As long-time readers of this site will know, I have a fascination with television pilots. Let’s be specific about what I mean, here: a true pilot isn’t just the first episode of a TV show. It’s something made separately from the rest of the series, as a first attempt at an idea. I find those first attempts endlessly interesting.
These pilots make their way to an audience in many different ways. Sometimes, as with Hi-de-Hi!, they are literally transmitted as a one-off show, well before the rest of the series.1 Others, like Yes Minister, are broadcast as part of the first series of the programme, sometimes with a few extra edits before transmission. There are ones which were transmitted purely by mistake, as per Absolutely Fabulous. And sometimes, like Drop the Dead Donkey, they were never transmitted at all, and instead became available on DVD years down the line.
And then there’s the truly interesting ones, where the pilot of a show has never been officially shown or released. One such example is Colin’s Sandwich, which I have a copy of here, but have shamefully never got around to writing about.2 Sometimes, we don’t even know if these pilots still exist or not. I talk about one of the Knightmare pilots here, but it’s never leaked in all the years that the show has had an ongoing and active fandom, which makes me suspicious.
Tracking these things down – or at least attempting to – is half the fun. But once, just once, I didn’t have to make any effort in order to see an obscure pilot down.
It was piped directly to me, unbidden.
* * *
It’s the 30th September 2013, and I’m sitting in Channel 5’s transmission suite in West London. In front of me are all the various things I am supposed to be monitoring.
Six of them are incoming feeds. Four of them switchable to wherever, used for things like Big Brother and the like. One of them is the Milkshake! studio, which used to be right next to the transmission suite, but is now at the Northern & Shell building; Channel 5 is currently part of Richard Desmond’s media empire. And the other one is a permanent line from ITN, used for news programmes throughout the day.
Not right now though. We’ve just broadcast the lunchtime news; the first teatime programme is at 5pm. And in-between, not going to air, just for internal eyes only? There is a weird echo of my childhood.
An echo of this:
I think of Police 5 as a Central programme from the 80s and early 90s, but in researching this piece, I found out it started on ATV way back in 1962. Truth be told, while I feel I should tell you all about avuncular Shaw Taylor informing me of awful crimes, it’s the music which really stuck in my head.3
Back to that incoming line from ITN. On it, there is Dominic Littlewood, clearly in a studio, in front of a rudimentary videowall featuring security cameras and the like. Occasionally, it would cut to the programme’s logo: yes, Police 5, with the 5 in the shape of Channel 5’s logo, albeit in blue rather than red.
This was the very first time I’d ever even heard of Channel 5 reviving Police 5. What a bizarre way to find out: not from reading Broadcast, but by seeing the recording of the pilot directly down the line from ITN.4
A shade over four months later, on the 11th February 2014, Police 5 made it to the air, looking rather different from that pilot:
A slightly less rudimentary videowall, and no Dominic Littlewood. But it did, pleasingly, feature Shaw Taylor.
OK, so it’s not quite as exciting as having the line suddenly spring into life and show me the entire unbroadcast Hippies pilot, but you can’t have everything, can you?
The pilot of Hi-de-Hi aired on New Years Day 1980; it was then repeated on the 19th February 1981, just before the new series of six more episodes. ↩
Friend of the site Billy Smart has written a little about the Colin’s Sandwich pilot here. ↩
Originally, this piece made the smart-aleck comment “Somebody should do a proper three minute version.” So thanks to Simon McLean for pointing out that this literally exists. And the full version is amazing. ↩
Incidentally, the magazine which used to hang around Channel 5 TX was my copy of Private Eye, where I would read about the latest Richard Desmond shenanigans while sitting the control room of the channel he owned. I thoroughly enjoyed doing this. ↩