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The Young Ones Music Guide: Series One

Published 16th June 2020

Madness on the set of The Young Ones

STANDARD YOUNG ONES MUSIC FACT™: Did you know that the reason there’s a band performing in nearly every episode of The Young Ones is so the programme could claim to be a variety show instead of a sitcom, and get a higher budget?

Yes, I did. Right, now that’s out of the way, let’s move on, shall we?

While working on a different project recently, I found myself in need of a complete list of music used in The Young Ones. Sadly, nobody had already written this. After some research, it soon became clear why nobody had already written this.¹ Of all the things I’ve done for this site, this has been one of the most difficult and complicated. The Young Ones has a lot of music in it, and a fair amount of it is obscure, sometimes absurdly so.

Not that I was starting entirely from scratch; I do own a copy of the official paperwork listing the music used in each episode. While this was of enormous help, the paperwork is also incomplete, and occasionally incorrect. Luckily, with a combination of that, my own ears, and an army of helpful people on Twitter, I’ve been able to identify the vast majority of the tracks used in the show. This includes chart music, library tracks, and specially written material by Peter Brewis.

There are a still few instances where I’ve unfortunately drawn a blank. These missing tracks are listed like this, along with an audio clip. So if anybody can identify any of these pieces, let me know in the comments, or drop me a line elsewhere. I will love you forever.

Let’s get going. This article covers Series 1; Series 2 will be dealt with separately, because I feel a responsibility not to over-excite you.

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No, Wikipedia, a list of band performances in each episode does not count. ↩

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best of, music guide, the young ones

Here’s to You, Mrs. Littlefield

Published 3rd April 2020

TV Comedy

Title page for Cheers pilot script

After nearly four decades, what is there new to say about the pilot of Cheers – widely regarded as one of the best television pilots ever made?

We can tick through the Standard Series Facts™ pretty quickly. Sam Malone was originally going to be an NFL player, until Ted Danson was cast. John Ratzenberger originally auditioned for the part of Norm. Before they decided on a bar in Boston, the initial idea was for a show set in a hotel. And you probably know what George Wendt is actually drinking at the bar, right?

If we dig a little deeper, however, we come across the strange tale of Mrs. Littlefield. A character scripted, cast, and shot for the pilot… but cut before air. Well, mostly cut, anyway.

Let’s find out a little about her from Sam Simon, writer and producer on Cheers¹:

“There was another regular that was cut out of the pilot, did you know that? Boston is a very racist town, and there was an old woman in a wheelchair, whose name I don’t remember. I think you can see her in the pilot, in the first episode, I should say, because it wasn’t a pilot.² They wanted to do the reality of Boston a little bit, and the racism of the town is certainly a valid topic for comment.”

Sam Simon, Television Academy Interview (49:24 – 50:05)

Then there’s this reader question on Ken Levine’s blog, another writer and producer on Cheers³:

“In Sam Simon’s amazing Emmy TV Legends interview, he talks about a character that was cut out of the Cheers pilot: A racist woman in a wheelchair. She was supposed to be a regular character, but apparently the Charles Bros/Burrows agreed that her harshness didn’t gel with the rest of the show.

Do you know anything about this?

Yes. The character was named Mrs. Littlefield. She was an opinionated old broad from the D.A.R.⁴ She was in the pilot and the decision to drop the character was made after it was filmed. Politics just didn’t fit with the mix. So they cut out her part, but there are a few shots here and there where she is still in the background. Just look for a sweet white-haired little old lady who used to have lines.

Since several back-up scripts were in the works before the pilot was filmed, we also had to go back and write her out of those episodes as well.

Again, it was a case of an actor being let go not because they gave a bad performance or did anything wrong. It’s just that the character didn’t mesh with the others.”

Ken Levine, Friday Questions (3rd January 2014)

Sure enough, if we go looking for her, we can indeed see Mrs. Littlefield in her wheelchair throughout the pilot:

Mrs. Littlefield

All of which is fascinating. But what nobody has done – at least as far as I can tell – is examine the original script of the pilot, and written about what Mrs. Littlefield actually said. But surely that script wouldn’t be readily available online…

Oh, hello. Final Draft, dated 16th April 1982. And it contains all of Mrs. Littlefield’s dialogue, every single line of which was edited out of the final episode.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

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Among a million and one other things ↩
You may note that I’m ignoring Sam Simon here, and refer to the first episode as the pilot throughout this article. I don’t know exactly why he doesn’t class it as a pilot; the episode was shot a few months before the rest of Season 1, as detailed here. Many other people who worked on the show refer to it as the pilot, so I’m going to follow their lead. ↩
Among two million and one other things. ↩
Daughters of the American Revolution. ↩

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best of, cheers, edits, pilots

An Exceptionally Important Piece of Analysis About Blackadder Goes Forth

Published 24th March 2020

TV Comedy

For a sitcom, Blackadder Goes Forth has inspired a great deal of scholarly debate over the years. In particular, the series’ portrayal of Field Marshal Haig as a callous murderer has become massively controversial. Is this simply devastatingly effective and truthful satire, or a fundamental misrepresentation of history which everyone has taken as fact?

