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Everyone on One Side of the Table in the Restaurant

Published 29th January 2025

TV Comedy

Here’s one of my very favourite sketches from End of Part One, Renwick and Marshall’s magnificent sketch show which eviscerated contemporary television in much the same way Python did a decade earlier.1 It’s from Series 2 Episode 3, broadcast by LWT on the 26th October 1980.

Warning: contains a slang term for gay men near the top which I think is entirely satirically justifiable, but some of you may not enjoy.

It’s difficult to pick my favourite thing in that sketch. Obviously, there are a million and one sketches in the world which would benefit from being cut in half and adding ETC in big letters to the end. But I think the most devastating line in it has to be:

Second Floor: randy men who try and talk like Hancock.

Because I hadn’t realised, but bloody hell, yes, of course. Mr. Lucas, you’re an oaf.

That’s not the line we’re discussing today, however. You might have guessed which one we are discussing from the headline of this piece.

Everyone on one side of the table in the restaurant. Going up…

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  1. I remember once excitedly showing some friends the series… mainly to embarrassed silence. Similar also happened to me with Rutland Weekend Television. I don’t force people to watch half hours of comedy they’ve never seen before in my presence any more, it’s just too excruciating if they hate it. ↩

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Everyone We Know Loves The Dandy

Published 22nd January 2025

TV Comedy

Recently, I’ve been burying myself in Radio Times letters pages of the 1970s. It can be a grim place to be, with its long, outraged analysis of various current affairs programmes. It’s almost as bad as Bluesky.

So thank heavens for the following shaft of light, published in Issue 2575, cover date 17th-23rd March 1973:

What comic does Eric read?
In the Morecambe and Wise Show (BBC1) of 23 February, Eric was reading a comic which stated that it was the Dandy, but the phrasing on the cover was: The Comic with Minnie the Minx.’ Minnie is one of the most popular characters in the Beano.

Other Beano characters are Biffo the Bear, Grandpa, Lord Snooty, and Dennis the Menace (not forgetting his dog Gnasher).

Also, in a comic which was so clearly the Beano, what on earth was Desperate Dan of the Dandy doing?

The ultimate in stupidity was reached when Eric mentioned Pansy Potter, who is a regular feature of the Sparky!

Brian Spursell (aged 10)
Manchester

Sure enough, if we check Series 7 Episode 8 of The Morecambe and Wise Show, broadcast on the 23rd February 1973:

Eric and Ernie in bed, Eric reading the Dandy, and Ernie reading the Financial Times

The same, from a different angle

That most definitely is an issue of The Beano with a horrible fake Dandy masthead clumsily pasted over the top. This one, in fact: Issue 1578, dated 14th October 1972.

Full cover of The Beano, Issue 1578

Moreover, it really is supposed to be The Dandy – as Brian Spursell (aged 10) says, Eric specifically mentions Desperate Dan, a Dandy character:

ERNIE: It’s got my beat, I just can’t make it out. I just can’t understand it at all. The market’s down four points.
ERIC: It’s got me beat as well. Desperate Dan’s just eaten four cow pies and he’s still hungry.

Although Eric does then start talking about Lord Snooty later in the sketch, a Beano character. I want my licence fee refunded.

As for why they badly mocked-up a Dandy, rather than simply using a real issue: who knows. I very much doubt it’s product placement worries; we can clearly see Ernie reading the Financial Times, and a Beano is featured in the following sketch anyway. It smacks of an emergency fix by the prop department, but you’d think it’d still be easier just to pop down the shops than to start mocking up mastheads.

Never mind. Maybe we should just ask Eric Morecambe, as the Radio Times did back in 1973:

ERIC MORECAMBE replies:
I have received several letters making the same complaint, and I am delighted, because I was just testing you.

And there’s an Eric Morecambe joke few people have read for over 50 years. You’re welcome.

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That Nice Mrs Merton

Published 18th January 2025

TV Comedy

For many viewers, The Mrs Merton Show sprang fully-formed onto BBC2 on the 10th February 1995. But things are never quite as simple as that. And with Caroline Aherne and Mrs Dorothy Merton, the story is even more complicated than most.

