video projects
It might be understandable that a sitcom where “nothing happens” would not be considered worth watching and would inevitably be disliked by people who expected the laugh-a-minute chaos of some tv sitcoms.
With that in mind, there seems little hope for this very niche sitcom, hidden away on Monday at 10:00pm on BBC Two. Except that the apparent simplicity of ‘The Royle Family’ belies the genius writing of Caroline Ahern and Craig Cash, and their relate-ably indolent tv watching family.
The BBC Comedy Playhouse episode ‘Are You Being Served?’ was broadcast on 8 September 1972 and a series began in March 1973.
The sitcom, based in an already out-dated department store, was a hit with UK audiences and was popular in English-speaking countries worldwide. In this tribute we bid a proper farewell to the managers, shop assistants and customer of Grace Brother’s department store.
In this trip to the ‘TV Pilot Graveyard,’ we’re pulling back the curtain on the chaotic, often absurd, world of media sitcoms.
Whether it’s the urgent deadline of a newspaper office, the ego-driven chaos of a TV studio, the quirky personalities behind the mic at a radio station, or the glamorous (and not-so-glamorous) lives of magazine editors, this subgenre has always promised a behind-the-scenes look at the content we consume. But for every ‘Drop the Dead Donkey’ or ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ there’s a whole newsroom of rejected pilots. Let’s dig into the stories that almost broke, but instead, just broke down.
In this instalment of the ‘TV Pilot Graveyard’, we’re celebrating the unbreakable, often dysfunctional, bond of friendship – or at least, the sitcom pilots that tried to.
The ‘best mates’ sitcom is a cornerstone of comedy, built on shared experiences, mutual exasperation, and that one friend who always gets you into trouble. But for every ‘Friends’ or ‘Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps’, there are countless duos, trios, and quartets who never got past their first episode. Join me as we explore the friendships that fizzled out before they even began – and ponder why these comedic friendships hit the cutting room floor.
The ‘TV Pilot Graveyard’ is the series where we unearth the pilot episodes that never quite made it to our screens. In this video we’re diving into the chaotic world of the flat share sitcom. From mismatched personalities crammed into questionable living arrangements to the endless saga of who’s doing the dishes.
This subgenre has been a fertile ground for comedy – and, as you’ll see, a surprisingly large number of rejected ideas. Get ready to meet the aspiring actors, the struggling artists, and the perpetually unemployed who almost became your favourite roommates, but instead, ended up in the TV Pilot Graveyard.
We all love a good British sitcom, don’t we? But for every hit show, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of ideas that never make it past a single episode. The pilot.
There are some well-documented failed pilots, shows based on intriguing ideas but, for various reasons, they didn’t get commissioned. But what about the really forgotten ones? The phantom pilots of British television. The ones from decades past, some before the Internet chronicled every single detail. We know the titles, who wrote them, maybe who was in the cast … but the stories? They’re lost to the mists of time.
In this video, we’re going on an archaeological dig into the forgotten sitcom pilots of the 1970s and 1980s, to try and discover what they could have been.
They were the ‘Home Guard’ that captured the heart of a nation. At its peak, ‘Dad’s Army’ had ratings of 18 million, with nine seasons from 1968 to 1977, plus a radio version, a stage show, and two films.
Today, we’re looking past the ‘stupid boy’ and the ‘doomed’ catchphrases to uncover what really happened to the heroes of ‘Dad’s Army’.
In the fourth and final part of my mini-series about the unbroadcast tv sitcom pilot pilot ‘The Jewel in the Crown, Southall, Middx’, we ask why did the BBC bury this pilot?
In the third part of my mini-series looking at the unbroadcast tv sitcom pilot ‘The Jewel in the Crown, Southall, Middx’, we look at how it failed and see how this pilot could never have worked in 1985.
In the second part of my mini-series about the BBC sitcom pilot ‘The Jewel in the Crown, Southall, Middx’, we look at how this new pilot introduced Spike and Eric, the bogus restaurant premise, and showed how the audience reacted to seeing a relic of an outdated comedy style.
The BBC didn’t want you to see it. However, I have seen a copy of a studio tape so let’s see what actually happens.