It’s certainly an interesting question. So in true Dirty Feed spirit, let’s ignore all of that and investigate the show’s set design in painstaking and pointless detail instead.

One specific set, in fact. Because in my recent rewatch of the show, a few things struck me about Melchett’s office, back at British HQ. I am now going to share my findings with you, because you are special and you deserve it.

So let’s take a trip through each episode – in order of recording date, rather than broadcast.

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best of, blackadder

A Weekly Look at the World of Science and Technology

Published 15th February 2020

TV Comedy

Today, we’re going to go down a particularly odd rabbit hole, even for this site. On the plus side: here is a 15 year old mystery, definitively solved.

So let us take a trip to my favourite comedy of the 2000s, Look Around You. Specifically, the DVD commentary on the first episode of Series 2, Music. But hey, Peter Serafinowicz, was Music really meant to be your first episode?

SERAFINOWICZ: This wasn’t meant to be our first episode, was it?
POPPER: No, and a lot of people on the net sussed that as well, didn’t they?
SERAFINOWICZ: Yeah. I don’t know, we…
POPPER: We were going to start with Sport.
SERAFINOWICZ: We were going to start with Sport, but… yeah, we changed it, didn’t we? Maybe it was a bit of a mistake to start with this one, cos it’s such a different one…
POPPER: I wonder if we should have started with the next one, Health. Medibot.¹
SERAFINOWICZ: Yeah, probably.

Discussion about transmission orders is like catnip to me. I am the person who wrote this particular monstrosity, after all. And personally speaking, I think Serafinowicz is correct here. I love Music, but – Live Final aside – it’s definitely the most format-breaking of the episodes. It feels weird to break your format when you haven’t even established it yet.²

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MED-I-BOT! ↩
Having Sport go out first would also make sense for another reason – it contains the “Thanks ants / Thants” joke. That version of the joke going out in the third episode always felt a bit strange, being a straightforward replication of the famous Series 1 moment – the show had already moved past it. ↩

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best of, look around you

Fawlty at Large, Part Four:
“Why did you laugh if you don’t understand it?”

Published 6th December 2019

TV Comedy

LWT logo

In the penultimate part of this series, we examined the full wrath of John Cleese. Today, to round things up, I want to investigate his softer side. The softer side that nonetheless involves a sharp jab at his fellow professionals, because this is John Cleese: the man who deliberately broadcast David Frost’s telephone number to the nation because he thought it was funny.

And a character like Mr. Davidson – someone who is the embodiment of anti-comedy – is the perfect vehicle Cleese can use to slag off some lazy jokes.

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best of, doctor in the house, fawlty at large, fawlty towers

Fawlty at Large, Part Three:
“He doesn’t know when to stop, does he?”

Published 4th December 2019

TV Comedy

Mr. Davidson and Collier

Last time in our analysis of No Ill Feeling!, we took an in-depth look at Dr. Upton’s nemesis, Mr. Davidson. We are now heading towards our final showdown with that particular fragment of humanity.

It is utterly glorious. It is also utterly savage, in a way that you might not expect from a 1971 LWT sitcom. And it’s something which seems to have been pretty much ignored by everyone in their analysis of the episode – in as much as the episode has had any analysis, beyond “look, there’s an early version of Basil”.

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best of, doctor in the house, fawlty at large, fawlty towers

Fawlty at Large, Part Two: “Join in the fun!”

Published 2nd December 2019

TV Comedy

Mr. Davidson

In Part One of this series, we took a trip to 1971 and Doctor at Large, where newly-qualified doctor Michael Upton went to stay at the Bella Vista hotel. There, he met Mr. Clifford, our ersatz Basil Fawlty, and had a fairly baffling time with him.

That’s where most analysis of the episode No Ill Feeling! ends. But to me, it’s really just the beginning. Today, we meet the real nemesis of Michael Upton… and John Cleese.

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best of, doctor in the house, fawlty at large, fawlty towers

Fawlty at Large, Part One: “Did you book a sprout?”

Published 30th November 2019

TV Comedy

Doctor Upton and Mr. Clifford, from Doctor At Large

There is a tendency, when talking about TV shows, to get caught up in the same old anecdotes and stock opinions.

