Police I.Q. Shocker

In a surprising move, today we’re going to take another look at The Young Ones. But this little tale is a good example of how researching old TV shows can lead you down an alley you never really expected.

Let’s join Mark Arden and Stephen Frost as a couple of gormless policemen in “Boring” (TX: 23/11/82).

As the picture dissolves into the newspaper headline, anyone who has been following my recent nonsense knows what’s coming next. What newspaper did they use as a basis for the prop, and what original story did the “Police I.Q. Shocker” headline replace?

Unlike our previous examples, this one is pretty straightforward. There’s no replaced or altered mastheads here. Not only is the paper an actual copy of The Guardian, but the correct date of the edition is visible, clear as a bell: August 3rd 1982.

Which means finding the original front page of the paper is easy:

The only story the production team changed was the middle one; everything else on the page is identical. The replaced story concerned Philip Williams, a soldier who turned up alive after six weeks, having been presumed dead fighting in the Falklands. In fact, now we know this, the line “was missing, presumed dead” is clearly visible in the broadcast episode, underneath the new headline.

Let’s ponder this date a little more closely, though. This sequence contains both studio and OB material. Here is a list of the studio recordings for Series 1 of The Young Ones, in order of recording date rather than transmission:

Now, unlike many productions, the paperwork for Series 1 of The Young Ones doesn’t list the dates for the OB shoot; just the main studio recordings. But looking through the above, something strikes me which I’ve never noticed before.

Obviously, “Demolition” was shot months before the rest of the series, as a genuine pilot. Once the series was commissioned, they returned to shoot “Flood” on the 29th-30th July 1982… and then we have nearly a week’s mysterious gap before the recording of “Interesting” on the 11th-12th August.

And what falls square into this gap? The date of the newspaper: August 3rd 1982. It is very, very tempting to suggest that the prop was made around the time of the OB shoot, and that explains the date of the newspaper. Did the gang convene to shoot “Flood” in studio, then do a week’s location shooting in Bristol, and then come back to rehearse and record “Interesting”?

Yes, they did. Take a look at this picture from the Alamy archive, of a location sequence from “Oil”:

The date given on the metadata for that picture is… the 4th August 1982. And while I know enough to not always trust those kind of dates, everything fits together so neatly that I highly suspect it is actually correct. The policeman sequence would have almost certainly been shot extremely near to the date given on the newspaper. And it seems that all the location material for the series was shot after the main studio record for “Flood”, rather than before it. Which is not how series of this length are usually made; the location sequences are nearly always shot before the studio dates, so they can play them in for the studio audience.

Which gives us one last interesting thing to ponder. If all the location sequences were shot after “Flood” was recorded, it means that the studio audience for “Flood” didn’t see the two location scenes in the episode:

Meaning that the opening sequence from “Flood” with the Witchfinder was probably played in to an entirely different audience later on in the series, in order to record their reaction to the finished episode. And if you actually got to the bottom of this ludicrous piece, I presume you find that as interesting as I do.

Funny what comes to light from a prop newspaper, isn’t it?

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