I really do love this set of episode reviews for Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, by Steve Phillips. In a world where so much of the conversation around the show degenerates into variations of “It’s very funny” / “No it’s not”, it’s nice to have someone tackle each episode on its own merits, instead of throwing around generalities. And I very much include myself when it comes to the latter.
For instance, take Steve’s critique of the famous roller-skating sequence in “Father’s Clinic”, broadcast on 20th December 1973.
“The roller-skate ride is arguably Some Mother’s Do ‘Ave ‘Em‘s best-remembered set piece, but suffers from a clumsy change from film to videotape near the end as Frank crashes through the shop (how exactly do you roller-skate up stairs anyway?) The sequence is also slightly marred by jumpy cuts and sudden changes of location.”
As with most British sitcoms in 1973, Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em used videotape for its interiors, mostly shot in a studio in front of an audience, and 16mm film for its exteriors, played into the studio during the main recording in order to get the studio audience’s reaction. Personally, I don’t find the change from film to videotape as Frank enters the shop clumsy. In fact, I rather like it – it’s like Frank is crashing back into “reality” at the end of the sequence.1
But hey, judge for yourself:
There is, however, one instance of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em cutting between film and video which I really do find horrendously awkward. The opening of “Jessica’s First Christmas”, broadcast on the 25th December 1974, is mainly VT material shot at Television Centre… but with inserts of baby Jessica, clearly shot on film:
If you read this scene in a particular way, as the film shots of Jessica are right next to the film panning across all the houses, it unintentionally looks like Jessica has been bunged outside in the dark by an uncaring Frank and Betty. Bastards.
So what’s going on here? For the answer, let’s turn to TV’s Greatest Hits, broadcast on BBC One on the 6th August 1999. Billed as “Gaby Roslin delves into the annals of television history”, this particular episode included an interview with Emma Ware – daughter of camera operator Peter Ware – who played baby Jessica in “Jessica’s First Christmas”:
GABY ROSLIN: What was he [Crawford] like to work with?
EMMA WARE: I’ve never met him. It was all filmed at my parents house. My dad was the senior cameraman on the show, and they just needed a baby, and I was there. That was it.
GABY ROSLIN: But you were never actually in the studio with them?
EMMA WARE: Never. It was all shot at home in my parent’s front room.
While it would have been technically possible to record shots of Jessica in the studio on the afternoon of the main recording, it was far easier all round just to shove a film camera in front of a child at home, and play the film inserts in during the studio session. Partly to save precious studio time while trying to get the reactions from Emma that the production wanted… but also, there was surely the thought that you were far more likely to get better reactions from her in a comfortable, familiar environment.2
Which is lovely, but provides an extremely odd look on-screen. And it isn’t just the opening scene which suffers. Later on in the episode, we get this:
I have no contemporary evidence that these scenes were deemed especially unsuccessful at the time, and perhaps we’re more sensitive to things like this now than many were in 1974.3 But one thing is clear: when producer Michael Mills left and Sydney Lotterby came on board for Series 3, and Jessica became an even bigger part of the scripts, Lotterby decided to have a rethink.
* * *
Series 3 of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em continued much in the same way as previous series: most of the interiors are studio VT, while the exteriors are all film. Indeed the first episode, “Moving House”, broadcast on the 11th November 1978, contains one of the very best film sequences from the entire run of the show.
Watch as Frank and Betty leave their condemned house, and consider how unlikely it is that any British sitcom would be able to attempt something like this now:
But now let’s look at the following sequence the same episode, this time featuring Jessica:
The first section, as with most interiors in the show, is studio VT. But once we cut to Jessica, the picture quality subtly changes. It’s still video, but the material no longer quite has the crisp, clean look of studio VT from the era. We then cut back to normal studio VT at the end of the video, when Betty appears.
What’s going on this time?
Maybe our new Jessica Spencer can help. Because for Series 3, Jessica was no longer played by Emma Ware; instead, Jessica Forte steps into the role. (Well, crawls.) Forte hasn’t really given any interviews on her role in the series, but she did appear on a “Child Stars” episode of Pointless on the 6th February 2021, where she gave her memories of the production:
JESSICA FORTE: I remember absolutely nothing of it.
Oh well. Jessica Forte ended up working in movies for a while; amongst other productions, she was an assistant production coordinator on Hot Fuzz. But for at least a partial answer to our question, we’re going to have to delve into Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em‘s production paperwork.
