television writer: one who a normal person who isn’t obsessed with TV might actually have heard of. The son of a coal miner, he ended up writing some of the most acclaimed drama serials British television has ever produced: Pennies from Heaven (1978), The Singing Detective (1986), and Lipstick on Your Collar (1993). Outside of these, he is perhaps best remembered now for his startling Without Walls interview with Melvyn Bragg in 1994, candidly discussing his work, his childhood, and his terminal cancer.

But his very first scripts for television were for The Wednesday Play in 1965. Alas, as ever with programmes of this vintage, we come up against the spectre of wiping. So much of this era of television simply doesn’t survive; the master tapes were considered simply too valuable not to be reused. Which means that Dennis Potter’s very first television work, The Confidence Course – a satire of Dale Carnegie and his self-improvement mantras – no longer exists. His second play Alice, about Lewis Carroll, luckily survives. But it was with his final two plays of the year, Stand Up, Nigel Barton and Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, that Potter hit creative paydirt.

Both plays are highly autobiographical, as Potter was wont to do throughout his career; but even by those standards Stand Up, Nigel Barton – broadcast on the 8th December 1965 – is probably most autobiographical thing he ever wrote. The play details the early years of the eponymous Nigel Barton, and directly mirrors Potter’s journey from a working-class kid growing up in the Forest of Dean, to his years at Oxford University. Here was a play which really did get a brand new voice out there to the viewing public, telling a story that really hadn’t been told in this way before. Class is, of course, at the heart of the piece, but not in a way which gives us easy heroes or villains. Potter resolutely refuses to condemn or romanticise his working-class roots; the point he makes is that the pain he felt moving between classes is something worth acknowledging and examining, rather than being something to hide.

Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, broadcast just a week later, has nearly a completely different cast: the wonderful Keith Barron as Nigel is the only link. Again, the play is autobiographical; this time, under examination is Potter’s experiences the previous year as a parliamentary candidate. What’s striking is that the play’s essential theme – pragmatism versus idealism in politics – isn’t the only part of the play relevant today; so are many of the details. The character of Jack Hay, Barton’s political confidant, is still endlessly seen in political satire decades later. There is surely a direct line between Jack’s brutal pragmatism, and Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It.

In both plays, Potter sets out his stall for the years to come. His obsessions with class and childhood are obvious, but we also have the beginnings of his distrust of pure realism in drama. And if his breaking the fourth wall seems more tame today than at the time, it’s still startling to see Nigel’s childhood portrayed not by using a cast of kids, but with a cast of adults. All sitting in a classroom as though it was the most normal thing in the world.

And then there’s the music. Potter eventually became well-known for his use of pop tunes in his work, with seemingly whole serials built around the idea. Yet somehow, his use of a contemporary song by The Animals to underline Nigel’s despair at his roots is still one of the most powerful examples of all. “We gotta get out of this place / If it’s the last thing we ever do…”

Despite most of his well-known work today being multi-episode serials rather than single plays, Potter wrote further single scripts for Play for Today, the successor to The Wednesday Play. (His most famous was Brimstone and Treacle, made in 1976, but so controversial internally at the BBC that it wasn’t aired until 1987.) But just as live drama slowly disappeared over the decades, so too did the single play, replaced with those limited run serials, or full continuing series. We can point to the odd exception, but that’s precisely the point: they’re an exception. Even the most convincing example – the brilliant Inside No. 9 – is written by the same two people every week, rather than being a way of new writers to make their mark.

We hear a lot about the need for diversity in television, and let’s be clear: that aim is both correct and laudable. But at the same time, television makes it more difficult for those new and diverse voices to make it to the screen. Bringing back the single play on a proper, permanent basis would be a way of increasing the opportunities for new, diverse writers. Do we want to actually bring those new voices to the screen, much like The Wednesday Play did with Dennis Potter?

Or do we just want to talk about it instead, and merely pretend we’re doing something?

