When discussing the origins of Yes Minister, one story seems to loom above all: a nervous BBC delaying the series until after the 1979 election. The following version of this tale, told by writer Jonathan Lynn, seems a good a place to start as any. On that pilot recording:
“That Sunday, we recorded the show. I had asserted, with a confidence I did not wholly feel, that it would get laughs. Neither of us1 quite expected the gales of laughter which came from the studio audience that night. John Howard Davies lost little time in commissioning three more scripts, to make the first series of seven. Then we waited, and waited… and waited.
The Winter of Discontent approached and government all but broke down, and the BBC refused to transmit the first series until after the forthcoming election, which turned out to be not until 1979. They were scared that it would be seen as improperly influencing the election. Finally, three years after we had first proposed the show to the BBC, we went on the air in February 1980.”
Jonathan Lynn, “Comedy Rules”, p. 107
Perhaps Lynn can be accused of indulging of some spin of his own here. I’m willing to take him at his word that it was three years since he and Jay had proposed the series to the BBC, but that isn’t the real point when it comes to this particular delay. The heavy implication in the line about the election not being “until 1979” is surely that the pilot was made in 1978; otherwise, why not say “later that year”?
In fact, the pilot of Yes Minister was shot on… the 4th February 1979, a year before it was broadcast on the 25th February 1980. The election clearly caused a delay, but perhaps not for as long as Lynn indicates here.
It’s odd, the things which can become obscured so easily.
Take Wally Who?, an early Grant Naylor radio sitcom from 1982, which I’ve written a bit about recently. It is not, to be fair, a series which is currently part of the pop culture zeitgeist. I am not expecting to find huge screeds written about the show in Digital Spy, nor am I expecting BBC Sounds to commission Obsessed With… Wally Who? But there are certain things which you think would be easy enough to nail down.
For instance: the number of episodes of the programme broadcast. That’s fairly basic. In fact, it might be the single most basic fact you could expect to know about a series. And yet every source online seems to have a different answer.
The BBC website lists 5 episodes. My old hangout Ganymede & Titan says 10 episodes. radiohaha also says 10, although erroneously gives the network as Radio 4 rather than Radio 2. The British Comedy Guide gives 5 episodes. Rob Grant himself says 8 were commissioned. Somebody even sent me a copy of what is listed internally at the BBC; they have 5 episodes, although the last one is confusingly labelled Episode 6.
Today, I have another story for you. And like all the best stories, it starts with the DVD menu for At Last Smith & Jones: Vol. 1.
At Last Smith & Jones: Vol. 1 is a slightly odd but extremely watchable Best Of release for the duo, released in 2009. It comprises of material from all four series of the BBC2 incarnation of the show – two episodes per series, making a total of eight compilation episodes – along with the complete 1987 and 1988 Xmas specials.1 None of these compilation shows have end credits of their own, just a BBC logo and a copyright date – everyone who originally worked on the show is listed on the separate credits elsewhere on the DVD.
And as I was reading those DVD credits for Series 4, a certain part of my brain sparked into life.
A consequence of hanging around in Red Dwarf fandom for too long is a minor obsession with early Rob Grant and Doug Naylor material. I knew they had written stuff for The Grumbleweeds and Jasper Carrot, but I never knew they had written anything for Smith & Jones. And yet there were their names, large as life.
What the hell did they write?! I had to know. Time for some investigation.2
Recently, I wrote this ridiculous article about The Young Ones episode “Cash”. So while we’re on the subject, here is something else about the episode which has bugged me for years.
To recap: in order to earn some bread, the gang decide to send Neil to the Army Careers Information Office. In no short order, he is flung right back out onto the pavement.
NEIL: I only said I was a pacifist.
And as the gang help Neil to his feet again, there is a very peculiar edit. The following are two consecutive frames from this moment in the episode:
Everyone has changed position; most obviously Planer, who suddenly has his hands in his pockets. Clearly, something was cut at this point. But what?
Unlike our previous investigation, the raw footage is of no help to us here; no location material is present on that tape. Nor does the paperwork I personally have access to shed any light. But the answer is out there, if you look hard enough.
And I honestly think the cut moment could have gone down in history as one of those TV moments a whole generation remembers.
“I alter people’s perception of reality.” – Dr. Hypnosis
One recurring theme in Red Dwarf has always been the rather tenuous grip on real life the crew have. Whether it’s the Total Immersion Videogame of “Better Than Life”, the hallucinations suffered in “Back to Reality”, those damn reality pockets in “Out of Time” – to name three of many – people’s perception of reality is something which Grant Naylor return to time and time again.
What’s interesting, however, is that Red Dwarf is far from the first time Grant Naylor have explored this idea. In fact, we can trace their fascination with it right back to their very first solo writing credit: the first episode of Radio 4 sketch show Cliché, broadcast on the 16th March 1981. Though unlike Red Dwarf, it isn’t framed in terms of science fiction.
I present to you the strange adventure of Dr. Hypnosis: his real name… Dr. Hypnosis.
Today, we’re going to answer a huge burning question about The Young Ones. No, nothing to do with flash frames, or hidden fifth housemates. This is the really important stuff.
Exactly what is the farty neighbour watching on her television in “Cash”, just before she switches over to Andy De La Tour doing a public information film?
