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Don’t Tell Me About the Press

Published 1st October 2023

TV Comedy

Jonathan Lynn’s Comedy Rules: From the Cambridge Footlights to Yes, Prime Minister is a slightly odd tome. Part autobiography, part an attempt to nail down the rules of comedy – while admitting that any such attempt is doomed to failure – it does feel like it would occasionally benefit from a little more focus. On the other hand, I found myself nodding along vigorously to pretty much every single page.

For instance, when talking about Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister:

“The series eventually ran from 1980 to 1988 but was not about the eighties. It was devised in the seventies and reflected the media-obsessed politics of the Wilson/Heath/Callaghan years, not the conviction politics of Margaret Thatcher. It was actually much closer to the politics of the years that followed, the years of Major, Blair and Brown. In any case, there is a timelessness about good comedy: the pleasure and excitement of recognition are not rooted in a particular time or place. Humanity remains constant.”

This dual nature of what comedy can be is key: it can be ostensibly linked to a particular time, and yet still leap easily across the years. I always shake my head in dismay when people tell me how easily comedy dates. Comedy is usually about people, and people don’t change either as much or as quickly as many would like to think.

SIR ARNOLD: What about the DHSS? John?
SIR JOHN: Well, I’m happy to say that women are well-represented near the top of the DHSS. After all, we have two of the four Deputy Secretaries currently at Whitehall. Not eligible for Permanent Secretary of course, because they’re Deputy Chief Medical Officers and I am not sure they’re really suitable… no, that’s unfair! Of course, women are 80% of our clerical staff and 99% of the typing grade, so we’re not doing too badly by them, are we?

— Yes Minister, “Equal Opportunities” (1982)

BARBIE: Are any women in charge?
MATTEL CEO: Listen. I know exactly where you’re going with this and I have to say I really resent it. We are a company literally made of women. We had a woman CEO in the 90s. And there was another one at… some other time. So that’s two right there. Women are the freaking foundation of this very long phallic building. We have gender neutral bathrooms up the wazoo. Every single one of these men love women. I’m the son of a mother. I’m the mother of a son. I’m the nephew of a woman aunt. Some of my best friends are Jewish.

— Barbie (2023)

Humanity remains constant indeed. Especially the terrible bits. Which is what an awful lot of comedy is about.

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The Pictures Are Much Much Better on Television

Published 6th July 2023

TV Comedy

Here’s a question for you. When did Alan Partridge first appear on television?

Caveats: a) I specifically mean television. Radio is brilliant, and also outside the scope of this article. b) For now, ignore any unbroadcast pilots. I’m talking about actual, broadcast telly. c) I do mean material exclusive to television, not just part of a radio programme aired on TV.

If you immediately went for the first episode of The Day Today, on the 19th January 1994, then join the club. That’s exactly where my mind went at first. So that would be this trademark awkward exchange between Chris and Alan:

But wait! The day before each episode of The Day Today aired, BBC2 broadcast The Day Today MiniNews, three minutes of extra material which served essentially as an extended trail for the next day’s episode. Or in other words: the closest you’d get to deleted scenes this side of a LaserDisc, at least in the first half of the 90s.

Partridge makes an appearance in the first one, which was broadcast on the 18th January 1994:

So is that the answer? Not quite. Because, of course, there were trails1 running for the series the week before air. Here’s one from the 14th January 1994, which features a brief bit of Partridge:

Incidentally, isn’t that a great trail? For all that Chris Morris has the reputation for scowling at publicity, you couldn’t ask for a better introduction to the show.

The above would usually cause me to make a variety of shrill and unpleasant noises, as I vainly tried to find the first transmission of a trail for the series. Luckily, we can sidestep that problem entirely. Because Partridge had an even earlier appearance on TV.

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  1. The BBC term is trails, not trailers, despite someone trying to correct me on this earlier in the year. ↩

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Fanny, I Want Fanny

Published 2nd July 2023

Other TV

Writing Dirty Feed can lead you down some strange avenues, and making some strange comparisons. Right now, I’m reading about Chris Morris and Fanny Cradock. What the hell do that pair have in common, beyond being “broadcasters” in the most general possible sense?

Answer: both were perfectly happy for the legend to be printed, rather than the truth. Which means disentangling lies told about them, either disseminated by themselves or by others, can initially seem like an exercise in futility. After all, if they didn’t care, surely nobody else should be bothered either.

