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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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Wyverns and Wherefores

Published 17th May 2025

TV Comedy

Series 1, Episode 7 of Marion & Geoff, first broadcast on the 7th November 2000, is different from every other episode in the first series of that show. How?

For the answer, let’s turn to the excellent DVD commentary, with Blick and Brydon.

HUGO BLICK: We’ve got to be honest with you, viewers. We structured nine episodes, we knew exactly where we were with nine episodes. What happens is, we sit in a room, we talk about the character, and Rob improvises, and I’m listening to what he’s doing. And I often go away, and kind of construct all his brilliant improvisations… and I get loads of material I can’t use, because the spine of the story takes it in a different direction.

So I thought ‘Well, let’s just leave one episode open, and put him into an area where he’s waiting for something to happen, and use all those lovely improvisations, to just put them in.’ And so we came up with this cunning device, that we would take you to a zoo. […]

ROB BRYDON: There are some great gags in this episode that I like.

HUGO BLICK: We just threw them in!

ROB BRYDON: But you also get a bit of history, you get a bit of backstory…

HUGO BLICK: Yeah, yeah, yeah… I was never casual about the whole construction. But it is remarkable, we just sewed them together. I remember saying ‘Right, try that one. Remember that one? Do that one.’

Which is very interesting, but far too much of a useful insight for Dirty Feed. What I really want to know is exciting stuff like: which exact safari park does Keith visit?

At first, the answer seems obvious enough. At the end of the episode as it appeared on first transmission, we get a shot of a sign. Wyvern Safari Park. Brilliant.

Keith, sitting outside a sign for Wyvern Safari Park

The only problem: Wyvern Safari Park doesn’t exist. I’m sure this is obvious to those of you who know your safari parks. I am not a safari park expert, and I had no idea. So like a fool, I went looking for Wyvern… and was mildly surprised when I couldn’t find it.

Luckily, the commentary track on the DVD reveals the answer:

HUGO BLICK: You will see at the very end that the place that we went to we stop outside, and it looks like a blatant kind of advertisement. It wasn’t, it was just where we stopped. The sign and the name is there. A large amount of this production budget was spent on airbrushing out the name of the real place, and it’s now called something else…. there we are. Wyvern.

ROB BRYDON: Is there no such place?

HUGO BLICK: I feel you might find that there isn’t.

With that knowledge in mind, it’s easy to tell that the sign has been altered in post-production. In fact, so easy, that I’m surprised I didn’t notice when I first watched it. The WYVERN in WYVERN SAFARI LODGE is too big and in the wrong font, and the phone number is in the wrong font as well.1 Indeed, the phone number 01632 960 009 is recommended by Ofcom for productions to use as a dummy number.

What the commentary track doesn’t reveal, however, is what the name of the real place was. It’s not too hard to work it out, though: the answer is clearly Woburn Safari Park, in Bedfordshire. The following photo, uploaded to Flickr in 2014, is clearly either the same sign, or an identical copy close by:

The original Woburn Safari Park sign

Woburn has had a rebrand since then, and a brand new logo; I highly suspect the above sign has been replaced by now. But if anybody wants to do some field research, by all means do so.

Still, it’d be nice to see the original shot of Keith driving past the Woburn sign, wouldn’t it?

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  1. To be fair, when Keith starts the car and the sign moves, they do an extremely good job at tracking the movement on the changed elements. Very well done for a TV show made in 2000. ↩

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50/60 Vision

Published 15th May 2025

TV Comedy

One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is the danger of assumptions when it comes to figuring out shit about old telly. I’ve always made it a point of order to invite people to correct or challenge me on my writing here… whether it’s a minor point, or something which upends a whole article.1

My recent piece on A Small Summer Party had a query which falls somewhere in the middle of that continuum. After I spent a great deal of time examining the difference between the 50-minute broadcast version and the 60-minute DVD version of the show, Smylers asked the following question in the comments:

“You describe changes as being from the broadcast version to the DVD version (which makes sense, as the order you experienced them in), but is there any evidence as to which was made first — or indeed why they bothered to make two versions?

If the longer version were made especially for the DVD release, that would obviously involve far more work than simply putting the existing broadcast version on the disk. So either that was a commercial decision that the DVD would sell more copies (making enough additional profit to pay for the extra work) with the “Director’s Cut”, or Hugo Blick was sufficiently irked by the TV edit that they were prepared to put the effort in to ensure that their vision of how it should be was finally out there.

The commercial potential-reason feels weak to me: the release was primarily of series 2, and surely most potential purchasers would buy it even if all the episodes were as broadcast.

