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An Absolutely Fabulous Pilot, Part Two

Published 11th June 2025

TV Comedy

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.

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An Absolutely Fabulous Pilot, Part One

Published 5th June 2025

TV Comedy

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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The Unexamined Sitcom Is Not Worth Watching

Published 3rd April 2023

TV Comedy

Sometimes, a sitcom mystery you’ve wondered about for years suddenly gets resolved. And for Dirty Feed, this one is the motherlode. After all, with the pilot episode of Fawlty Towers, you’re talking about something as close as you can get to a sacred text around here.

Strap yourself in. This is a good one. Let’s start from the beginning.

One of the most important things to understand production-wise about the pilot of Fawlty Towers – usually known these days as “A Touch of Class” – is that it really was a genuine pilot, made eight months before the rest of the series. The majority of the studio scenes in the episode were shot in front of an audience on the 23rd December 1974, for eventual broadcast on BBC2 on the 19th September 1975. In comparison, the rest of Series 1 was shot in August/September 1975, less than two months before transmission.

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An Evening at Television Centre

Published 16th December 2022

TV Comedy

There is a certain kind of deranged comedy fan, who has a very particular kind of deranged list. It’s a list which can bring you nothing but pain. “Which sitcom episodes would you love to have been in the studio audience for, but weren’t?” Bonus points if you hadn’t even been born at the time of the recording.

I am a deranged comedy fan. And my deranged list includes the Fawlty Towers episode “The Kipper and the Corpse”, the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned”, and the One Foot in the Grave episode “The Trial”. Somebody seriously needs to invent a time machine. Screw killing Hitler, I’ll spend most of my time hanging around various TV studios.

But one show has just leapt right to the top of my list. Not because it’s a seminal episode of sitcom, although it is very, very good. But because of what I’ve discovered about the studio recording itself.

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Back to Basie

Published 26th April 2022

TV Comedy

Some people probably think I compile lists of recording dates for sitcoms in lieu of having anything interesting to say about them. These people are entirely correct.

Nonetheless, as I’ve just had a delightful time watching the whole run on iPlayer, let’s take a look at Series 1 of Andrew Marshall’s brilliant 2point4 children.

Episode RX TX
Leader of the Pack 21/4/91 3/9/91
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 11/8/91 10/9/91
When the Going Gets Tough
the Tough Go Shopping		 18/8/91 17/9/91
Love and Marriage 25/8/91 24/9/91
Dirty Bowling 1/9/91 1/10/91
Young at Heart 8/9/91 8/10/91

The above are the main audience record dates for the series. Location work for the pilot was done between 10th – 12th April 1991, and location for the rest of the five episodes was done between 15th – 27th July 1991.

There are a few things to note about the above. Firstly: yes, “Leader of the Pack” was a genuine pilot, shot nearly four months before the rest of the series. This pilot was shot in the main Studio A at Pebble Mill, before the show moved down to TV Centre for the rest of the programme’s run.

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Roughly 3,000 Words on Yes Minister Pilot Edits

Published 28th February 2021

TV Comedy

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.

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  1. Lynn is referring to his co-writer Anthony Jay here. ↩

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A Few Musings About the Young Ones Pilot

Published 26th May 2020

TV Comedy

Right now, I’m working on a piece for Dirty Feed which might be deemed Actually Useful™ – at least, for certain definitions of the word “useful”. A complete guide to every single piece of music heard in The Young Ones, right down to the most obscure library tracks which aren’t even mentioned in the paperwork.

But there’s something bugging me about the music used at the start of the very first episode, Demolition. Something deeply obscure, even for someone writing, say, a complete guide to every piece of music heard in The Young Ones. So rather than derailing that particular piece right at the beginning, let’s get all this nonsense out the way now.

Demolition, as I’m sure most people reading this will know, wasn’t just the first episode of The Young Ones. It was a pilot, in the true sense of the word – shot months before the rest of the series, in the hope of getting a commission. But the version which was finally broadcast in late 1982 isn’t the original edit of that pilot. A moment’s thought proves that it couldn’t be – the episode as we know it contains the regular title sequence for the series, which includes clips from episodes which simply hadn’t been made yet. I’ve been wondering what the original opening titles were for Demolition for nearly 20 years now.

