The Stories on the Lips of the Nation

One problem I’ve always had with Dirty Feed is my desire to move onto the next big thing.

That may sound a tad ridiculous, when the next big thing appears to be Fawlty Towers. Or, indeed, Love Thy Neighbour. What I mean is: I’m always pushing on to write about the next thing which captures my interest, and I’m incredibly bad at updating old articles to reflect new information gleaned from various sources. (Unless somebody corrects an absolutely outrageous error.)

So let’s take a moment to revisit this piece I wrote in 2018, about the unbroadcast pilot of Drop the Dead Donkey. It’s an article I remember very fondly, because it felt like a real step towards writing about things in the way I do now. Dirty Feed launched in 2010, but it took me years to figure out what I really wanted this place to be like. That article is as good a waypoint as any.

But there was one big mystery still remaining about that unbroadcast pilot, expressed in the comments of the original piece, from Iain Hepburn:

“One question (one I suspect you won’t be able to answer but I’ll try anyway) that’s always bugged me: just how untransmitted the pilot was.

I know the full thing wasn’t available until the DVD release, and admittedly I was 12 when the first episode aired, but I could swear I’d seen the Ridley joke and the crop circles joke before the first episode. I’m not sure if it was a trailer or some preview clip on something, but I’ve a very strong (and probably erroneous) feeling that at least one clip of the pilot was shown before the actual first episode, and it was a standout joke at that.”

My reply was:

“It wouldn’t surprise me at all if clips from the pilot were used to represent the series in some kind of early publicity for the show. As the show was recorded the day before transmission, if they wanted to trail the series in any way, unless it was some kind of specially shot trail, they’d *have* to use clips from the pilot. And surely they trailed the series, didn’t they?

So if anybody reading this has any Channel 4 continuity from around August 1990, now is the time to look…”

And there that little question sat for seven years. Until Will Tudor pointed me towards, erm, some Channel 4 continuity from around August 1990. Specifically, from the 9th August 1990, the day the first (proper) episode of Drop the Dead Donkey was broadcast.¹

From 4:14 in:

And so now we can see that Iain was entirely correct – the promo did indeed contain both the Ridley joke and the crop circles joke, both using from footage taken from the otherwise-unbroadcast pilot! I always go on about people’s faulty memories with this kind of thing – including my own – so it’s nice to see one which was absolutely bang on.

Of course, the reason for using clips from the pilot is obvious: the episode itself would only have been recorded on the 8th August 1990, the day before the above promo aired. And not only is that not really enough time to include clips in a carefully-planned promo broadcast the next day, but we can also assume that versions of this promo were broadcast in the week leading up to transmission. These clips probably aired before the “real” first episode of the series was even recorded.

So now we now for sure: clips from the pilot of Drop the Dead Donkey really were broadcast on Channel 4 all those years ago. Brilliant. One article updated, only 658 to go.

1. Incidentally, it’s well worth browsing all the videos uploaded by ‘Sticky tape ‘n’ rust’, the brilliant YouTube channel responsible for this. ↩

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