The other possible chronology is that the show was originally made as a 60-minute edit, but the BBC then asked them to cut it down to 50 minutes for scheduling reasons.”

Which is a highly sensible question… and not something I’d even thought about, despite picking through the programme in such detail that I spotted the addition or removal of single shots. That’s my brain for you.

I tossed off a quick reply:

“So in this particular case, I believe that the DVD version was made later, for the simple reason that I think the final scene shows a clear rethink of how to approach things. It feels like a true, after-the-fact Director’s Cut.”

Ahem. Wrong. In fact, I could not have been more wrong. As Paul Hayes then went on to reveal in the thread:

“It appears from the listings on the BBC archive that the hour version is a /71 edit, and the 50-minute one a /72.”

In other words: the first version edited of the programme was the 60-minute version which ended up on the DVD, and the second version was the 50-minute one, which was what was originally broadcast, and which is currently on iPlayer.

Not content with that – after all, I’ve already been caught out once on this – I did some further digging. The /71 version is indeed identical to the DVD version, aside from the end credits.2 And the /72 version is definitely what was broadcast back in 2001.

I also have some EXCITING dates:

  • The /71 version is dated 16th July 2001.
  • The /72 version is dated 8th August 2001.
  • The programme was broadcast – in its /72 edit – on the 3rd September 2001.
  • The DVD was released – in its /71 edit – on the 14th June 2004.

In other words, we can confidently state that the hour-long version released on DVD wasn’t created for the DVD, and certainly wasn’t Hugo Blick’s “second take” on the show. It was the very first version created. It just took nearly three years for us to be able to watch it.

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  1. I’ve only ever had to pull a whole piece on here once in 15 years. I really should rewrite that damn thing properly. ↩

  2. The credits are all on individual cards, as opposed to scrolling, although the scrolling credits which ended up being used are also tacked onto the end as an option. ↩

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“He did kick me up the arse!”

Published 12th May 2025

TV Comedy

I sometimes feel like I spend half my life trying to figure out obscure production details about my favourite sitcoms. Sometimes with a great deal of success… and sometimes, less so. The deeper and more unexplored the waters, the more I feel like I’m on the verge of drowning. What I really need is for the people who worked on these shows to sit down, and write out all the in-depth details of how they were made. The kind of details which idiots like you and I would be interested in.

Luckily, Lissa Evans, producer of Father Ted1 has done exactly that, with the book Picnic on Craggy Island: The Surreal Joys of Producing Father Ted. And the book includes things which are right in my wheelhouse, but I never even thought of.

For instance, take the big picture of Ted kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse, in, erm, “Kicking Bishop Brennan Up the Arse”, broadcast on the 17 April 1998.

Ted standing next to a big picture of him kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse, on location

Ted running away from a big picture of him kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse, on location

Surely there’s no real problem there, is there, beyond having to get the photo blown up to the required proportions? Lissa explains it all:

“A gigantic photograph of Ted kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse: God, this was a nightmare. For a start, the photo shows something that takes place inside a bedroom in the parochial house (which was a studio set), but we needed to bring the photo with us to Ireland before we recorded in the studios…”

Which is something obvious once you think about it, but never, ever occurred to me. Of course the location scenes were shot first, and so the photo would cause a problem!

The solution is also obvious, but incredibly annoying:

“…so we had to ‘pre-create’ the bedroom in the draughty area of the London Studios where they stored the sets, and book costume, make-up, camera, actors and editing months ahead of the studio recordings, all for the sake of a static shot.”

Perhaps these days, you’d be tempted to cheat and paste the photograph on the shot afterwards. Much cheaper, much less time-consuming… and I bet it wouldn’t look quite right.

You can currently buy Picnic on Craggy Island for 99p on Kindle, and other options are available here. If you like the kind of silly thing I post on Dirty Feed, you will love this book, written by someone who was there, rather than someone who does semi-accurate guesses.

And as for the set being ‘pre-created’ before the main studio recording, it’s perfect, except for one small detail…

Ted kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse in the studio scene

Ted standing next to a big picture of him kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse, on location

…the rug is different.

I am a twat.

  1. Aside from the first series. ↩

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Girl on Film

Published 8th May 2025

TV Comedy

I really do love this set of episode reviews for Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, by Steve Phillips. In a world where so much of the conversation around the show degenerates into variations of “It’s very funny” / “No it’s not”, it’s nice to have someone tackle each episode on its own merits, instead of throwing around generalities. And I very much include myself when it comes to the latter.

For instance, take Steve’s critique of the famous roller-skating sequence in “Father’s Clinic”, broadcast on 20th December 1973.

