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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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An Evening at Television Centre

Published 16th December 2022

TV Comedy

There is a certain kind of deranged comedy fan, who has a very particular kind of deranged list. It’s a list which can bring you nothing but pain. “Which sitcom episodes would you love to have been in the studio audience for, but weren’t?” Bonus points if you hadn’t even been born at the time of the recording.

I am a deranged comedy fan. And my deranged list includes the Fawlty Towers episode “The Kipper and the Corpse”, the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned”, and the One Foot in the Grave episode “The Trial”. Somebody seriously needs to invent a time machine. Screw killing Hitler, I’ll spend most of my time hanging around various TV studios.

But one show has just leapt right to the top of my list. Not because it’s a seminal episode of sitcom, although it is very, very good. But because of what I’ve discovered about the studio recording itself.

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Back to Basie

Published 26th April 2022

TV Comedy

Some people probably think I compile lists of recording dates for sitcoms in lieu of having anything interesting to say about them. These people are entirely correct.

Nonetheless, as I’ve just had a delightful time watching the whole run on iPlayer, let’s take a look at Series 1 of Andrew Marshall’s brilliant 2point4 children.

Episode RX TX
Leader of the Pack 21/4/91 3/9/91
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 11/8/91 10/9/91
When the Going Gets Tough
the Tough Go Shopping		 18/8/91 17/9/91
Love and Marriage 25/8/91 24/9/91
Dirty Bowling 1/9/91 1/10/91
Young at Heart 8/9/91 8/10/91

The above are the main audience record dates for the series. Location work for the pilot was done between 10th – 12th April 1991, and location for the rest of the five episodes was done between 15th – 27th July 1991.

There are a few things to note about the above. Firstly: yes, “Leader of the Pack” was a genuine pilot, shot nearly four months before the rest of the series. This pilot was shot in the main Studio A at Pebble Mill, before the show moved down to TV Centre for the rest of the programme’s run.

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Roughly 3,000 Words on Yes Minister Pilot Edits

Published 28th February 2021

TV Comedy

When discussing the origins of Yes Minister, one story seems to loom above all: a nervous BBC delaying the series until after the 1979 election. The following version of this tale, told by writer Jonathan Lynn, seems a good a place to start as any. On that pilot recording:

“That Sunday, we recorded the show. I had asserted, with a confidence I did not wholly feel, that it would get laughs. Neither of us1 quite expected the gales of laughter which came from the studio audience that night. John Howard Davies lost little time in commissioning three more scripts, to make the first series of seven. Then we waited, and waited… and waited.

The Winter of Discontent approached and government all but broke down, and the BBC refused to transmit the first series until after the forthcoming election, which turned out to be not until 1979. They were scared that it would be seen as improperly influencing the election. Finally, three years after we had first proposed the show to the BBC, we went on the air in February 1980.”

Jonathan Lynn, “Comedy Rules”, p. 107

Perhaps Lynn can be accused of indulging of some spin of his own here. I’m willing to take him at his word that it was three years since he and Jay had proposed the series to the BBC, but that isn’t the real point when it comes to this particular delay. The heavy implication in the line about the election not being “until 1979” is surely that the pilot was made in 1978; otherwise, why not say “later that year”?

In fact, the pilot of Yes Minister was shot on… the 4th February 1979, a year before it was broadcast on the 25th February 1980. The election clearly caused a delay, but perhaps not for as long as Lynn indicates here.

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  1. Lynn is referring to his co-writer Anthony Jay here. ↩

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A Few Musings About the Young Ones Pilot

Published 26th May 2020

TV Comedy

Right now, I’m working on a piece for Dirty Feed which might be deemed Actually Useful™ – at least, for certain definitions of the word “useful”. A complete guide to every single piece of music heard in The Young Ones, right down to the most obscure library tracks which aren’t even mentioned in the paperwork.

But there’s something bugging me about the music used at the start of the very first episode, Demolition. Something deeply obscure, even for someone writing, say, a complete guide to every piece of music heard in The Young Ones. So rather than derailing that particular piece right at the beginning, let’s get all this nonsense out the way now.

Demolition, as I’m sure most people reading this will know, wasn’t just the first episode of The Young Ones. It was a pilot, in the true sense of the word – shot months before the rest of the series, in the hope of getting a commission. But the version which was finally broadcast in late 1982 isn’t the original edit of that pilot. A moment’s thought proves that it couldn’t be – the episode as we know it contains the regular title sequence for the series, which includes clips from episodes which simply hadn’t been made yet. I’ve been wondering what the original opening titles were for Demolition for nearly 20 years now.

