Did Colin Baker ever appear in The Young Ones? And if he did, why the hell can’t I remember ever seeing him, when I’ve endlessly watched those 12 episodes for years?
Certainly, Wikipedia claims that he was in the show:
“Baker returned to television, notably guest-starring as the villainous Bayban the Butcher in the 1980 Blake’s 7 episode “City at the Edge of the World”. He also had a regular role as James West in the ATV soap opera For Maddie with Love (1980). Other programmes in which Baker guest-starred include Dangerous Davies (1981), The Young Ones (1982), Juliet Bravo (1982), The Citadel (1983) and Swallows and Amazons Forever (1984).”
Wikipedia gives us a reference for this information: Issue 40 of Doctor Who: The Complete History, published in 2016. Sure enough:
“TV acting roles soon picked up; as Bayban the Butcher in Blake’s 7 episode City at the Edge of the World (1980), Baker upstaged star Paul Darrow, a move later repaid in Timelash (1985). There was a regular role as James West in ATV’s afternoon soap For Maddie with Love (1980), and guest parts in Dangerous Davies (1981), The Young Ones (1982), Juliet Bravo (1982), The Citadel (1983) and Swallows and Amazons Forever (1984).”
Well, I guess Wikipedia made a vague stab at rewriting.
Let’s just turn to the place which should know the answer to this. Colin Baker’s official site also claims he was in the show, and even gives us a character name:
THE YOUNG ONES (Evil Count Dust Bag) 19821
What’s going on? Well, first things first: it is correct to say that Colin Baker never appeared in an episode of The Young Ones. But it is even more correct to say that Colin Baker never appeared in an episode of The Young Ones… as broadcast.
The DVD commentary for Episode 5 of The Trial of a Time Lord2 has the answer. When Christopher Ryan first appears as Kiv, writer Philip Martin and Colin Baker share the following exchange:
PHILIP MARTIN: Of course, he’d been part of The Young Ones, hadn’t he?
COLIN BAKER: Yes. I did an episode of The Young Ones with him… and I got cut out of it. So I was never seen. I was in a cutaway. I was the Evil Count Dustbug, who was in the groove of a record that Chris Ryan put on the turntable. And I tied a girl down in the groove, and the needle was coming down the track to her. And I was twirling my moustaches. They obviously decided that wasn’t as funny as they thought it was.
PHILIP MARTIN: Sounds pretty inventive to me.
This is, I believe, the most which has ever been revealed publicly about Colin Baker’s involvement in the show. We don’t even know what episode he was supposed to be in, beyond the 1982 date indicating it was the first series.
I think we can do better than that.
* * *
So first off: I don’t know of any surviving footage of Colin’s deleted scene. Maybe it exists in Paul Jackson’s house somewhere on a grotty VHS. But barring some miracle discovery, it doesn’t exist at the BBC. I do, however, have the next best thing: the camera script for the episode in question.
That episode was “Boring”, first broadcast on BBC2 on the 23rd November 1982, and recorded three months previously in TC3 at Television Centre. The Young Ones had two days in the studio: one pre-record day, and then one day with a live audience in the evening. All of Colin’s material was shot on the pre-record day: the 18th August 1982. In fact, if the planned recording schedule was kept to, Colin’s section was the very first thing recorded that day, at roughly 2:30pm.3
The scene was meant to appear near the beginning of the episode; here it is in full, as it appears in the camera script.4
SCENE 7 – RICK’S ROOM
IN FULL PYJAMAS.
RICK WITH RECORD IN HAND.RICK: I think things have come to a pretty pass when the only things in the whole world which aren’t boring are Cliff Richard records. I don’t know what I’d do without Cliff Richard – but I suppose everyone feels that way.5
SCENE 7A – PUPPET AREA
(PUTS RECORD ON – WE ZOOM INTO IT – TWO DUST BUGS ARE IN THE GROOVE OF THE RECORD – ONE AN EVIL COUNT, THE OTHER A PRETTY YOUNG MAIDEN)
MAIDEN: No, I say no! A thousand times no! You evil old dustbug. You shall not lay one hand upon my grey and fluffy young body – I am sworn to another.
