As long-time readers of this site will know, I have a fascination with television pilots. Let’s be specific about what I mean, here: a true pilot isn’t just the first episode of a TV show. It’s something made separately from the rest of the series, as a first attempt at an idea. I find those first attempts endlessly interesting.
These pilots make their way to an audience in many different ways. Sometimes, as with Hi-de-Hi!, they are literally transmitted as a one-off show, well before the rest of the series.1 Others, like Yes Minister, are broadcast as part of the first series of the programme, sometimes with a few extra edits before transmission. There are ones which were transmitted purely by mistake, as per Absolutely Fabulous. And sometimes, like Drop the Dead Donkey, they were never transmitted at all, and instead became available on DVD years down the line.
And then there’s the truly interesting ones, where the pilot of a show has never been officially shown or released. One such example is Colin’s Sandwich, which I have a copy of here, but have shamefully never got around to writing about.2 Sometimes, we don’t even know if these pilots still exist or not. I talk about one of the Knightmare pilots here, but it’s never leaked in all the years that the show has had an ongoing and active fandom, which makes me suspicious.
Tracking these things down – or at least attempting to – is half the fun. But once, just once, I didn’t have to make any effort in order to see an obscure pilot.
It was piped directly to me, unbidden.
The pilot of Hi-de-Hi aired on New Years Day 1980; it was then repeated on the 19th February 1981, just before the new series of six more episodes. ↩
Friend of the site Billy Smart has written a little about the Colin’s Sandwich pilot here. ↩
