the thick red line – Dirty Feed

The Thick Red Line, Part One

Published 31st October 2021

Inspector Fowler at his desk, greeting the audience

How I experienced The Thin Blue Line originally is lost to the mists of time. Did I actually watch it on its first TX in 1995/6?

I can’t help but feel I must have done. But I have no memories of it. I was 14 when it first aired; I was probably too busy worrying about whether anybody would like to touch my testicles. No, my first real memory of watching the show was in 2004 – newly moved in with my girlfriend, and no longer worried about my testicles. I distinctly remember lying on her bed; we had no telly in the bedroom, so we just watched the DVD on her PC. I remember us both absolutely screaming in hysterics. It’s one of my fondest memories.

It perhaps explains why I can occasionally be so defensive about the show: however and whenever I first watched it, it’s now mine.

All of which means that my experience with the show is very much with the version released on DVD. And for Series 2, that version is really quite different from the originally transmitted versions of the show. Indeed, most of the episodes have at least three full minutes of additional material added. These extended versions were first released on VHS in 1997, and have become the generally familiar edits of these shows for most people over the years.¹ Indeed, for a fair amount of time, the original transmitted edits became genuinely obscure.

That is, until the BBC recently decided to upload the whole series to iPlayer. And sure enough, the iPlayer versions are the original broadcast versions, not the extended versions we’ve all been watching on DVD for years. Which gives us a nice easy way of seeing what the extra bits were on the VHS/DVD releases, without having to find off-airs from the time. It also gives us the chance to ask: is either edit clearly a superior version of the show?

Let’s find out. With this piece I’m assuming that people are most familiar with the DVD versions, so I’ve labelled things as [cut for broadcast/iPlayer], even though the broadcast versions were available first. All times are taken from the DVD versions. Programme synopses are taken from the Radio Times. Bad opinions are taken from my head.

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Let’s not discuss the bastardised widescreen versions sitting on Amazon Prime. Not today, anyway. ↩

The Thick Red Line, Part Two

Published 7th November 2021

TV Comedy

Good evening, everybody.

“Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” Of course, these days, it seems that comedy equals tragedy, full stop. Gone are the days when BBC1 regularly broadcast harmless comedy hijinks on a daily basis. These days, it seems to be nothing but swearing, people looking depressed, and unwanted bodily fluids.

But I digress. There’s nothing like a good, classic half hour of sitcom to raise the spirits. But as we shall see, editing down your sitcom to half an hour is like becoming a royal eunuch: more cuts are needed than you would strictly prefer.

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The Thick Red Line, Part Three

Published 20th November 2021

TV Comedy

And so we reach the third and final part of this series of articles looking at the extended VHS/DVD versions of The Thin Blue Line.¹ To recap: Part One looked at the first three episodes. Part Two looked at the next three episodes. There’s just one more episode to go. Why does it get its own article?

The answer becomes clear when we look at the sheer amount of footage in the extended version compared to the broadcast. There’s fully 10 minutes of extra material here. This, then, is the tale of how you can edit down a 40 minute sitcom episode to a 30 minute sitcom episode for broadcast, and still have it make sense. More or less, anyway.

As ever, deleted material in the broadcast version is rendered [like this].

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In answer to a question I was asked about these pieces: only Series 2 got these extended edits. None were released for Series 1. ↩