Perhaps there is an echo of them left in the episode as transmitted, however. An echo that was staring me in the face for years, but I never even noticed until it was pointed out to me. The title card for the episode is highly unusual; nothing else like it appears anywhere else in the series. The gang, mildly awkwardly pasted into the windows of the original house:

Demolition title card

It looks like part of a title sequence, but it’s difficult to imagine this was created anew for the final broadcast version; it sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the episodes. Whether the entire pilot title sequence was just that shot with music over it as a placeholder, or something far more involved, is the kind of question which keeps me up at night.

We do have one other piece of information about that original pilot edit. A certain Peter Brewis used to have an unused version of the theme on his website, as originally used in the pilot. Sadly, his website has long since been deleted, but luckily someonee kept a copy and uploaded it to YouTube. And it’s fucking brilliant. (Visuals mocked up by the uploader, of course.)

I mean, who knows how it would have worked in the episodes as broadcast – it’s bloody long – but it’s lovely to hear for its own sake.

Which leads us – finally – to the oddity. Listen closely to the start of Demolition, as the strains of the broadcast title music start skipping, and then fade away:

[mejsaudio src=”https://dirtyfeed.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/s1e1-opening.wav” volume=”false”]

The Young Ones, Demolition Opening

Nine seconds into that clip, just before the DJ starts speaking, there’s a snatch of a different version of the title music. It doesn’t sound like the broadcast version. It doesn’t sound like Cliff’s original version. It doesn’t even sound like the pilot version, as heard in the video above.

So… presumably, there was yet another version of the song, used for the original opening titles of Demolition? And once the opening title music was changed for the series, the new version was just pasted over the top… leaving that tiny fraction of the original version from the first pilot edit, to confuse us all decades later. Why else would it be there?

Yes, I am keeping myself busy during lockdown, why do you ask?

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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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  1. Among a million and one other things ↩

  2. 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. ↩

  3. Among two million and one other things. ↩

  4. Daughters of the American Revolution. ↩

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Something Good About Come Back Mrs. Noah

Published 25th January 2019

TV Comedy

It has to be admitted that nice comments about Come Back Mrs. Noah – Lloyd and Croft’s 70s sitcom about a spacebound housewife – are rather thin on the ground. Having just watched the pilot episode on YouTube, I honestly don’t think it’s quite as bad as its reputation, although doing a racist joke about Notting Hill six minutes into the episode does push your goodwill rather. And the less said about the tea maker gag the better.

But enough about that. I want to highlight something interesting about that pilot, which is an effects technique I’ve never seen before. It takes place in Mission Control, where the ground crew are trying to sort out the fault with the spacecraft. And we get these two consecutive shots of the monitoring equipment they’re using to troubleshoot the fault:

First effects shot
Second effects shot

Clearly, there was only one source available for the yellow overlay oscilloscope effect, but they wanted to show it from two separate angles. The solution? They designed things so the same overlay effect would work for each shot, despite the two shots being entirely different!

You can see it in action here:

It may look a little odd to modern eyes, but it’s a really clever, thinking-outside-the-box solution. You can’t do two different effects? Then make sure your single effect works from two angles.

Brilliant.

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It Ain’t Half A Missing Pilot Title Sequence Mum

Published 21st January 2019

TV Comedy

Today, I want to talk about It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. Not the sad death of Windsor Davies, or whether the programme is racist1. This is Dirty Feed, and I have higher things in mind.

The show premiered in January 1974 on BBC1 with a first series of eight episodes.2 The first episode, however, was a true pilot, recorded a full year before air, and separately from the other seven episodes. David Croft’s autobiography, You Have Been Watching…, p. 196:

“The first pilot programme in January 1973 went very well with the studio audience and featured probably the smallest riot ever experienced by the British in India. There was no room in the studio for a proper full-scale riot mob, and we couldn’t afford one anyway. I made do with about ten shadowy figures in the foreground, but the result didn’t bear examination.3 I was present at the odd riot in India and they are extremely frightening affairs. Police and troops are usually heavily outnumbered and very scared, so ghastly mistakes can easily happen. The remainder of the show was a good pilot and served to introduce the characters and the general thrust of the plots, as any pilot should.”

Despite being shot at a different time to the rest of the series, there really are very few differences between that pilot episode Meet the Gang, and the rest of Series 1. But there is one major change: the closing titles. In the pilot, the gang song is all shot on VT in the studio. For the rest of Series 1, it was completely remounted on film.

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  1. That’s a 50,000 word article, which I am frankly disinclined to write. ↩

  2. Attention boring people: no, not six episodes, despite your claims that every UK sitcom series contains six shows. ↩

  3. Reading this, it is perhaps not surprising that when You Rang, M’Lord? allowed Croft to go to town on the battle sequence at the beginning, he really fucking did so. ↩

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Drop the Dead Donkey: The Unbroadcast Pilot

Published 31st October 2018

TV Comedy

Drop The Dead Donkey pilot - Alex, Damien, Dave and George

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with TV pilots.