The first studio recording day for Series 3 was for the first episode broadcast, “Moving House”, and took place on the 8th October 1978. But also listed in the paperwork is the following:
ON O.B.
MICHAEL CRAWFORD
JESSICA FORTE
And:
OB Recording 4.10.78
4th October 1978. Four days before the main studio record. And on that day, they recorded the Frank and Jessica scenes for a total of four episodes: “Moving House”, “Wendy House”, “Scottish Dancing”, and “Australia House”.4
At this point, it’s worth clarifying exactly what we mean by the term OB, or outside broadcast. Let’s turn to this in-depth article, by Douglas McNaughton:
“OB was devised as a means by which electronic cameras could be taken on location and produce either live broadcasts or video recordings. Live relays from theatres had been a staple of television broadcasting from 1938. Both BBC and ITV experimented with using OB to produce drama on location from the early 1960s. For example, Philip Saville’s pioneering Hamlet at Elsinore (BBC 1964) used six OB cameras on location in a real castle in Denmark. Experimental Lightweight Mobile Control Room (LMCR) OB units were constructed at the BBC in the early 1970s, and by 1977, a two-camera unit was available with two Bosch Fernseh KCR 40s with Canon 10-1 zoom lenses, recording onto 2-inch videotape.”
In other words, while most location material for Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em was recorded onto film, OB material was recorded onto videotape, matching the look of the studio sequences much more closely. McNaughton states that “OB was a cost-effective alternative to the more expensive 16mm filming process”, which is entirely true. But Some Mothers isn’t using OB video for cost reasons. It’s using it for practical ones… and perhaps more importantly, aesthetic ones.
Sadly, as far as I’m aware, Lotterby has never gone on record as to exactly what his thinking was for shooting the Jessica sequences for Series 3 using OB. But I believe we can work it out relatively easily. Clearly, Series 3 has far more material featuring Jessica than before; four fairly long scenes across the series. These scenes were almost certainly shot at Forte’s real home, just as with Emma Ware.
The production therefore had four options when it came to completing these scenes:
- Shoot them exactly as “Jessica’s First Christmas”, and have Crawford on studio VT, and Forte shot on location film. Not only would this produce a dog’s breakfast visually, but it would stop Crawford interacting with Forte for real, which is one of the lovely things about the scenes as broadcast.5
- Shoot them entirely on film, on location. This would work, but the scenes would feel rather odd, with a single room in the Spencer household being film rather than VT.
- Shoot them entirely in the studio. But here, studio time would have been more of an issue than it it would have been on “Jessica’s First Christmas”; you’d either be trying to shoot four full scenes for the whole of Series 3 in one day, or you’d be dragging Forte into the studio for four different weeks. And as before, you’re more likely to get better reactions from Forte in her own home.
- Shoot them on location, but as OB material. This frees up studio time, allows Forte to be in a familiar environment, while still visually matching the scene far more closely with the rest of the studio VT material. And you can shoot all the material in one day.
We can’t be sure that Lotterby saw “Jessica’s First Christmas”, and reacted to an aesthetic disaster. But we can be sure that he looked at a difficult production problem, and chose an unusual and successful solution to it. One that introduced an entirely new way of working for Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, but was deemed worth it in order to capture a central part of the programme successfully.
This can be seen most obviously in the very final episode of the show, “Learning to Fly”, broadcast on 25th December 1978. Here, Lotterby stages a scene between Frank, Jessica, her “boyfriend” Alexander, and his mother Linda, which would have been difficult to shoot competently in any other way.6
And if you didn’t notice the difference between these scenes and the others in the Spencer household until I mentioned it? Well, that was the point.
With thanks to Simon Guerrier and Oliver Wake for research about OB material, Milly Storrington for production research, and Paul Hayes, Tanya Jones, and Richard Latto for checking I haven’t said anything overtly cretinous.
