Dirty Feed

Being Charming, Debonair

Published 21st July 2025

Many years ago now, I had to study Seamus Heaney for A-Level. All a bit pointless, really. Sure, “Death of a Naturalist” is all very well, but did he ever write anything as good as the opening theme to Heathcliff?

“So join in the jubilee / The cats are great they’ll all agree / You’ll find in each calamity / The cat’s superiority”. Wise words, mate.

In fact, the lyrics to the theme have been widely questioned over the years. I always thought one of the lines was “They’ll make some history”, but after some careful listening to a high quality version of theme on Shuki Levi’s website, I believe the lyrics are actually the following:

The gang will reign supreme
And no-one can deny-y-y-y
They’ll make ’em history
And always have an alibi

Which is actually more appropriate – there is a fine line between gang and gangster – but the combination of “make ’em history” and “alibi” does sound rather murderous. Don’t run into Riff-Raff after dark, he’ll tear your face off.

Anyway, I remember very little about Heathcliff aside from the brilliant Levy/Saban theme tune, and I’m not sure I paid much attention to the rest of the show when I saw it at the time. But watching the end credits of the show recently, something new struck me.

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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:

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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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newspaper props, terry and june

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?

[Read more →]

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alan partridge, best of, newspaper props

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”.

[Read more →]

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absolutely fabulous, script books

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:

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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absolutely fabulous

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.

[Read more →]

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absolutely fabulous, pilots

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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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. ↩
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. ↩
The next thing to be recorded for the programme was location material on the 5th February 1992. ↩
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 fabulous, best of, pilots

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.

[Read more →]

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absolutely fabulous, best of, tx date investigations

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:

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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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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best of, marion & geoff

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

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