TV pilots of all kinds. Shows which eventually made it to the screen virtually untouched as part of a series, like The Young Ones episode Demolition. Shows which made it to screen, but which were substantially or entirely reshot for the series proper, such as Citizen Smith. One-offs which aired, but never became a series – remember Mirrorball? And then there’s my favourite: pilots which were never broadcast, either because they were never intended to be in the first place, or because substantial changes happened between the pilot and the series… or because they were a complete fucking disaster in every single respect.

There are so many of these unbroadcast pilots I’d love to see. There’s the 1986 pilot Dungeon Doom… followed by a second, also unbroadcast pilot under the more familiar name Knightmare in 1987. Similarly, 1983 saw an unnamed pre-pilot, followed by a full pilot called UNTV… with a series appearing the year after, a certain Spitting Image. Then there’s Paul O’Grady’s version of The Generation Game, which by rights should have been the BBC’s big entertainment hit of 2003… and wouldn’t you just love to watch the two pilots they made to see exactly why that didn’t happen?

Occasionally, such pilots get to see the light of day on DVD, if they ended up as successful shows. Sherlock saw its unbroadcast 60 minute version of A Study in Pink released. The Day Today is one of the most obvious comedy examples, with the bare bones of the show there… but the visual panache of the series very much not. And then there’s Doctor Who, where the DVD set The Beginning contains the complete unedited pilot recording, and a brand new edit combining the best of all the raw session’s takes. Because, y’know, Doctor Who.

With comedy, it’s easy to wish so much more was released.1 Blackadder is the most obvious example here, with a pilot which had never been officially put out on DVD, presumably due to somebody not wishing it to be out there.2 Slightly further afield, I would do anything3 to see A Big Bunch of Hippies, the pilot for the underrated sitcom Hippies – and even if you didn’t like the show, its unbroadcast pilot was the last TV show scripted jointly by Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan, which is surely of interest to the discerning comedy fan.4

But occasionally, we get lucky. Hello Drop the Dead Donkey, Channel 4’s truly excellent 90s newsroom sitcom… which actually released its unbroadcast pilot on DVD in 2005. And watching it in the context of that first series from 1990 is rather instructive.

Let’s instruct ourselves, shall we?

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  1. Admittedly, comedy in general has it better than game shows, or entertainment shows in general. Duncan Norvelle’s pilot edition of Blind Date is the stuff of legend, and we’ve never seen so much as a field of it. UPDATE: Thanks to Ben Baker, who points out that parts of this pilot were seen in the documentary Who Killed Saturday Night TV? Now I’ve just got to pluck up the courage to watch it. ↩

  2. To be honest, it shuffles round the net so often like the proverbial video ghost that you’d think whoever it is might as well just throw up their hands, give in, and accept a few pennies out of it. ↩

  3. Not actually anything. ↩

  4. Yes, you there. Hello. ↩

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Frasier: The Good Son

Published 16th February 2017

TV Comedy

“Our biggest struggle after filming the pilot was cutting it down to time. We were something like six minutes long, which is a lot. We cut and cut and cut some more. We cut things we liked and we cut things we loved. Still, after 6 or 7 passes at the show we were still a minute long. We felt we had cut it to the bare bones. Any more cuts could damage the show so we went to Paramount with our dilemma. Thankfully, they agreed with us and asked NBC to give us some extra time. After viewing what we hoped would be our final cut, NBC agreed to give us that extra minute which was a very big favor. So, how do they come up with that extra minute of programming time for us? Don’t think that all they have to do is cut a commercial or two. Are you crazy? That’s money. No, to give us that extra minute, they asked the three other comedies and one drama on that Thursday night to each cut 15 seconds out of their programs. It’s not something that’s done very often and it’s not something the network likes to do, but for that pilot of Frasier they felt it was worth it.”

— How Frasier Came To Be (Part 3), Peter Casey, December 2006

Six minutes, cut out of one of the best sitcom pilots ever made? Oh, man, wouldn’t it be amazing to see what was cut? But I guess we’ll never find out, unless there happens to be a script of the pilot hanging around online anywhere…

…oh, hello. Marked “REVISED FINAL DRAFT”, and dated April 29th 1993. Let’s dig right in.

Material which is only in the script is indicated like this; material which is only in the episode as broadcast is indicated like this. I won’t detail every single difference in phrasing between the script and the final show, minor trims to dialogue, or every change in staging, but all major differences will be noted.1

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  1. If you want to see every little difference, I suggest you watch the final episode and read through the script at the same time. Note how Kelsey Grammer often slightly rewords his lines. ↩

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