COUNT: Not that penniless bit of matted hair and dust that lives in the crack on “Living Doll”?
MAIDEN: The same.
COUNT: Well me fine young beauty of a virgin dustbug, if I can’t have you – none shall. (GRABS HER – SHE SCREAMS AND WE HEAR “SUMMER HOLIDAY” IN B/G) If I’m not mistaken that’s the 11.15 needle now – right on time – so either you let me do unspeakable things to your pure grey fluffiness, or I’ll stick you to the track with this huge lump of grease.
MAIDEN: Do your worst! (HE STICKS HER DOWN – AND MAKES OFF. SHE SCREAMS. THE MUSIC GETS LOUDER – WE SEE THE NEEDLE GETTING CLOSER AND CLOSER – TENSION…..)SCENE 7B – RICK’S ROOM
CUT TO RICK BY RECORD PLAYER
RICK: Well I suppose I’d better face the day (HE MOVES TO PICK UP NEEDLE)
SCENE 7C – PUPPET AREA
CUT TO RECORD – NEEDLE JUST MISSES MAIDEN AS RICK PICKS NEEDLE UP
MAIDEN: Phew.
SCENE 7D – RICK’S ROOM
RICK: Boring.
Phew indeed.
A few thoughts, then. Firstly, Colin misspoke when he said in the DVD commentary that it was Christopher Ryan as Mike who was using the record player; it’s actually Rick, which makes far more sense. His description of the scene is otherwise perfectly accurate.
The script is also consistent in calling Colin’s character Dustbug, rather than Dustbag. In the scene, it’s clear that Colin is playing a literal dust bug, or dust mite, but this is surely also a pun on the record cleaning arm popular at the time, which went under the brand name “Dust Bug”. This is a reference which has become rather obscure over the years.
One question which immediately occurs is: who played the pretty young maiden? For obvious reasons, my brain immediately transplants Nicola Bryant into the role. In fact, the cast list at the front of the script reveals she was played by Pippa Guard, known for programmes like the BBC’s serialisation of The Mill on the Floss (1978), and three roles in the Beeb’s 70s/80s Shakespeare adaptations. Here’s how both Colin and Pippa looked in 1982:
Colin Baker, Juliet Bravo
Pippa Guard,
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman6
And yet, at least for me, the scene remains incredibly difficult to imagine visually. With many deleted scenes in TV shows which only exist in script form, we usually have a rough idea of how things would have looked: you can already see the characters in the finished show, and often the set was used elsewhere. Here, we have a tricky predicament indeed: two entirely cut characters, on a set which never appeared in the final show either. Worse still, both the characters and sets are odd – a huge record needle, coming towards a young, beautiful bug. How can we even begin to imagine how this actually looked?
If we’re lucky, perhaps one day a picture taken on-set will magically appear and give us some real answers. But I suspect there is a moment elsewhere in The Young Ones which may give us an idea of how this scene worked. How about the fly-on-the-wall film crew from “Bomb”, broadcast just one week later?
The temptation with the dust bug scene, when you read that it was shot in the “Puppet Area”, is to imagine it as a sequence created purely with puppets, such as the rats in “Demolition”, and with Colin and Pippa as merely voices. But the camera script for “Bomb” reveals that the above scene – clearly shot with Christopher Ryan, Nigel Planer, and Rik Mayall in full-size fly costumes7 – was also recorded in the part of the studio deemed the “Puppet Area”.
I would suggest that it’s highly likely that the dust bugs scene was recorded in the same way as the fly scene – with the actors in full-size costumes, possibly augmented by puppeteered legs. The action feels a little too tricky to get across with just puppets. And of course, the dancing carrot and chip sequence elsewhere in “Boring” also points towards this solution.
* * *
Which leaves us with one final question: why was the scene cut? Colin Baker is joking in the DVD commentary when he says “they obviously decided that wasn’t as funny as they thought it was”, but it is of course possible that the sequence just didn’t turn out as well as the production had hoped. Action sequences shot at speed in a multicamera studio are not the easiest things to pull off at the best of times.
