Some videos in this article contain racist views and language.
Of all the things I expected to write on this site in 2025, “The unbroadcast Love Thy Neighbour pilot is really interesting” wasn’t top of the list.
Anyway, the unbroadcast Love Thy Neighbour pilot is really interesting. Completely reshot for the first episode of the series proper, the pilot starts with a lovely unbroken two-minute location shot of the Reynolds leaving their new house, and the Booths arriving at theirs:
The location of the house was about three and a half miles away from the much-missed Teddington Studios, where the interiors were recorded. Here’s how it looks now:
This house only appeared in the pilot, however. For the series proper, they decided to move the Booths and the Reynolds to a terrace, rather than a semi-detached. Gwendolyn Watts also left the cast as Joan, to be replaced by Kate Williams, who plays the part in a rather less glamorous fashion. The overall effect is to make the show distinctly more working class.
Also gone in the episode as broadcast is any attempt to recreate the opening shot seen in the video above. Instead, we get an exceedingly workmanlike title sequence, first aired on the 13th April 1972, featuring merely a couple of photos of the new house:
a) No expense spared, clearly.
b) That massive gas holder on the left is hilariously grim. And is also a reminder that 1972 is far, far closer to my childhood than today. Both the one here, and gas holders in the area where I grew up, have been long since demolished.
This new house was even closer to Teddington Studios; about a mile away:
I wonder if the current owners know that they’re living in a house made famous by one of the most popular sitcoms of the 70s1, or whether they’re blissfully unaware. I’m not about to knock on the door and check. I suggest you don’t either.
But here we run into something a little odd. Despite its close proximity to the studios, for the first couple of series of the show those photos were all you were going to get of the real house. Instead, Thames built a replica set of the front section, which again, we can see in the first episode:
OK, so I made fun of the low-effort title sequence, but I think the actual set is rather good. I’m a sucker for exteriors-as-interiors in sitcoms. Of course, the huge benefit of having the set in the studio rather than going on location is you can still play scenes with the studio audience present, and have the actors bounce off them. Some scenes done on this set are extremely dialogue heavy rather than mere transition sequences, and so this was a real benefit.
You can see this most clearly in the following scene, broadcast on the 11th May 1972:2
The amusing thing about the above is that the studio set suddenly gets far less accurate to the location when you step outside the lovingly-recreated gates. What the hell is that kerb on the right of the first shot? Nothing like that is present on the real street!
* * *
For the first two series of the show, that’s the only way the house was represented on-screen: either as a photograph, or a set. But come Series 3, things suddenly changed.
In the second episode of that series, broadcast on the 26th March 1973, we suddenly see the outside of the house shot on the actual location. In fact, this episode has extensive OB location sequences, of which the below is just a small part:
I really like how the show replaces the second photograph in the title sequence with a shot of the location, going into the action of the car arriving. That shows real thought in how the show is put together.3
But still, it’s all a bit of an oddity. It’s not unusual for exteriors to be shot as studio interiors at this time, of course. But it is slightly odd for a show to become famous while recording scenes on a recreation of a real location… and then a year in, once the show has become well-known, start using the actual location for the first time.
That does slightly weird things in my head.
One episode in 1974 got 21 million viewers. ↩
We know for a fact that the below scene was shot as part of the audience record, as there is no cue dot on the left-hand side in the previous scene. In Thames sitcoms of this vintage, a cue dot on the left always signifies that we’re about to watch a pre-recorded insert.
You can have fun with this when watching George and Mildred, as just before any scene featuring Nicholas Bond-Owen, the cue dot will appear. This is because any scene with him was recorded in the afternoon of the main recording, due to child labour laws. ↩
The interior set representing the outside of the house disappears entirely in Series 3. It’s tempting to take a guess at why this happened: the first two series were produced and directed by Stuart Allen; for the third series, Ronnie Baxter takes over. However, the exterior set reappears in Series 4, also directed by Baxter. And in one episode it’s more aggressively artificial than anything in the first two series. So who knows. ↩