Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four • Part Five • Part Six • Part Seven
Last time in our look at stock footage in End of an Era, we hung around in the nice clean-cut world of Top of the Pops. Today, Smashie and Nicey throw themselves headlong into… “PUNK!”
This sequence uses only two clips of existing footage… but they just happen to be two of the most interesting clips in the entire show. One of them is extremely well-known. The other, rather less so.
You may wonder why I have spent some time recently watching videos of Jimmy Savile on YouTube. This is a very good question, and one that I am unable to fully answer. I guess this is what happens when I get fed up of new Star Trek and get desperate for something to watch.
Nonetheless, here is yer evil bastard himself, on BBC2’s Open to Question in the 80s, being interrogated by a bunch of high school kids. Warning: video contains Jimmy Savile.
If you don’t want to watch the above – which is perfectly understandable – the below hilarious video condenses it down to three minutes. And while it’s clearly made partially for comedy purposes, it does accurately represent much of the content and feeling of the full interview:
Anyway, our question for today: when exactly was this interview broadcast?
Recently, I have come across something rather disquieting. Every time I check out the accepted TX dates of a programme I’m researching, something turns out to be awry. Last time it was The Brittas Empire; this time, A Bit of Fry & Laurie comes under the microscope, if you’ll pardon the pun.1
The story behind Series 4 of A Bit of Fry & Laurie is oft-told; transferring back across to BBC1, with celebrity guests in all but one episode, it’s generally regarded as the weakest of the four series, with its reputation not helped by Fry’s disappearance and flight to Belgium near the beginning of the run. I personally love it, but now isn’t the time for my brilliantly iconoclastic and dangerous comedy opinions. Let’s stick to the facts.
And the facts, at first glance, seem to be clear. Plenty of websites seem to think that the series was transmitted in the most straightforward manner possible: seven episodes, weekly on Sunday nights, from the 12th February through to the 26th March 1995. For example, Wikipedia, the British Comedy Guide, and IMDB all state that this is the case.
Unfortunately, a bit more poking reveals some discrepancies. epguides.com still thinks the series started on the 12th February, but also that it skipped a week on the 5th March; meaning the final episode transmitted on the 2nd April. The BBC itself, meanwhile, also indicates the series skips a week; however, their missed week is the 12th March. The Beeb also unhelpfully list the series as six episodes long in the episode descriptions, rather than the correct seven.
Our mission is clear. Can we disentangle this load of old nonsense?
What pun? ↩
One thing I’ve become vaguely obsessed with over the past year is how often the things that “everyone” knows about a TV show turn out to be incorrect. Of course, by “everyone”, I don’t actually mean everyone. The person on the street doesn’t mutter Brittas Empire TX dates as they go about their shopping. At least not in my local Tesco.
Somewhere which should know its Brittas Empire TX dates is epguides.com, mind you. Here is their page for the show, although I’ve screengrabbed the relevant section below, for reasons which will soon become apparent.
According to epguides.com, Series 1 of The Brittas Empire aired weekly from the 3rd January 1991, ending on the 14th February, skipping a week on the 31st. Wikipedia has the same details, as does The Brittas Empire Wiki. For complete transparency, seeing as I was writing for the site when it was published, Ganymede & Titan‘s guide has the same broad dates, but skips the 10th rather than the 31st; IMDB follows these latter dates too.
Every single guide mentioned above is wrong.