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Insults, Cups of Tea and Quips

Published 1st August 2025

TV Comedy

Recently, we had some tradesmen round to our house to fit a new hob. Before they arrived, my partner decided to hide our newly-purchased copy of the complete Love Thy Neighbour DVD boxset. After all, they might think we were massive racists. Or even worse, start telling us that Enoch was right.

Now, I’m most certainly not the right person to mount a full-throated defence of the show, not least because parts of it don’t deserve a full-throated defence. But while watching it for an article recently, I have to admit that the series kept surprising me. Partly because, away from the racial slurs, how line-by-line funny it can be.

EDDIE: I’m not going to go where I’m not wanted.
JOAN: Well, if you kept to that, you’d never go anywhere.

But also: the show kept going to areas that I didn’t quite expect. The fourth episode of Series 11 does a great parallel story between the men striking at work and the women striking at home, which is far more intelligent politically than most of the racial material. The first episode of Series 2, after opening with the usual sitcom shenanigans, contains a startling moment where Barbie, the black neighbour, bawls her eyes out at Eddie calling the police on her housewarming party. A scene which is not played for laughs in any way.

Oh, and the second episode of that series? I could have guessed that Eddie would be convinced to make a fool of himself by his black neighbour. I could have guessed this might involve a stupid fake voodoo dance around a tree at midnight. I might even have guessed that this dance would be naked. What I wouldn’t have guessed is that Jack Smethurst would fully commit to the bit, and we would get lots of luxuriant shots of his bare arse. All shot in a way where it’s very clear that it’s him, and not a stand-in.

For many, the language alone will render the series forever unwatchable. I won’t argue those people are wrong, and I certainly won’t argue that anybody reading this article is obligated to give it a go. But I will say that I went into the show expecting to watch the bare minimum for research purposes… and instead, I found far more of interest than I expected.

To be honest, that’s the main thing I want out of television these days.

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  1. Fifth on DVD order. ↩

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“From Here?”

Published 30th July 2025

Film / TV Comedy

Over the years, I’ve written plenty about comedy writers reusing jokes. Today’s topic is one of the most famous and most-quoted examples of the lot.

So let’s turn to ersatz Bond film Never Say Never Again, which premiered in the US on the 6th October 1983. Oh dear, James Bond isn’t having much fun.

NURSE: Mr. Bond? I need a urine sample. If you could fill this beaker for me?
BOND: From here?

The tale surrounding this is well-known by now. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais did some emergency rewrite work on Never Say Never Again, coming in three weeks after the film had started shooting, and staying with the production for three months.1 Of course, they nicked the above joke from their own Porridge, and both writers have openly and repeatedly discussed this.

For instance, in the Omnibus edition “Whatever Happened To Clement & La Frenais?”, broadcast on the 20th July 1997:

DICK CLEMENT: We’re always tempted to recycle jokes, We did use one… it’s not a similar joke, it’s the same joke, in Never Say Never Again as in Porridge. If you see them back-to-back, it’s quite amusing.
IAN LA FRENAIS: We call it homage. We don’t call it recycling. (laughs) But it doesn’t happen very often.

The joke was actually taken from the very first episode of Porridge2, “New Faces, Old Hands”, which first aired on 5th September 1974:

DOCTOR: You see those flasks over there? I want you to fill one for me.
FLETCH: What, from ‘ere?

For me, it’s the lightning-fast reaction from Barker which really sells it. He knew when you shouldn’t have time to anticipate the gag.

Obviously, this scene has become one of those clips over the years – if not quite rivalling Del Boy falling through the bar, then definitely in the ballpark. You do get to the point where at least as many people remember the clip from documentaries and anecdotes as they do from the actual show.

With that in mind, it’s worth noting at least one newspaper reviewer enjoyed the joke so much on first transmission, that they quoted it in their column the very next day. Peter Fiddick, in The Guardian:

“The jokes are there though both verbal and visual. (“I want you to fill that glass” says the prison doctor to Barker. “What – from here?” – and the camera cuts away from them precisely to emphasise the distance.)”3

So far, so standard. But the big question is: can we trace the joke back even further?

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  1. More than Likely: A Memoir (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2019). ↩

  2. Not including Seven of One‘s “Prisoner and Escort”, obviously. ↩

  3. Not a perfect quotation, sure, but in 1974 without the aid of home video, let’s not be too picky. ↩

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Snookered

Published 22nd July 2025

TV Comedy

As I’ve spoken about many times before on this site, I’m constantly surprised at how often the generally accepted transmission dates for various TV shows turn out to be a load of rubbish. Sometimes, the confusion is understandable – a last-minute schedule change not reflected in the Radio Times, say. Other times, I struggle to see the thought process.

This time? Well, we have ourselves a bit of a strange one.