Let’s try to ignore the fact that Crawford hit his head for real very hard indeed while shooting that scene in the studio. It makes it a little more difficult to watch once you know. ↩
Using film may well also have made choosing particular reactions from Emma easier; film was still far easier to edit than video in 1973. ↩
Though I’m always a little dubious about assertions like this. I’ve read some very intelligent things about television in audience research reports from decades ago, and I’ve read some very stupid things said about television last week. ↩
None of the episode titles for Some Mothers are official; they don’t appear on-screen, or in the production paperwork, but were given to the programme after-the-fact. It’s weird – but possibly deliberate? – that three out of the six of these “given” titles for Series 3 include the word “house”. ↩
Incidentally, did they cast a real-life Jessica in order to try and get the right reaction from her, when Crawford says her name? I have no proof – maybe it’s just coincidence – but it seems at least possible. ↩
This scene was shot separately from the other OB material in Series 3; on the 28th November 1978. ↩
18 comments
Alasdair Swanson on 8 May 2025 @ 10am
I have read somewhere (can’t track it down right now) that yes, Michael Crawford, who was far more involved in the writing etc for series 3, insisted that they have a baby actually called Jessica for exactly that reason. If I can find it I’ll pop it here.
Mike on 8 May 2025 @ 10am
Excellent article, thanks!
It still amazes me that people couldn’t see the difference between VT and film back in the day. Even my A level Media Studies teacher couldn’t, leading to a difficult exchange back in the early 90s for me in class!
What I find most jarring bout the roller skates sequence is the awful ADR. It totally takes me out of the scene.
Anyhoo, loving your work sir. Keep it up (as ‘twere).
Brad Jones on 8 May 2025 @ 11am
My mother still can’t see the difference between VT and film.
I’ve shown her the “Good Lord! We’re on film!” sketch from Monty Python.
Not a glimmer.
David Brunt on 8 May 2025 @ 11am
The costume design schedule paperwork notes the final pre-filming day on the 28 November – on film. The same week as a two-day studio remount of a previous episode [it doesn’t note which one], a week before the xmas episode was recorded.
The main filming days were 20 October to 3 November.
It’s possible that it was listed as film rather than OB in error, but it’s curious if it was for that scene.
James on 8 May 2025 @ 12pm
I always noticed the difference, even as a kid, even though I didn’t understand the technicalities. I remember assuming it was because the cameras didn’t work as well outdoors! Some of that location work looks awful (though the modern rescans of surviving film material that’s been some shows is a massive improvement- still a jarring difference between studio and location though). The final specials of Miranda tried to capture that aesthetic as well, with 50i studio work and 25p location work, which was bizarre.
Suprised how long the BBC persisted with film on location on sitcoms as well, there’s plenty of VT location work in ITV sitcoms in the 70s and 80s, but very little on the BBC. And even some BBC examples continuing into the 90s (One Foot In The Grave, Bread, the first 3 series of May to November, Brush Strokes, the first series of As Time Goes By etc. as well as some seemingly random ones on Ab Fab) The amount of pre-1990 BBC sitcom location VT I’ve seen I can probably count on one hand- The Young Ones, Red Dwarf, Series 2 (or 4 depending on if you count the two sketch show series) of The Lenny Henry Show, the 1989 Ever Decreasing Circles Christmas special, the first episode of Just Good Friends a couple of Only Fools and Horses examples (which otherwise was on film even in the 00s) are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head.
John J. Hoare on 8 May 2025 @ 12pm
Alasdair: please do, that would be great!
Mike: On a similar note, I have known broadcast engineers – extremely good ones who know far more than me about broadcast – who just CAN’T see aspect ratio problems. I think your mind either works a certain way, or it doesn’t.
Adam Tandy on 8 May 2025 @ 12pm
Great article, and a salutary warning to anyone tempted to write young children into scripts.
Child licensing for the under 5s was extremely limited in the 1970s. Half a day on location, finish by 4pm, lots of breaks between any time on camera, etc. And always on diminishing returns, because children of that age get tired very quickly.
You’re right about them using the LMCR I think. The mount used to get the final Z/I TO MUSIC BOX is quite lightweight and shaky, and the development takes longer than you’d like, but the artist clearly wasn’t playing ball by the time they shot that sequence, Syd was probably running out of time (because child performance hours), and he may have had to improvise that closing frame as he couldn’t DEV TO SLEEPING JESSICA. Poor Jessica is only seen on the WS, complaining to her mother OOV CR, and some short inserts of her asleep. Crawford is clearly acting his heart out on his own for the majority of the scene, and they haven’t even dubbed any of Jessica’s ad libs over it to make the sound feel of a piece. But it works, and the only tell is the massive generational loss in the 2″ because the VPR rushes have been edited onto the insert roll, (or pre-edited and then transferred, but you’d try and avoid that), then played into the studio on the night, and then edited to make the /71. So it’s at least 2nd or 3rd generation 2″ – no wonder it looks soft.