Regional television can get short shrift in the history of comedy; regional radio even more so. Very little in-depth has been written about the origins of Mrs Merton in Frank Sidebottom’s Piccadilly Radio shows, or her appearances on 90s Granada talk show Upfront. Even tracking down some of this material is hard, and perhaps impossible if you’re a completist.

For instance, it’s very much worth listening to the following extremely early Mrs Merton, on Key 103:

But when was it actually broadcast? There’s no TX date attached to it at all. It’s probably 1988 or 1989, but that’s all I can really figure out.

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Genital Activity

Published 12th January 2025

TV Comedy

Just occasionally, my silly research for this site turns up something wonderful.

So, there I was, perusing the archives of that august organ Huddersfield Daily Examiner, when I spotted the following Channel 4 programme scheduled on the 30th November 1992:

11:00 CATHOLICS AND SEX Examining the Catholic Church’s attitudes towards birth-control and pre-marital sex. Catholic women talk about the ban on contraception, and teenagers give their views on virginity. A bishop gives an unusual justification of the Church’s teachings…

So far, so normal.

…and comedienne Caroline Aherne provides an alternative interpretation.

Oh, hello there.

This would be Caroline Aherne just pre-stardom. The Fast Show was a couple of years away, but by now she was appearing as Mrs Merton on programmes like Channel 4’s own Remote Control:

But I’d never heard of her appearance in Catholics and Sex. And frankly, it felt like I would be unlikely to ever see it. After all, who is going to bother uploading a copy online?

Answer: Reuters Screenocean has. And, predictably, it features Aherne as Sister Mary Immaculate, talking about contraception.1 I’m not going to be cheeky, rip that video and upload it here, but the two short sections with Caroline are at 10:13:41 and 10:32:54.

A VT clock for Catholics and Sex

Caroline Aherne as Sister Mary Immaculate

The whole thing is very worth watching, actually. I’m very at home with early-90s Channel 4 documentary-making. Anything with inserts shot on film in black and white I find extremely comforting.

  1. This is the second of four episodes; the other three have contributions from John Hegley, Bruce Morton, and Sean Hughes. ↩

While We Have Still Got Some Insanity Left

Published 3rd January 2025

Meta / TV Comedy

Website stats are funny old things. For a start, it’s become deeply unfashionable to actually care about them. “Write for yourself, not for others”, people cry, myself included. This is, on the face of it, an entirely reasonable attitude… but I have to admit that these days, I really want people to read my stuff. So much of my writing relies on other people helping me with my research, and the more people who read my work, the better and more widespread that research gets.

The other odd thing about stats is that what is an extremely successful article by my standards, is a mere rounding error when it comes to some sites. As detailed in my 15 year retrospective, the most popular article I’ve ever written on Dirty Feed has had about 45k hits over the years. The second most popular article I’ve ever written has had nearly 18k hits. A lot of pieces I’m very proud of have 2-3k hits. This piece on the pilot of Fawlty Towers, featuring material which has never been published before, has had less than 1k hits. I don’t lie awake thinking about it too much, but I know damn well plenty of worse sites than this one get exponentially more views. It can get mildly frustrating.

But perhaps not as frustrating as the following.

Back in 2013, I uploaded the following YouTube video. It’s a clip from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, “Showing the Flag”, broadcast on the 2nd January 1975. It’s one of my very favourite moments of the series, featuring Don Estelle corpsing spectacularly. It also contains a masterclass from Windsor Davies on how to ride the the laughter from a studio audience.

That video has had over one million views. It is by far he most popular thing I have ever published online. Never mind in-depth articles about flash frames in The Young Ones which are the result of years of research and thought – just rip a random sitcom clip, shove it on YouTube, and watch the views mount up.

Anyway, I am very mature and sensible and have entirely come to peace with all of this and think it is all brilliant.

Coventry City 0, Mr. Johnson’s Una 3

Published 27th December 2024

TV Comedy

Recently, I embarked on yet another rewatch of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I always find the TV incarnation a slightly odd experience. There are enough episodes, and the shows themselves are so packed with stuff, that no matter how many times I see them, huge swathes of sketches are somehow always a surprise.

So as usual, I’d completely forgotten about International Wife-Swapping. Which among many other highlights, also contains Michael Palin doing his Frank Bough:

“Just a reminder that on Match of the Day tonight, you can see highlights of two of this afternoon’s big games: Mrs. Robinson v. Manchester United, and Southampton v. Mr. Rogers. Unusual game, that. And here’s a late result: Coventry City 0, Mr. Johnson’s Una, 3. Coventry going down at home, there.”