As part of the research for my last piece on Terry and June, I had cause to look at the transmission dates for the series broadcast in late 1983. Here’s what epguides.com thinks:

Season 7 40. 7-1 31 Oct 83 Photo Finish 41. 7-2 07 Nov 83 One Little Pig 42. 7-3 14 Nov 83 The Raft Race 43. 7-4 21 Nov 83 Too Many Cooks 44. 7-5 28 Nov 83 Pardon My Dust 45. 7-6 05 Dec 83 The Artistic Touch

Six episodes, broadcast weekly from the 31st October 1983. Simple enough. And at the time of writing, this is also exactly what Wikipedia, IMDB, and the British Comedy Guide think happened too.

But on bbc.co.uk, we have a different story. The first four episodes of the series are indeed broadcast weekly… but then the show skips a week. The BBC has “Pardon My Dust” airing on the 5th December, and “The Artistic Touch” airing on the 12th December.

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“I Know How Much You Like It at Ross…”

Published 6th July 2025

TV Comedy

Right, after my last piece about mocked-up newspapers in sitcoms, time to get on with some real work. Anyone got any suggestions? How about friend of the site Rob Keeley, have you got anything?

“If you’ve still got an appetite for mocked-up newspapers, John, I saw a subject for you the other day in the Terry and June episode ‘The Raft Race’. The end credits play over a local newspaper from Ross-on-Wye, telling about Terry’s river antics, and there’s a photo, headline and two quite convincing paragraphs, then the article suddenly turns into the original one, about drink-driving! They obviously thought no one would read any further. I did.”

Oh, alright then. Let’s do one more.

The Terry and June episode in question, indeed called “The Raft Race”1, was first broadcast on the 14th November 1983. Location filming took place on the 13th and 15th of April, and it was recorded in studio on the 14th May, exactly six months before transmission.

The episode sees the pair take a trip away from Surrey, and into the dark, jungle-like depths of, erm, Herefordshire.

TERRY: Oh, by the way June, would you press the trousers of my brown suit for me?
JUNE: Well of course, but can they wait until Friday when I do the ironing?
TERRY: If you want me arrested for walking around Ross-on-Wye in me shirt tails, yes.
JUNE: You’re going to Ross-on-Wye?
TERRY: Yes, Sir Dennis has arranged an important business meeting for me on Friday, and I’m travelling down tomorrow afternoon.

I wonder if anybody has figured out exactly what percentage of Terry and June episodes involve Terry attempting to impress his boss.

Anyway, to cut a short story even shorter, Terry ends up embarrassing himself in the eponymous raft race, and gets in the local paper. We don’t have to squint at the screen in order to read it – the programme helpfully makes it full-frame over the end credits:

A close-up of a newspaper. The masthead reads: THE ROSS G... (the rest is not visible) Headline: BELLS KITCHENS SPLASH OUT

The title of the newspaper isn’t difficult to work out either. This is The Ross Gazette, the real local paper of Ross-on-Wye. And luckily, there is a digital archive of the paper available online. With the date of the paper clearly in view – it was the edition published on the 28th April 1983, a couple of weeks after the location filming – it doesn’t take too long to find the original edition of the paper which the prop was based on:

The Ross Gazette Main headline: Mayor Writes to Mrs. Thatcher on Town's Plight - Call for special development status

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  1. Other places give the episode different names; Wikipedia, for instance, calls it “In the Navy”. However, the paperwork for the episode clearly states the episode title as “The Raft Race”, so this was its actual title during production. ↩

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Hayers to Sweep Away ‘Dead Wood’ at BBC

Published 26th June 2025

TV Comedy

The opening episode of the first series of I’m Alan Partridge, “A Room with an Alan”, was broadcast on the 3rd November 1997. What is the first thing we see Alan Partridge doing in his room at the Linton Travel Tavern?

Oh, the usual stuff. Some bad programme ideas. The first of many dream sequences. But the very first thing we see is him doing is reading a newspaper article about Tony Hayers… the person who is about to deny him his second series.

Close-up of article. Headline: Hayers to sweep away dead wood at BBC. On the left, there is a corner of a Cult TV front page.

A wider shot of the two pages.

If you squint, the folio at the top of the first image identifies the paper as The Guardian. So let’s ask our usual question: which edition of the real paper did they modify, in order to create their prop with the fake Tony Hayers story?

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Burst Your Bubble

Published 17th June 2025

TV Comedy

There is something a little mysterious about the Absolutely Fabulous episode “Magazine”, you know. But to understand exactly what, we have to get deep, deep into recording dates. I am giving you ample warning to either strap yourself in, or leave quietly.

Still here? Excellent. So, most of the episode was shot in the normal fashion. There was location shooting done on the 6th February 1992, a studio pre-record day on the 17th March, and then an audience record on the 18th March. So far, so normal.