“The roller-skate ride is arguably Some Mother’s Do ‘Ave ‘Em‘s best-remembered set piece, but suffers from a clumsy change from film to videotape near the end as Frank crashes through the shop (how exactly do you roller-skate up stairs anyway?) The sequence is also slightly marred by jumpy cuts and sudden changes of location.”

As with most British sitcoms in 1973, Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em used videotape for its interiors, mostly shot in a studio in front of an audience, and 16mm film for its exteriors, played into the studio during the main recording in order to get the studio audience’s reaction. Personally, I don’t find the change from film to videotape as Frank enters the shop clumsy. In fact, I rather like it – it’s like Frank is crashing back into “reality” at the end of the sequence.1

But hey, judge for yourself:

There is, however, one instance of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em cutting between film and video which I really do find horrendously awkward. The opening of “Jessica’s First Christmas”, broadcast on the 25th December 1974, is mainly VT material shot at Television Centre… but with inserts of baby Jessica, clearly shot on film:

If you read this scene in a particular way, as the film shots of Jessica are right next to the film panning across all the houses, it unintentionally looks like Jessica has been bunged outside in the dark by an uncaring Frank and Betty. Bastards.

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  1. Let’s try to ignore the fact that Crawford hit his head for real very hard indeed while shooting that scene in the studio. It makes it a little more difficult to watch once you know. ↩

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“Mr Bedford! Mr Bedford!”

Published 5th May 2025

TV Comedy

What’s the best episode of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em? Probably not the one where Frank is busted for distributing hardcore porn, which is always a good one to throw at people to see if they really remember the show properly.

For my money, the show probably never bettered “Have a Break, Take a Husband” from Series 1, first broadcast on the 8th March 1973. There’s so much to love about the episode, featuring Frank and Betty’s disastrous second honeymoon. Not least a boiling undercurrent of sexual frustration throughout, beautifully played by Michele Dotrice:

FRANK: Now don’t do anything while I’m gone.
BETTY: Well I can hardly start without you, can I?

I highly suspect, Baby Jessica or not, Betty eventually figured out that she could actually start without Frank. She probably also figured out that she could finish without Frank as well.

But today’s topic isn’t Betty’s sexual organs. Instead, I want to focus on Kenny, “a nervous and outrageously camp dabbler in spiritualism”1, a brilliant performance by Cyril Shaps.2 And what prop would you give such a character?

A copy of Psychic News. Main headline: Medium turns table on sceptical TV team

We reveal that the copy of Psychic News is being held by Kenny. He's looking upwards at Frank and Betty's room in a faintly alarmed manner.

A copy of Psychic News, of course. Which was a real newspaper. And God help me, if you know this site, you know what nonsense I’m about to come out with. Exactly which edition of Psychic News is Kenny holding?

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  1. © Steve Phillips. ↩

  2. Who also appears in the pilot of The Young Ones… playing the medium next door. So if you want to say that The Young Ones and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em take place in the same universe, there’s your excuse. ↩

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Centrepiece of Municipal Display Stolen

Published 23rd April 2025

TV Comedy

Having just done a full rewatch of Men Behaving Badly, I thought it was about time to do a multi-part article on the series, really nailing exactly what it is that makes the show tick, what Simon Nye was trying to say about how people worked, and why we seem to find it impossible to make audience sitcom like it today.

Nah, just kidding, I want to poke at a newspaper prop again.

So let’s take a look at “Gary in Love”, the penultimate episode of Men Behaving Badly, broadcast on the 26th December 1998.1 As a reminder, the gang have gone to Worthing, and Gary and Tony steal a massive ornamental fish and stash it in their hotel room, for reasons. Unfortunately, this drunken bender does not go unnoticed, not least by the local paper.

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  1. Incidentally, please appreciate the effort I have gone to in order to provide proper widescreen screengrabs from this episode. Despite the final three episodes being made and broadcast on digital in widescreen, the DVD is a 4:3 centre cutout… and has never been reissued in widescreen format. Later streaming releases, like YouTube, are widescreen… but are half the frame rate they should be, as per all interlaced material released on every streaming site aside from iPlayer. Meaning you cannot actually buy a proper version of the final three episodes of Men Behaving Badly, which is utterly ludicrous.

    We’ll have to hope for an iPlayer boxset at some point. ↩

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Rescued.

Published 22nd April 2025

Internet / Videogames

Jason Dyer’s All the Adventures project – “Wherein I play and blog about every adventure game ever made in (nearly) chronological order” – is undergoing a particularly amazing time at the moment. So far he’s covered 192 full games from 1982 alone – 32 of them since the start of this year – some of them very obscure indeed, and usually in multi-part articles. It brings into sharp focus those people who simply pretend to write blogs.