And I laughed at that final line… before stopping to think slightly. Was I just, as I have done many times before when watching comedy, making up my own jokes?

Luckily, we can know for sure. On the extras of the incredible Network Blu-ray release – or bootlegged if you’re one of those people – are the raw pre-recorded inserts for Series 3 Episode 13, commonly known as “Grandstand”.1 And one of these inserts is Michael Palin as Frank Bough, recording the above line.

A chalkboard VT clock for a Monty Python insert

Michael Palin as Frank Bough looking very amused at Eric Idle's dirty joke

And after one particular take, we get Palin grinning widely, followed by…

PALIN: Eric Idle joke. Man of the world, Eric…

So firstly, I now now for sure that it was a deliberate gag. But more importantly: if there’s anything more pleasurable in the world than watching Michael Palin laugh at Eric Idle’s dirty joke, I have yet to discover it.

A version of this post was first published in the December issue of my newsletter.

  1. RX: 18th May 1972. TX: 18th January 1973. ↩

A Comedy Spray

Published 2nd December 2024

TV Comedy

While we’re on an anonymous questions kick, here’s something else I was asked recently: “Favourite behind-the-scenes moment?” Which gives me an excuse to talk about something brilliant.

Take a look at this scene from Red Dwarf, “Stasis Leak”, broadcast on the 27th September 1988.

This was shot on location in the Midland Hotel in Manchester, on the 5th/6th May 1988.1 Note the plaque for “The Ganymede Holiday Inn” is clearly above one for the Midland Hotel. Although the really interesting thing about that plaque is that it includes a close approximation of the Holiday Inn logo, which is perhaps a little odd for a BBC show of the time!

Now let’s turn to The Bodysnatcher Collection, a Red Dwarf DVD release from 2007 which I’ve talked about many times before on here. One of the features on that release was an in-depth behind-the-scenes making of documentary of Series 2, It’s Cold Outside, which features plenty of previously unseen clips from the raw recordings, both studio and location.

Such as the following. A discussion between Danny John-Jules and Doug Naylor, taken from the shooting of the Ganymede Holiday Inn scene, about spraying the nice lady with water… and who gets to do it. And it’s fantastic.

There’s something about the way Doug acknowledges comedy in that clip that is just magical. Comedy as its own thing, as something worth fighting for, as something that matters.

There are a great number of TV shows made now which would benefit from somebody stepping forward and saying: “It’a a comedy spray.”

  1. Two days for the material at the Midland Hotel seems excessive, but that’s what the paperwork states. Other location material featuring Mark Williams as Petersen was shot at the Albert Dock on the 11th May 1988. ↩

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Duck, Everyone

Published 25th November 2024

TV Comedy

Recently, I asked people to send me anonymous questions again, which is always good fun until someone sends you something unpleasant. Anonymity and nasty messages, what are the odds?

Anyway, I particularly enjoyed this one, as it gives me an excuse to link to one of my favourite things ever.

“Favourite audience reaction in a sitcom? I know it’s difficult to choose. The reaction at the end of Seinfeld’s The Marine Biologist when George pulls Kramer’s golf ball out of his jacket has to be one of mine, love that woman who does the shriek when she realises what he’s holding.”

Having finally got round to a full rewatch of Seinfeld this year – yes, I know – I fully concur. The actual laugh is at 4:00 in the below video, in an episode which first aired in the US on the 10th February 1994.1

As for my own suggestions, my mind immediately turns to Red Dwarf. The obvious answer is the shrinking boxer shorts scene in “Polymorph”, followed by the reveal of the crew meeting the skeletons in “Kryten”. In fact, nearly all the huge audience reactions in the show come from the show’s early years in Manchester, which might be a riposte to anyone who says that the audience got louder in later years when the fans started attending recordings.

A less obvious answer, but still utterly glorious, is the following from “Bodyswap”, broadcast on the 5th December 1989. You don’t need to worry about the body swap shenanigans themselves – all you need to know is that thanks to a wiring fault, Lister’s order of “a milkshake and a crispy bar” ten minutes earlier set off the ship’s auto-destruct system:

It is, of course, the utter release of tension, as well as the joke itself, which creates such a hysterical reaction.

