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.
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 TXTX 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.