Star Trek: The Next Generation only got good with Season 3. Panorama was briefly interesting in 1957 with its spaghetti harvest April Fools, and again that time when Dimbleby sat there like a twat when no films would run. Catchphrase is reduced to Mr. Chips having a wank next to a snake.

It’s the same with sitcoms. Hancock is all about armfuls of blood and reading off cue cards. Are You Being Served? is entirely centred on Mrs. Slocombe’s minge. The Office invented a whole new way of making comedy.¹ So it is with Fawlty Towers, which has its own set of anecdotes and origin stories, all endlessly repeated over the years until nobody bothers to question them.

So let’s question one of them, shall we?

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It didn’t. ↩

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best of, doctor in the house, fawlty at large, fawlty towers

Beyond Grace Brothers

Published 8th September 2019

TV Comedy

Mrs. Slocombe, Mr. Humphries and Miss Brahms as backing singers

Something very odd happens in Episode 54 of Are You Being Served?, you know. Something which has never happened before.

Mind you, Series 8 of the show had already seen its fair share of upheaval. We wave goodbye to Mr. Goldberg, see in Mr. Grossman… then four episodes in, wave goodbye to Mr. Grossman and say hello to Mr. Klein, turning the Men’s department into a full-on ridiculous revolving door situation. We also say goodbye to Mr. Lucas, who admittedly had been lessening in importance for years, but was our original audience identification figure in the show’s early days. In his place comes the enormous waste of time and space which is Mr. Spooner.¹ Finally, Young Mr. Grace disappears – he briefly returns for the 1981 Christmas special, but that’s it – and hands over the reins to Old Mr. Grace, who somehow manages to be even more of a creepy fucker than his predecessor.

Elsewhere, there are signs that the show itself is getting restless. While Croft displayed a taste for expanding the scope of his other sitcoms – with perhaps a few rickety film sequences too many in Dad’s Army and the like – for the first seven series, Are You Being Served? stayed resolutely within the walls of the Grace Brothers department store.² Most of the action takes place on the shop floor of the Ladies and Gentlemen’s departments, the canteen, or an office. Occasionally they might sneak into the boardroom, and the show took the odd trip to other departments – most memorably in Series 5’s “A Change Is as Good as a Rest”, where they all go and work in the Toy Department for a week. But we never, ever go outside the building. Grace Brothers is all we ever see.

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I know there will be Mr. Spooner fans reading this. Sorry. *pulls that face Mr. Spooner pulls* ↩
Ignore the film. In every respect. ↩

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are you being served?, best of

KYTV: Challenge Anna
(TRANSLATED AND DUBBED BY DIRTY FEED)

Published 23rd July 2019

TV Comedy

Our two heroes

I remember the very first time I ever became aware of KYTV.

It wasn’t through actually watching it, like a normal person. That would be too easy. No, it was reading a rather snotty reference to it in What Satellite magazine, where some idiot columnist made some outraged remark about the BBC making fun of their precious satellite television while forcing everyone to pay the licence fee. It was a remark which, if Geoffrey Perkins or Angus Deayton had read it, I suspect would have filled them with glee. Irritating various people who deserve to be irritated is entirely within the remit KYTV had set itself, after all.

In any case, it’s easy to accuse the columnist of over-sensitivity. “A parody of cheap satellite TV” might be part of what KYTV is doing, but it most certainly isn’t all of it. If that was true, then for a start, they wouldn’t have been able to reuse so much material from the show’s radio predecessor, Radio Active. No, the targets KYTV had in its sights were fairly scattershot. For every joke about dishy dish girls, there’s another about BBC2 theme nights. And for every joke satirising cheap and exploitative TV, there are jokes which aren’t much about TV at all. You could stick Martin Brown in any environment, and he’d be funny.¹

Which brings us to Challenge Anna: the last episode of Series 1 of KYTV, the best episode of the show made up until that point, and up there with the best full stop. In the programme’s sights are Challenge Anneka – a BBC show – and Treasure Hunt – a Channel 4 show. Indeed, neither programme is the kind of thing which Sky or BSB could really afford to make in 1990. And while the feature “Spin the Wheel” could be viewed as what could happen to the formats if dirty old Sky got hold of them, jokes about companies helping out on the show in order to get their name mentioned are very much digs at the Beeb.

Sadly, KYTV has fallen down the cracks of comedy history somewhat – more, in fact, than Radio Active itself, which has had an ongoing successful stage revival, and this year is up in Edinburgh for the team’s 40th anniversary. So let’s redress the balance. With many thanks to Darrell Maclaine-Jones, I have in my possession the script for Challenge Anna. And contained within are all kinds of differences to the broadcast episode – with whole scenes included which didn’t make the final cut.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

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