But one part of the episode needed to be recorded in studio a couple of weeks earlier than the rest of the programme. The paperwork states:

Pre-recorded Sc 4 on Wednesday 4th March 1992 due to Jane Horrocks being unavailable for Studio 5 dates.

The 4th March 1992 was the main studio record day for “Iso Tank”. The paperwork also lists four supporting artists for the office staff, and specifically states:

Used on Wed 4th March 1992 (For Prog 3 & Prog 5)

Don’t worry too much about those episode numbers; a combination of the paperwork treating the pilot as a separate production, and rearranging the final two episodes in the transmission order, means that they don’t match with how we think of that first series. The important thing is that the paperwork is claiming here that there were scenes shot in Edina’s office on the 4th March, and they appeared in both “Iso Tank” and “Magazine”.

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A Sideways Look at the Week’s News

Published 13th June 2025

TV Comedy

As we’re in an Absolutely Fabulous mood at the moment, let’s watch the end credits of Episode 1.4, “Iso Tank”, broadcast on the 3rd December 1992. I promise you there’s a good reason.

The conversation starts off with the reuse of the “Yamishi’s new shop” material from the pilot, as detailed in my previous article. But the really interesting bit is right at the end:

PATSY: You want to hear a new joke, darling? You want to hear a new joke? It’s not in very good taste. The thing is this: you know Elizabeth Taylor? I hear that she is the new ride at Disney World.

So at the risk of frog-dissection, what does the above joke mean?

One element is obvious: a joke about Elizabeth Taylor’s endless marriages and affairs. (The kind of joke I feel a lot more comfortable with when it’s said by a woman.) But there is another thing in the mix here. Because a certain event took place on the 27th February 1992, which was reported in the LA Times the following day:

An article from the LA Times. Headline: Liz Taylor and the Party of 1000 Birthday bash: Celebrities and security take over Disneyland for a night for private salute to Hollywood 'survivor' who turned 60. ANAHEIM - Elizabeth Taylor swooped into Disneyland in a horse-drawn white carriage Thursday night as hundreds of her Hollywood friends turned out to salute a 'survivor' on her 60th birthday. The woman who grew up on screen before the rapt eyes of generations of Americans transformed Disneyland's Fantasyland into a movie extravaganza with hundreds of celebrities, extraordinary security and lights that turned night into day. Trumpet fanfares and flashing strobe lights greeted the celebrities who preceded her to Sleeping Beauty's castle. Disney characters escorted everyone from Henry Winkler to Cheryl Tiegs, Gregory Peck to Tom Selleck. A blonde Delta Burke, accompanied by her husband Gerald McRaney, called Taylor 'strong and soft... witty and clever, intelligent... a fighter. Disneyland officials barred the press from the event, but beamed their own videotape of the festivities onto satellite for waiting television stations. It gave the public another glimpse of the woman who starred in 'National Velvet' at age 12, won two Oscars and married seven men, one of them twice. Along the way she battled a host of illnesses and addictions to painkillers. 'This is a private party and the sky is the limit,' said a Disney spokeswoman. No one would say how much it cost to fete the 1,000 invited guests, but the normal $8,000 charge to rent the park after hours clearly was only the starting point. Although corporations have staged parties at Disneyland in the past, Taylor was the first individual to rent it, a park spokesman said.

Elizabeth Taylor’s 60th birthday party took place at Disneyland. An event which captured people’s imagination so much, it was still talked about 25 years later. And all of a sudden, Patsy’s joke gains more resonance – the choice of Disney as opposed to anywhere else no longer feels quite as arbitrary.

Now, Patsy actually gets the location wrong, of course – she says Disney World, not Disneyland. It doesn’t matter; that’s exactly the kind of thing people get wrong in jokes anyway. And reading the above newspaper report, all of a sudden, the joke feels a little less cruel. If someone moves in circles where they can get Disneyland hired out for their 60th birthday party, Patsy’s remark feels like the definition of kicking upwards.

But there’s something even more amusing about all this, if we put the joke into its real-life context. When it finally aired in December 1992, nine months had passed since Elizabeth Taylor’s 60th birthday. But when was “Iso Tank” actually recorded?

Answer: the 4th March 1992. Exactly a week on from the party itself. It’s a genuinely topical gag… well, for the studio audience, anyway.

When Patsy said it was a “new joke”, she really meant it.

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An Absolutely Fabulous Pilot, Part Two

Published 11th June 2025

TV Comedy

Part One • Part Two

A 4x8 grid of the Series 1 title sequence - coloured letters of a rotating O

Last time, we took a look at an early edit of the pilot for Absolutely Fabulous. Today, we’re going back even earlier: to the original script for the episode, containing scenes – and even characters – which never even made it into that initial version of the show.

