Some videos in this article contain racist views and language.
Of all the things I expected to write on this site in 2025, “The unbroadcast Love Thy Neighbour pilot is really interesting” wasn’t top of the list.
Anyway, the unbroadcast Love Thy Neighbour pilot is really interesting. Completely reshot for the first episode of the series proper, the pilot starts with a lovely unbroken two-minute location shot of the Reynolds leaving their new house, and the Booths arriving at theirs:
Recently, we had some tradesmen round to our house to fit a new hob. Before they arrived, my partner decided to hide our newly-purchased copy of the complete Love Thy Neighbour DVD boxset. After all, they might think we were massive racists. Or even worse, start telling us that Enoch was right.
Now, I’m most certainly not the right person to mount a full-throated defence of the show, not least because parts of it don’t deserve a full-throated defence. But while watching it for an article recently, I have to admit that the series kept surprising me. Partly because, away from the racial slurs, how line-by-line funny it can be.
EDDIE: I’m not going to go where I’m not wanted.
JOAN: Well, if you kept to that, you’d never go anywhere.
But also: the show kept going to areas that I didn’t quite expect. The fourth episode of Series 11 does a great parallel story between the men striking at work and the women striking at home, which is far more intelligent politically than most of the racial material. The first episode of Series 2, after opening with the usual sitcom shenanigans, contains a startling moment where Barbie, the black neighbour, bawls her eyes out at Eddie calling the police on her housewarming party. A scene which is not played for laughs in any way.
Oh, and the second episode of that series? I could have guessed that Eddie would be convinced to make a fool of himself by his black neighbour. I could have guessed this might involve a stupid fake voodoo dance around a tree at midnight. I might even have guessed that this dance would be naked. What I wouldn’t have guessed is that Jack Smethurst would fully commit to the bit, and we would get lots of luxuriant shots of his bare arse. All shot in a way where it’s very clear that it’s him, and not a stand-in.
For many, the language alone will render the series forever unwatchable. I won’t argue those people are wrong, and I certainly won’t argue that anybody reading this article is obligated to give it a go. But I will say that I went into the show expecting to watch the bare minimum for research purposes… and instead, I found far more of interest than I expected.
To be honest, that’s the main thing I want out of television these days.
Fifth on DVD order. ↩
Over the years, I’ve written plenty about comedy writers reusing jokes. Today’s topic is one of the most famous and most-quoted examples of the lot.
So let’s turn to ersatz Bond film Never Say Never Again, which premiered in the US on the 6th October 1983. Oh dear, James Bond isn’t having much fun.
NURSE: Mr. Bond? I need a urine sample. If you could fill this beaker for me?
BOND: From here?
The tale surrounding this is well-known by now. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais did some emergency rewrite work on Never Say Never Again, coming in three weeks after the film had started shooting, and staying with the production for three months.1 Of course, they nicked the above joke from their own Porridge, and both writers have openly and repeatedly discussed this.
For instance, in the Omnibus edition “Whatever Happened To Clement & La Frenais?”, broadcast on the 20th July 1997:
DICK CLEMENT: We’re always tempted to recycle jokes, We did use one… it’s not a similar joke, it’s the same joke, in Never Say Never Again as in Porridge. If you see them back-to-back, it’s quite amusing.
IAN LA FRENAIS: We call it homage. We don’t call it recycling. (laughs) But it doesn’t happen very often.
The joke was actually taken from the very first episode of Porridge2, “New Faces, Old Hands”, which first aired on 5th September 1974:
DOCTOR: You see those flasks over there? I want you to fill one for me.
FLETCH: What, from ‘ere?
For me, it’s the lightning-fast reaction from Barker which really sells it. He knew when you shouldn’t have time to anticipate the gag.
Obviously, this scene has become one of those clips over the years – if not quite rivalling Del Boy falling through the bar, then definitely in the ballpark. You do get to the point where at least as many people remember the clip from documentaries and anecdotes as they do from the actual show.
With that in mind, it’s worth noting at least one newspaper reviewer enjoyed the joke so much on first transmission, that they quoted it in their column the very next day. Peter Fiddick, in The Guardian:
“The jokes are there though both verbal and visual. (“I want you to fill that glass” says the prison doctor to Barker. “What – from here?” – and the camera cuts away from them precisely to emphasise the distance.)”3
So far, so standard. But the big question is: can we trace the joke back even further?