Perhaps there is an echo of them left in the episode as transmitted, however. An echo that was staring me in the face for years, but I never even noticed until it was pointed out to me. The title card for the episode is highly unusual; nothing else like it appears anywhere else in the series. The gang, mildly awkwardly pasted into the windows of the original house:

Demolition title card

It looks like part of a title sequence, but it’s difficult to imagine this was created anew for the final broadcast version; it sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the episodes. Whether the entire pilot title sequence was just that shot with music over it as a placeholder, or something far more involved, is the kind of question which keeps me up at night.

We do have one other piece of information about that original pilot edit. A certain Peter Brewis used to have an unused version of the theme on his website, as originally used in the pilot. Sadly, his website has long since been deleted, but luckily someonee kept a copy and uploaded it to YouTube. And it’s fucking brilliant. (Visuals mocked up by the uploader, of course.)

I mean, who knows how it would have worked in the episodes as broadcast – it’s bloody long – but it’s lovely to hear for its own sake.

Which leads us – finally – to the oddity. Listen closely to the start of Demolition, as the strains of the broadcast title music start skipping, and then fade away:

[mejsaudio src=”https://dirtyfeed.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/s1e1-opening.wav” volume=”false”]

The Young Ones, Demolition Opening

Nine seconds into that clip, just before the DJ starts speaking, there’s a snatch of a different version of the title music. It doesn’t sound like the broadcast version. It doesn’t sound like Cliff’s original version. It doesn’t even sound like the pilot version, as heard in the video above.

So… presumably, there was yet another version of the song, used for the original opening titles of Demolition? And once the opening title music was changed for the series, the new version was just pasted over the top… leaving that tiny fraction of the original version from the first pilot edit, to confuse us all decades later. Why else would it be there?

Yes, I am keeping myself busy during lockdown, why do you ask?

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Here’s to You, Mrs. Littlefield

Published 3rd April 2020

TV Comedy

Title page for Cheers pilot script

After nearly four decades, what is there new to say about the pilot of Cheers – widely regarded as one of the best television pilots ever made?

We can tick through the Standard Series Facts™ pretty quickly. Sam Malone was originally going to be an NFL player, until Ted Danson was cast. John Ratzenberger originally auditioned for the part of Norm. Before they decided on a bar in Boston, the initial idea was for a show set in a hotel. And you probably know what George Wendt is actually drinking at the bar, right?

If we dig a little deeper, however, we come across the strange tale of Mrs. Littlefield. A character scripted, cast, and shot for the pilot… but cut before air. Well, mostly cut, anyway.

Let’s find out a little about her from Sam Simon, writer and producer on Cheers1:

“There was another regular that was cut out of the pilot, did you know that? Boston is a very racist town, and there was an old woman in a wheelchair, whose name I don’t remember. I think you can see her in the pilot, in the first episode, I should say, because it wasn’t a pilot.2 They wanted to do the reality of Boston a little bit, and the racism of the town is certainly a valid topic for comment.”

Sam Simon, Television Academy Interview (49:24 – 50:05)

Then there’s this reader question on Ken Levine’s blog, another writer and producer on Cheers3:

“In Sam Simon’s amazing Emmy TV Legends interview, he talks about a character that was cut out of the Cheers pilot: A racist woman in a wheelchair. She was supposed to be a regular character, but apparently the Charles Bros/Burrows agreed that her harshness didn’t gel with the rest of the show.

Do you know anything about this?

Yes. The character was named Mrs. Littlefield. She was an opinionated old broad from the D.A.R.4 She was in the pilot and the decision to drop the character was made after it was filmed. Politics just didn’t fit with the mix. So they cut out her part, but there are a few shots here and there where she is still in the background. Just look for a sweet white-haired little old lady who used to have lines.