But for my money, one of the best audience reactions of all time is in Drop the Dead Donkey. In “Sally’s Libel”, broadcast on the 4th February 1993, we get the sad tale of footballer Pat “The Panther” Pringle, played by Paul Clarkson. Well, he was called “The Panther” until a horrendous own goal in the last minute of a semi-final, where he became known as “The Plonker” instead.

Luckily, after years in the wilderness, he’s finally got a job as Globelink’s new sports presenter. And so the gang make him feel comfortable in their usual inimitable fashion.

Interestingly, it works slightly differently to the Red Dwarf example above. It’s not about a release of tension; the tension is already released by the bathetic “Oh well, there you go!” So you think that’s the main joke… and then wham, David Swift comes on and leaves you gasping for breath.2

It’s as joyful and magical as television gets for me. And it creates the case for audience sitcom in and of itself.

  1. Although annoyingly enough, despite including some of the lead-up, it doesn’t include any of Kramer playing golf on the beach earlier in the episode, which is key to the punchline. ↩

  2. And leaving Stephen Tompkinson gasping for breath, covering his face to hide his corpsing. Which brings to mind Simon Day in the final Mid-Life Crisis sketch of You Ain’t Seen These, Right? ↩

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You Ain’t Seen All of These… Right?

Published 20th November 2024

TV Comedy

“This is it! It’s THE FAST SHOW as you’ve never seen it before – literally! This special video compilation has sketches you will not have seen on TV featuring all your favourite characters as well as loads of completely new ones, so fresh and raw they don’t even have proper names – Mid-life-Crisis Man, Road Rage Man, Up All Night Shagging Man. Plus the New York Eskimo, Ponce In The Garden, The King, The Over-Sensitive Dad and Danny Klein, a cop like no other cop you’ve ever seen before, because he’s Conventional Cop.”

Back of VHS cover, You Ain’t Seen All of These… Right?

The problem with something like The Fast Show – a programme which for many years has essentially lived on DVD – is that the origins of various things can become a little murky in your brain. Or at the very least, my brain.

So let’s quickly nail down the facts:

  • In 1999, The Fast Show put together a fantastic compilation of previously unseen sketches, titled You Ain’t Seen These… Right? This was broadcast on BBC Two as part of Fast Show Night on the 11th September 1999, in a 30-minute edit.
  • A couple of months later, on the 15th November 1999, it was released on VHS in an extended 50-minute edit, as part of the Series 3 Fast Show boxset.1 This version was called You Ain’t Seen All of These… Right?
  • Finally, this 50-minute edit was also part of the Ultimate Collection DVD boxset, released on the 5th November 2007. Both the VHS and DVD edits are identical.

For my part, I have fond memories of watching the show on the original broadcast on Fast Show Night… but never owned the commercial VHS at all. In 1999, I just couldn’t afford to keep up with every brilliant BBC Video release back then. So the first time I saw the extended edit was on the Ultimate Collection boxset years later, where the 20 minutes of extra material took me by complete surprise, despite the fact that the extended edit was first released eight years earlier.

You know where this is going. Last time, we looked at the 30-minute edit of the show. Let’s take a look now at the 50-minute commercial release. Sadly, I don’t have access to the same kind of production paperwork this time round; the BBC’s commercial releases are generally much harder to research than broadcast material. This means that for the extra sketches, we don’t know the official titles, authors, or even which series they were originally recorded for. Although on that latter question, trying to figure it out from the sketches themselves is half the fun.

Regardless, here is a complete list of every single difference between the broadcast 30-minute edit of the show, and the commercial 50-minute edit. I do find this extra material fascinating, because it was essentially rejected twice; once for the main series, and then again for the broadcast version of You Ain’t Seen These. If any Fast Show material was going to be of questionable quality – at least when it comes to stuff that the public got to see – then the material listed here is going to be it.

All times given are for this 50-minute edit of the show. This version isn’t available online, at least legally and in good quality, but I suspect the crossover between “people who read Dirty Feed” and “people who don’t own The Fast Show Ultimate Collection on DVD” is fairly small.

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  1. It never had a separate release. ↩

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