The limitations of analogue VT when shooting, editing and playing-in was a large factor in why film was still being used by some producers until digital editing came in (1993). But you can’t fault the rationale here. Two children on set at once immediately suggests a multi-camera set-up would be safer.
Perhaps controversially, I think the music box scene is actually shot on a very quick redress of the other set under time pressure. The backing is very patchy and the wallpaper behind Jessica is the same as the one CR on the Alexander scene. And that set looks like a simple set-build on location. The camera is too far back, the lighting too even, and there’s a little bit of skirting board missing on the door return, and the drape CL is a match for the one in the bedroom.
If I was cynical, I’d guess the set “location” was Kendall Avenue where BBC London OBs were based. Not TFS or TVC because unions.
John J. Hoare on 8 May 2025 @ 12pm
David: I think I can shed light about the remount, at least. The PasC for 3.5, “King of the Road”, gives a studio date of the 3rd December 1978. It also states that the original date – “cancelled, not recorded” – was the 16th November 1978. Whether the original date was cancelled due to cast illness or the effects of a strike, I don’t know.
It is perhaps possible that they also shot film material on the 28th November? The OB sequence *is* chunky – 4’08” – but maybe that wouldn’t have taken all day?
Leigh Graham on 8 May 2025 @ 12pm
Alasdair Swanson is not hallucinating. I know I read / heard from someone involved that the child ‘had’ to be called Jessica so she would react to her name.
It is noticeable in the lullaby clip that when ‘Frank’ sings and leans into the cot, we never get another shot including both him and Jessica. She really looked like she wanted to go to mummy!
John J. Hoare on 8 May 2025 @ 1pm
Adam: Thanks so much for all that. Plenty of food for thought! I did try and do a bit of research into the rules around, erm, shooting children in the 70s, but the distance made it a bit tricky.
I hadn’t realised the generational loss on OB material would be so large, but what you say makes total sense. And you’re right – while Jessica’s clearly not playing ball at all at that moment, Crawford does such a brilliant job that it doesn’t feel like it matters.
With regards to where it was recorded, perhaps the obvious thing to do would for me to try and contact Forte herself – she may well not remember much about the series, but she might know that, at least.
Steve Williams on 8 May 2025 @ 1pm
I think people might already know this, but Jessica Forte’s dad was Michael Forte, who went on to become a kids TV producer for many years, at the Beeb and other channels. I can imagine an item in Ariel asking if anyone at the Beeb had a young child called Jessica.
One thing I’ve pondered for a while is what the last TV show was that used film for exteriors as a matter of course, because that was how you did it, rather than stylistic reasons which feels like it may have been the case with the sitcom examples. I had a look at an episode from the last series of kids’ science show Knowhow and was suprised to see it pretty much entirely shot on film, including all the links from the production office, and that was in 1990, which must be one of the very last uses of it for non-stylistic reasons. I seem to recall the kids doc series Ipso Facto persisting with all-film into the nineties as well.
One of the odd things about Some Mothers I think is that the To Be Perfectly Frank doc was broadcast in April 1977 – nearly eighteen months after the last episode, over three years after the last series and about eighteen months before the next series. Seems a bit strange to have a behind the scenes special on a series that wasn’t currently in production, but presumably it was always planned if they recorded some behind the scenes footage. But in that case, why sit on it for so long?
Gareth Randall on 8 May 2025 @ 2pm
I’d love to know more about how the first bus shot in the skating scene was done. As the pan starts you can just see someone – I’m guessing a police officer – standing in the road presumably to stop traffic, but did the BBC really pay for those two other buses and the extras to be in the scene?
The fact that Frank’s bus has to pull around the parked one exactly as another bus (which would have been a risk to hit Crawford if anything had gone wrong) is passing in the opposite direction, *and* the timing is perfect… was that really all planned and rehearsed, or did they just have the one bus and the copper to stop traffic following it, and go for it?
As for the Jessica scenes, I’m assuming that Lotterby’s decision to use OB VT was also informed by the fact that film sequences didn’t just *look* different to VT, if there was dialogue recorded as well they *sounded* different too.