Jason doesn’t just limit himself to games which were published. For instance, take Time Warden by Simon Wadsworth, a game vaguely inspired by Doctor Who. Simon wrote about it on his own site:

“This was my second full adventure. I submitted it to Bug-Byte, as I had done with The Scepter, but it was never published. It was written using the same source code structure. I’d forgotten all about this game until sorting through a pile of old cassette tapes looking for my copy of The Scepter.

In this adventure you play the Time Warden. While you have been away on vacation and the Key of Time has been lost on the planet Syrius 5. You have 250 turns to recover the key before the end of the Universe.”

Luckily, Simon didn’t just talk about it on his site – he provided a download link to the game, which Jason used to write his post. Not that you can actually directly download it from Simon’s site any more… or, indeed, even read about it. The site went offline at some point in 2019. You can only access it now through the Wayback Machine.

Meaning that when Jason wrote about Time Warden, he’s writing about something rescued twice: firstly, an unpublished game scraped from an old cassette by its author… and then secondly, scraped from a defunct website through the Internet Archive.

Blogs are dead. Apart, of course, from all the amazing blogs out there.

A Slightly Larger Summer Party

Published 12th April 2025

TV Comedy

“We are aware that there will be those who say ‘What a shame to show us these characters’, but I would always rather be brave.”

– Rob Brydon, The Sunday Telegraph, 2nd September 2001

“You’ve got to carry on swimming. I was really keen not to put this precious character of ours in a cul-de-sac where he only functions in a monologue.”

– Hugo Blick, The Sunday Telegraph, 2nd September 2001

“A Small Summer Party [is] entirely unnecessary. In advance, this was billed as our chance to “find out how the Marion and Geoff story began”. The trouble was that we already knew.”

– James Walton, The Daily Telegraph, 4th September 2001

A Small Summer Party, broadcast on the 3rd September 2001, remains a controversial entry into the Marion & Geoff1 universe. A retelling of that fateful summer barbecue where Keith’s life finally falls apart, I can’t say I really understand complaints that the episode was pointless, simply because we already knew what had happened. I don’t see sitcom as a content-delivery mechanism for plot.

I do have a bit more sympathy with James Walton’s other issues with the show:

“It was in episode six of the original series that Keith (Rob Brydon), speaking more quickly and nervously than usual, told us about the day when it finally became undeniably apparent that his wife was unfaithful and his marriage was finished… As ever, we had to do a bit of thinking to figure out from Keith’s version precisely what had happened – but, as ever, this only made the effect more powerful. Which may be why that 10-minute monologue managed to be funnier, sadder, subtler, and more dramatic than yesterday’s 50-minute fleshing out of the events Keith had described.”

As evidenced by Rob Brydon and Hugo Blick’s comments which opened this article, this is exactly what they were worried about when it came to making A Small Summer Party… and decided it was worth the risk. It’s a risk which I personally think comes off, despite entirely understanding why people fell in love with the monologues. I just think A Small Summer Party has more than enough of interest going on in its own right.

I admit that my favourite thing about the show is fairly obvious: how it plays as a found footage horror movie. A suburban Blair Witch Project, which was a film still relatively fresh in the memory back in 2001. But this surely wasn’t just some clever-clever directorial flourish; framing the show like this was far from an arbitrary choice. To Keith, this really is a horror film: the most horrific day of his life. And to most of the audience watching, this kind of domestic horror is far more likely to be a part of their lives than encountering evil spirits… or even an axe murderer.

A glowering, indistinct Marion in the kitchen doorway

A successful piece of television or not, one thing is true: A Small Summer Party has barely been repeated on the Beeb. It got a couple of BBC Choice showings the week after first transmission, and then nothing. Three years later in 2004, it did get a DVD release as part of Series 2… but not in its originally-seen broadcast version. Instead, it was an extended edit – specifically labelled as a Director’s Cut – increasing the 50-minute special up to a full hour.

Which is perhaps a bit of an strange choice. Even if you enjoyed the show, it was surely long enough in its 50-minute form, if not a little too long. It’s at times like this that you wish the release had a commentary, so we could hear all of Blick’s reasoning. As it is, we’ll have to prod the show ourselves.

You know the drill by now. Let’s take a look at every single difference between the broadcast version of A Small Summer Party, and the extended DVD edit. All timings given are for the broadcast edit, which is also available on iPlayer.

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  1. Marion & Geoff, or Marion and Geoff? I’m going for Marion & Geoff unless I’m quoting someone else, because that’s what it’s called on the show’s title card. Bite me. ↩

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