Squinting at it, it seems impossible to tell. Some kind of drawing of a car? Unless it’s some well-known cartoon, or mentioned in the paperwork for rights reasons, or specified in the script, how could we ever figure it out?
Spoiler: it’s not a well-known cartoon, or mentioned on the paperwork for rights reasons, or specified in the script. We have only our wits to go on here.
Well… wits, and a certain video of Young Ones raw studio footage, sitting patiently on YouTube. I wrote recently about the section of this video containing material for the episode “Nasty”, but the second half of the video is entirely dedicated to “Cash”. And crucially, it includes the entire recording session for this scene.
It’s the 6th February 1984 in studio TC4, and Rik Mayall is having a circular saw aimed at his knackers.
I write a lot about comedy on here. Sometimes I write some very silly things about comedy indeed. Take, for instance, this analysis of one of the main sets in Blackadder Goes Forth, and how it showed up in various forms throughout the series. You have to have a certain kind of mind to find that interesting, and admittedly, part of it is a pure puzzle box mentality: “What bit goes where?”
But there is also something a little deeper going on there. For all the careful explanations of what writers were hoping to achieve with their work – which for the avoidance of doubt, is something I’m also extremely interested in – what I really want to be able to do is transport myself back, and be present in the room where the comedy was actually made. I get obsessed with wanting to know how a room felt, either in the writing, or in the shooting. Trying to figure out what piece of wood went where while recording a sitcom is an attempt at nothing less than time travel, however ludicrous that sounds.
Which is where your good old fashioned studio recording tapes come in. Whether it’s just clips in documentaries, longer extracts released as DVD extras, or bootlegs passed quietly around as though we’re all crack dealers, there’s nothing quite seeing the raw footage of how a show is made to get a sense of how things felt. An incomplete sense, of course. Nothing can quite replace a real time machine. But it’s something.
All of which preamble is leading up to this glorious video on YouTube. Two hours of raw studio recordings of The Young Ones, precisely none of which is officially sanctioned for release, and precisely all of which is fascinating.
Let’s be very clear about what the above footage represents. Each episode of The Young Ones – unusually for a sitcom of the era – had two days in the studio. These consisted of a pre-record day for the complicated technical bits, without an audience, followed by an audience record the very next day. The above footage is the bulk of the pre-record days for the episodes “Nasty” and “Cash”. The fact that these are the pre-record days explains the lack of audience laughter on the footage, something a few people in the YouTube comments are a little confused by. An edited version of this material would have been shown to the audience the next day on the studio monitors, along with recording the rest of the show in front of them, in order to get the laughs.
Not that what we are seeing is the edited footage that the audience would have seen, either. This is the complete – or near-complete – recording of the day, featuring multiple takes of the material. In short: this really is as close as we can get to skulking around in the studio for the day, silently watching as the team shoot one of the best sitcoms ever made. We even know exactly when everything occurs; the timecode at the bottom of the screen is literally the time of the recording.
There is no substitute for simply watching the video embedded above. But I thought it might be useful to write some notes to go alongside it. Here then, are some observations on the first half of the video, covering the pre-record day for “Nasty”. In particular, I’ve tried to identify any part of the script which don’t make it into the final edit, along with which of the multiple takes were actually used in the finished show.
“Beam me up Scotty” was never said in original Star Trek. “Play it again, Sam” was never said in Casablanca. Or how about my least favourite example: “Don’t tell him your name, Pike” is not the actual line in Dad’s Army. A sentence which is so lacking in comic rhythm that I could punch somebody… so obviously, it had to be plastered in large letters inside the audience foyer of New Broadcasting House.1
This article is about another misquote. But unusually, it’s about a very recent misquote. One which we can see spreading before our very eyes.
So let’s take a look at this article in the Metro on the best Basil Fawlty lines in Fawlty Towers, published February 2018. I have to be honest: it is not an especially good article. I don’t plan to eviscerate it; I will leave that fun as an exercise for the reader, if you so desire.2 I merely want to point you all towards the very first quote that the article gives as an example of Basil at his best:
“For someone called Manuel, you’re looking terribly ill…”
Here’s the thing. That line doesn’t appear in any of the 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers.
Previously on Dirty Feed, I took an in-depth look at the music used in Series 1 of The Young Ones. This turned out to be a surprisingly popular move. So, how about Series 2?
No preamble, let’s get on with it. Only pop music can save us now…
As before, there are some tracks that I just haven’t been able to identify yet. If you have any ideas, let me know in the comments or elsewhere.
Sometimes a joke in a sitcom isn’t just funny, and doesn’t just reveal character. Sometimes, a joke is so good it literally seems to define your character. When Father Ted protests “that money was just resting in my account”, or Lieutenant Gruber sheepishly admits that “it was very lonely on the Russian front”, it somehow seems to be everything you need to know about them. A whole life, in a few short words.
For instance, take this joke in Series 1 of Red Dwarf (1988). As Lister prepares to watch Rimmer’s auto-obituary in “Me²”, he notices the following caption at the start.
HOLLY: “BSc, SSc?” What’s that? LISTER: Bronze Swimming certificate and Silver Swimming certificate. He’s a total lunatic.
In that moment, you feel like you know everything there is to know about Arnold J. Rimmer. His abject failure to achieve anything, and his desperation to hide that by any means possible.
The thing is with these kind of jokes: they stick. When a joke means that much in terms of defining a character, the writers often can’t quite let go of it.