But such defeatist talk gets us nowhere. So let’s take a look at this Guardian piece from 2006, “Secret drugs menu of TV chef Fanny”. There are a number of rather dubious claims in that article, but I want to focus on one which we can easily investigate:

“Her last public appearance before she died at 85 in 1995 was on the Parkinson Show alongside Danny La Rue who was dressed in drag as Shirley Bassey. Fanny had no idea at first that ‘the woman’ was actually a man, and when she found out she stormed out of the studio.”

This sounds like it should be a huge, classic TV moment, which is well-known about. Sure enough, it was picked up by The Times in November 2007:

“Fanny Cradock, the original TV chef, never presented a show again after she upset viewers by criticising the cooking of a housewife. She stormed off a Parkinson show when she found that Danny Da Rue, her fellow guest, was a man dressed as a woman.”

And in case you wondered why I’m talking about this now, this anecdote is still being told rather more recently. In March 2018, The Mirror gave us “The red-hot private life of temperamental TV chef Fanny Cradock”:

“Consigned to chat shows, her last was on Parkinson when she stormed out after realising Danny La Rue was a man in drag.”

From this, it starts making its way into various blog posts. There’s UCBloggers in November 2020, “Fanny Cradock: Britain’s First Celebrity Chef”:

“She made her last TV appearance on the Parkinson show, but she stormed off set in horror as she realised that the woman on the show alongside her was in fact Danny La Rue in drag.”

And there’s Retro Vixen in March 2023, “A Look Back at Fanny Cradock”:

“In one of her final TV appearances, she appeared as a guest on Parkinson alongside Danny La Rue. When she realised that Danny was a man dressed up as a woman, she stormed off set.”

Of course, it’s inevitably made it onto Wikipedia, directly citing The Guardian as a source:

“Fanny appeared alone on Wogan, Parkinson and TV-am. When she appeared on the television chat show Parkinson with Danny La Rue and it was revealed to her that La Rue was actually a female impersonator, she stormed off the set.”

And bringing us right up to date, the tale even makes it into the book Camp!: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World, published in May 2023:

“Fanny and Johnnie retired to the south coast and became chat show regulars, with Fanny making her final television appearance in 1995 aged eighty-five on the Parkinson show, alongside the fabulous drag queen Danny La Rue, who happened to be dressed as Shirley Bassey. When Fanny realised that La Rue was a female impersonator she stormed out – a shame, I’m sure if she’d hung around she would have benefited enormously from his makeup tips.”

Yes, yes, very amusing. Just one problem. This anecdote is bollocks.

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Project No: 1144/3361

Published 19th May 2023

TV Comedy

Fawlty Towers VT clock for the pilot

If there’s one thing you should know about me by now, it’s that I will accept any excuse to write about Fawlty Towers. Already this year, we’ve taken a look at cut material from “Gourmet Night”, a superb stage direction from the pilot, and the real truth behind Polly becoming a philosophy student.

Those latter two pieces were written with the aid of a camera script of that pilot: the actual script they took into the studio on the 23rd December 1974. And of course, there are numerous other revelations in that script, which I just have to share with you. Including one moment which I desperately wish had made it to the screen.

Let’s take a step through the episode as broadcast, and see what fun stuff we can dig out. I haven’t mentioned every single tiny change in dialogue, because you would want to kill me, but that still leaves plenty to take a look at. Material present in the script but cut or changed for transmission is rendered like this.

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The Unexamined Sitcom Is Not Worth Watching

Published 3rd April 2023

TV Comedy

Sometimes, a sitcom mystery you’ve wondered about for years suddenly gets resolved. And for Dirty Feed, this one is the motherlode. After all, with the pilot episode of Fawlty Towers, you’re talking about something as close as you can get to a sacred text around here.

Strap yourself in. This is a good one. Let’s start from the beginning.

One of the most important things to understand production-wise about the pilot of Fawlty Towers – usually known these days as “A Touch of Class” – is that it really was a genuine pilot, made eight months before the rest of the series. The majority of the studio scenes in the episode were shot in front of an audience on the 23rd December 1974, for eventual broadcast on BBC2 on the 19th September 1975. In comparison, the rest of Series 1 was shot in August/September 1975, less than two months before transmission.

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Obsessively Tracing Chris Barrie’s Movements in Late-1987

Published 5th March 2023

TV Comedy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dwarf on Film

Published 14th February 2023

TV Comedy

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

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

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

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

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

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Freeze-Frame Gonna Drive You Insane, Part One

Published 27th January 2023

TV Comedy

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

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

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

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

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

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“Of Course There’s Too Much Duck!”

Published 8th January 2023

TV Comedy

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

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

Two Fawlty Towers scriptbooks - all relevant information in the article

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

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

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Foreign News Sketch

Published 2nd January 2023

TV Comedy

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

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

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

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