James on 8 May 2025 @ 2pm
I never really thought about the multi-gen thing when it came to VT location work, but it would explain why video location work in pre-1990s shows usually looks softer and noiser than the studio work, not just because of different cameras and lighting. Whereas I guess filmed work was telecine’d straight from the negatives (not that they often looked great, even then!).
Adam Tandy on 8 May 2025 @ 2pm
Steve: It was definitely a personal preference. Even 16:9 didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of some producers since they had Super 16mm (future-proofing they claimed, although delivery and post requirements always meant there was little going back from terrible 14:9 shoot and protect versions of things before 16:9 TX started in 1997. Sometimes, mind, we did it for purely aesthetic reasons (like when I took out a Super 16mm camera for film pastiches on KYTV in 1993)
One of the last stalwarts of film inserts for audience sitcom was Susie Belbin: OFITG had film inserts well into the 90s. Some shows moved entirely to film, after being mixed media for most of its life (LOTSW), but then Alan J W Bell had come from film editing originally.
David Brunt on 8 May 2025 @ 2pm
Thanks for the remount details John.
There were only two episodes left they could have filmed more material for. One’s this remount, in studio two days later. And the xmas episode the following week, which certainly had the extensive plane sequence filmed in the main batch (there’s several photos from that filming).
I suspect it is that OB sequence, just mis-attributed as film.
Brad Jones on 8 May 2025 @ 4pm
For me, one of the most jarring film sequences in sitcoms is when the interior of the Trotters flat is seen in To Hull And Back (Only Fools and Horses, obviously). Not only is the familiar now on film, but we also see the fourth wall, and no laughter track. It all looks rather “off”. The entire production was made on film, so it’s obvious this had to be too.
James on 8 May 2025 @ 6pm
One Foot In The Grave still had film inserts right until the end in 2000! In fact I can only think of two videotaped location scenes during the whole run- Victor and Duffy from Casualty in the video rental shop in the 1990 Christmas special, and Victor and Margaret visiting Mrs Warboys in hospital in The Affair Of The Hollow Lady. There’s also a scene in The Wisdom Of The Witch that I’m not 100% sure is studio or location.
Last Of The Summer Wine did have a series that was entirely on video (series 13 in 1991), which threw me the first time I saw it as I’d previously assumed it went straight from video/film (in front of an audience) to all film (shown to an audience after filming). Of course the show already had three all-film (laugh-track free) feature length specials back in the 80s. The show was so heavily location based and became even more so over time that you can understand the reason behind moving away from an audience, it likely meant they could film studio scenes for multiple episodes at a time, rather than have multiple studio sessions which would just have had the audience watching most of it on a monitor anyway. I do wonder if they would have stuck with all video though if there’d been a couple more studio audience series shot that way.
You can see the trotter’s flat and Nag’s head set on film on the second part of Miami Twice as well, but theres no fourth wall in that episode- both sets still feel entirely different just for being on film though. You can see the fourth wall in Time On Our Hands though, during the dinner scene with Raquel’s parents (where Albert mixes up the gravy and coffee)- I wonder if that scene was shot separately from the rest of the episode?
There are a few video scenes in OFAH- the graveyard scene in As One Door Closes (which I read was due to them using up the budget because of the reshoots and remounting after Lennard Pearce’s death), a brief shot of Rodney looking out the window to see the police looking at the van in Dates (possibly so it mixed better with the studio footage surrounding it?), a scene outside of the creepy B&B in The Jolly Boys Outing (though there’s another scene on film in the same location later in the episode), and in The Sky’s The Limit, a single long shot of Del & Rodney walking out onto the balcony (the rest of the scene is in studio) and Rodney at Gatwick Airport.
Another late example of film on location I can think of is Waiting For God, which stands out even more, because the last scene of most episodes was on location, but unlike location scenes earlier in the episode, video, which seems a very unusual decision. The producer/director of that was Gareth Gwenlan, who was also producer of OFAH after 1988, which likely shows the use of film to be a personal preference, though the other sitcom he produced and directed at the same time, On The Up, was entirely on video.
Rob Keeley on 8 May 2025 @ 7pm
I remember my mother being dismissive of the show. “All those scenes with baby Jessica, and she’s looking the other way.”
I also remember noticing as a kid that the house that falls down isn’t the same one they had in series one and two – the layout of the rooms is different, with an extra door at the back of the main room. They must have had another house between series two and three.