There’s another obvious possibility, of course: episode duration. “Boring” is already one of the longest episodes of Series 1, clocking in at 35’07”.8 There simply isn’t room for this sequence in the show. But that’s really a cheat of an answer: why cut this, and not something else instead?
I think we can take a good stab at why. First of all, let’s remind ourselves of how the transmitted version of “Boring” actually starts:
The camera script, however, goes as follows:
- Originally, the episode was supposed to start with a cold open – no opening titles. Instead, we have the scene featuring the hermit, Kitchener9, rats and mice playing poker10, and the skating carrot and chip.
- In this scene there’s also a cut gag with a floating carpet, which I’ve discussed elsewhere.
- On Neil’s “Morning has broken” gag, we were then supposed to cut to the opening titles.
- After the titles, there’s an entirely deleted scene in Rick’s bedroom, where he sets up the motif of the episode. “Boring boring boring, why is everything so bloody boring? I hate everything in the world except me.”
- This is followed by another cut scene in Mike’s bedroom featuring Mike talking to his “plastic woman”. This ends with the immortal stage direction: HE SIGHS AND PULLS THE STOPPER OUT OF HER BUM – SHE DEFLATES.
- We then cut to Vyvyan’s bedroom, where he is hanging on the wall, chained up by the arms. “I would have thought that spending the whole night chained up by the arms as an experiment to see what it’s like spending the whole night chained up by the arms might be quite interesting – but it’s not.”
- There’s then another OB shot of Neil, climbing back into the house from his ledge. “Oh well – the start of another boring day.”
- After all this, we finally get the Rick’s bedroom/dust bugs sequence, quoted in full earlier.
- We then cut to downstairs living room with Mike playing with his Rice Krispies, and the episode continues as broadcast.
Clearly, the deleted material here would push the episode way above the 35-minute mark, which partially explains why it was cut. But also, fun though it all is, none of it does anything which the episode as broadcast doesn’t already do elsewhere. All the complaints from the gang about being bored are also established in the following living room scene. And the idea of something really interesting happening elsewhere that the gang don’t notice is endlessly sold throughout the rest of the episode – not least in the material from the opening which does still make it in.
Colin Baker as Evil Count Dustbug was surely fun… but entirely expendable in story and structure terms. And not even The Young Ones is entirely absolved of having to consider those.
With thanks to Simon Simmons, Paul Rhodes and Alasdair Swanson for fly-related musings, and Tanya Jones for her usual editorial eye.
Yes, that’s Dust Bag. We’ll come back to this later. ↩
Or the first episode of Mindwarp, take your pick. Yes, after over 15 years of running this site, I have finally waded into the controversy that is Doctor Who serial titles. I hate my life. ↩
The material with Rik Mayall which surrounds it was supposed to be recorded slightly later that day, around 5pm. ↩
Lightly adapted from the original layout; camera scripts are always a little difficult to replicate on the web. The script actually misspells Rick as “Rik” repeatedly here, mistaking the character name and the actor name. As the cast list at the front correctly uses “Rick”, I’ve simply corrected the spelling here for clarity. ↩
This is my favourite joke in the whole scene. ↩
The 1982 film. The 1997 TV adaptation is probably more well-known these days. ↩
A scene which caused quite a bit of debate on Bluesky when I asked about it. I always assumed that while the close-ups of the flies were obviously the actors in costumes, the overhead shot was done with separate, smaller models. I have now been convinced by various people that this is all one setup, due to various features being identical in both shots, and the overhead angle is done at full scale. To which I can only say… hey, remember when comedy had money for this shit? ↩
“Bomb” is the other really long episode of the series, at 35’09”. The shortest is “Flood”, at 30’23”. ↩
Oddly, the script describes Kitchener as “sitting in a chair cutting his toenails”, and then in the very next sentence as “just in chair pointing”. As this is literally impossible, the final episode ignores the toenails stuff. ↩
There’s no dialogue for the rats/mice in the script, strangely enough. The transmitted episode adds the “You rat!” / “I’m a mouse!” gag. ↩