This is much easier to do than you might think. I didn’t need to go searching in DISREPUTABLE PLACES which I shouldn’t be hanging around in. The original script for the pilot – alongside the scripts for the other five episodes of that first series – were published by BBC Books in 1993, just a year after the series aired. And thankfully, these really were the actual scripts used in production, rather than boring transcripts.

Let’s go.

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An Absolutely Fabulous Pilot, Part One

Published 5th June 2025

TV Comedy

Part One • Part Two

A 4x8 grid of the Series 1 title sequence - coloured letters rotating outward, of ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS

“The pilot show of a new sit-com about Edina, a neurotic, but successful woman who runs her own PR/design/fashion business and is obsessed with keeping up with the times. Her very sensible, teenage daughter Saffron lives with her and is forced into taking the mothering role. Edina is easily lead astray by her degenerate friend, Patsy, who is a magazine editor. Bubble is Edina’s secretary.

In this episode, Edina tries, unsuccessfully, to give up drinking.”

– Original internal billing for the pilot

It’s sometimes hard not to compare Bottom and Absolutely Fabulous. Both grew out of the same group of Comic Strip and Young Ones writer-performers. Both capture what those performers were doing at the turn of the new decade. Both are audience sitcoms on the, shall we say, larger side of the acting stakes.1

And most importantly for today’s discussion, both originated from a one-off pilot recording, with a full series recorded the following year. Hey, you know me by now. I can’t resist a good list.

Absolutely Fabulous Series 1
Episode Studio RX TX
Pilot/Fashion2 27-28/6/91 12/11/92
Fat 18-19/2/92 19/11/92
France 25-26/2/92 26/11/92
Iso Tank 3-4/3/92 3/12/92
Magazine 17-18/3/92 10/12/92
Birthday 10-11/3/92 17/12/92

The pilot of Absolutely Fabulous had location material shot on the 18th and 19th June 1991. There was then a pre-record day in Studio 4 at TV Centre just over a week later on the 27th June, followed by a recording in front of a live audience on the 28th June. There was then a gap of over seven months before the rest of the series entered production.3 The pilot finally transmitted on the 12th November 1992… 18 months after it was initially recorded.

I have access to some of the paperwork for that pilot episode here, and if you squint at it, we can made some guesses as to what happened to the pilot in that 18 month gap. For instance, the following line is in a different font to the rest of the page, and was clearly typed later:

OPENING TITLES SPECIALLY SHOT ON BETA & transferred to D3

Some material related to the music is also in a different font:

Musicians for sig tune – Costed to 1/LLV Q731H – Recorded 24 3 924

Opening/Closing Music by SIMON BRINT

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the following is also clearly typed later:

FINAL EDIT BY CHRIS WADSWORTH on Spool No D632800

Why am I telling you all this? Because from the above, we can tell that in between the pilot being recorded, and its final transmission, the team must have added new opening titles, added new title music, and then amended the paperwork to include both. The version of the programme which eventually transmitted on BBC2 in 1992 was LLC/C521/73; the paperwork would have been originally prepared for the previous edit, LLC/C521/72. An edit which was never broadcast.

Well, never intentionally broadcast, anyway.

Because when UK Gold started showing Absolutely Fabulous, somebody had clearly been a little careless with the version of the pilot they sent over to them. The result: for years, they accidentally showed the /72 edit of the pilot, put together long before the rest of the series was finished. And while Gold finally corrected the error around 2017, I’ve recently got hold of what the channel repeatedly aired all those years ago.

Which means we can now take a little look at the pilot of Absolutely Fabulous in its 1991 incarnation, rather than its final 1992 broadcast.

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  1. Both were also made under the variety department rather than comedy, allowing them two days in the studio rather than one, making them feel rather more lavish than many other sitcoms. And all this without a band in sight. ↩

  2. The paperwork I have access to only calls the episode “Pilot”. The name “Fashion” for this episode first seems to have been used on the 1993 UK VHS release. ↩

  3. The next thing to be recorded for the programme was location material on the 5th February 1992. ↩

  4. I bet you’d like to know who played on the original Ab Fab version of “This Wheel’s On Fire”, wouldn’t you? Here you go: Dave Stewart (keyboards), Steve Pearce (bass guitar), Steve Sanger (drums), Roddy Matthews (guitar), and Simon Brint (keyboards). ↩

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Absolutely Out of Order

Published 29th May 2025

TV Comedy

I don’t want much out of life, you know. I really don’t. Just the basics. Like, for example, knowing which episode of Absolutely Fabulous was broadcast on BBC2 on the 17th December 1992. The final programme of the very first run of the show. Is that really too much to ask?

Apparently, the answer is yes. Let’s track my attempts.

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