Since several back-up scripts were in the works before the pilot was filmed, we also had to go back and write her out of those episodes as well.

Again, it was a case of an actor being let go not because they gave a bad performance or did anything wrong. It’s just that the character didn’t mesh with the others.”

Ken Levine, Friday Questions (3rd January 2014)

Sure enough, if we go looking for her, we can indeed see Mrs. Littlefield in her wheelchair throughout the pilot:

Mrs. Littlefield

All of which is fascinating. But what nobody has done – at least as far as I can tell – is examine the original script of the pilot, and written about what Mrs. Littlefield actually said. But surely that script wouldn’t be readily available online…

Oh, hello. Final Draft, dated 16th April 1982. And it contains all of Mrs. Littlefield’s dialogue, every single line of which was edited out of the final episode.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

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  1. Among a million and one other things ↩

  2. You may note that I’m ignoring Sam Simon here, and refer to the first episode as the pilot throughout this article. I don’t know exactly why he doesn’t class it as a pilot; the episode was shot a few months before the rest of Season 1, as detailed here. Many other people who worked on the show refer to it as the pilot, so I’m going to follow their lead. ↩

  3. Among two million and one other things. ↩

  4. Daughters of the American Revolution. ↩

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Something Good About Come Back Mrs. Noah

Published 25th January 2019

TV Comedy

It has to be admitted that nice comments about Come Back Mrs. Noah – Lloyd and Croft’s 70s sitcom about a spacebound housewife – are rather thin on the ground. Having just watched the pilot episode on YouTube, I honestly don’t think it’s quite as bad as its reputation, although doing a racist joke about Notting Hill six minutes into the episode does push your goodwill rather. And the less said about the tea maker gag the better.

But enough about that. I want to highlight something interesting about that pilot, which is an effects technique I’ve never seen before. It takes place in Mission Control, where the ground crew are trying to sort out the fault with the spacecraft. And we get these two consecutive shots of the monitoring equipment they’re using to troubleshoot the fault:

First effects shot
Second effects shot

Clearly, there was only one source available for the yellow overlay oscilloscope effect, but they wanted to show it from two separate angles. The solution? They designed things so the same overlay effect would work for each shot, despite the two shots being entirely different!

You can see it in action here:

It may look a little odd to modern eyes, but it’s a really clever, thinking-outside-the-box solution. You can’t do two different effects? Then make sure your single effect works from two angles.

Brilliant.

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It Ain’t Half A Missing Pilot Title Sequence Mum

Published 21st January 2019

TV Comedy

Today, I want to talk about It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. Not the sad death of Windsor Davies, or whether the programme is racist1. This is Dirty Feed, and I have higher things in mind.

The show premiered in January 1974 on BBC1 with a first series of eight episodes.2 The first episode, however, was a true pilot, recorded a full year before air, and separately from the other seven episodes. David Croft’s autobiography, You Have Been Watching…, p. 196:

“The first pilot programme in January 1973 went very well with the studio audience and featured probably the smallest riot ever experienced by the British in India. There was no room in the studio for a proper full-scale riot mob, and we couldn’t afford one anyway. I made do with about ten shadowy figures in the foreground, but the result didn’t bear examination.3 I was present at the odd riot in India and they are extremely frightening affairs. Police and troops are usually heavily outnumbered and very scared, so ghastly mistakes can easily happen. The remainder of the show was a good pilot and served to introduce the characters and the general thrust of the plots, as any pilot should.”

Despite being shot at a different time to the rest of the series, there really are very few differences between that pilot episode Meet the Gang, and the rest of Series 1. But there is one major change: the closing titles. In the pilot, the gang song is all shot on VT in the studio. For the rest of Series 1, it was completely remounted on film.

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  1. That’s a 50,000 word article, which I am frankly disinclined to write. ↩

  2. Attention boring people: no, not six episodes, despite your claims that every UK sitcom series contains six shows. ↩

  3. Reading this, it is perhaps not surprising that when You Rang, M’Lord? allowed Croft to go to town on the battle sequence at the beginning, he really fucking did so. ↩

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