These were The Battle of Waterloo, Redundant!, Night Kids, Cargo Kings and Japanese Style, and aired from the 13th February 1983. ↩

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BBC100: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954)

Published 17th April 2023

TV Drama

For more on this BBC100 series of posts, read this introduction.

BBC 100 logo, with Winston and Julia

One of my favourite television programmes has a bit of a problem, you know. It doesn’t actually exist any more. What’s more, it never really did, unless you happened to be watching it at the time.

That kind of thing can easily happen when discussing programmes that are nearly 70 years old, like Nineteen Eighty-Four. Because the original version of this production, broadcast on the BBC on the 12th December 1954, wasn’t even wiped: it was never actually recorded in the first place.¹ Down the memory hole, if you will. As per all television drama at the time, it was performed to the nation live, albeit with a few filmed inserts shot on location. And if something wasn’t recorded, it disappeared for good.

Perhaps that sounds puzzling, unless you spend a lot of time deep in the mires of archive television. It’s surely difficult to appreciate the idea that the first episode of Stranger Things might disappear completely. Though maybe not impossible. It’s worth noting exactly how many YouTube videos end up… gone. If television used to be more ephemeral, it’s worth remembering that huge chunks of the internet are exactly that right now. Life changes less than we think over the years.

Still, for our appreciation of this play – a fairly straight adaptation of Orwell’s novel, with a screenplay by Nigel Kneale – we only have its repeat to judge it on, four days later on the 16th December. Well, I say repeat. To do that repeat in 1954, you had to bring back all the cast and crew, and mount the entire production again. Moreover, due to controversy about the initial production’s content, the BBC’s Head of Television Drama Michael Barry ended up having to give a stout defence of the programme… live, on-camera, just before air. I’d like to see them try that these days before a particularly violent EastEnders.

Some people reported at the time that the remount lost a little of the magic of that original broadcast; in 2023, it’s impossible to judge. But enough of the magic was certainly retained to make it a remarkable piece of television. I get the idea that I’m supposed to say that the power of the play has diminished today, with boundaries having been pushed far beyond what was acceptable in 1954. While it’s difficult to imagine politicians being up in arms about it now – they save that for the dangerous and terrifying Joe Lycett on Sunday morning political programmes – Nineteen Eighty-Four really does retain a raw power which makes it unnerving to watch today.

But then, how could it not? Television isn’t purely interesting because of shock value. If that were true, this industry would be a depressing one to work in indeed. There’s far more to the play than that, not least its cast. Peter Cushing is of course excellent as Winston Smith, the man broken by a totalitarian state. But Leonard Sachs as Mr. Charrington, the man who betrays Winston, is possibly my favourite performance: and truly somebody who figured out early that when a television camera gets close, you can afford to underplay things.

For me, the true horror doesn’t come when Winston arrives in Room 101, and faces his greatest fear. It doesn’t even quite come in the dreaded Newspeak, and all the propaganda and revisionism of the Ministry of Truth. It comes in the one, single act of betrayal by Charrington. Just one person not being who you thought they were. And if that isn’t literally the most relatable piece of drama in the world, I don’t know what is.

As well as not having its original performance recorded, Nineteen Eighty-Four suffered from problems at the other end of its life, too. For years, a DVD release was planned and then forbidden, due to rights issues involving Michael Radford’s film version of the novel. There were some TV showings in 1994 and 2003, but you weren’t actually allowed to own it. (The heavy irony here considering the subject matter is almost too much; if you wrote it into your own script, you’d be told off for being too obvious.) Finally, in April 2022, the BBC version got a proper release by the BFI – and on Blu-ray, with the original film sequences rescanned and presented in true HD for the first time.

If you want to dip your toe into archive BBC drama, there is no finer starting point.

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At least, not in its entirety. Internal documentation and contemporary reports suggest a 20 minute excerpt may have been recorded “for technical and archive purposes”. This footage almost certainly no longer exists, if it ever did. Regardless, there is no suggestion that the first broadcast of the play was ever recorded in full. ↩

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BBC100: Introduction

Published 17th April 2023

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