The complete 28/3/92 Isle of Wight Going Live edition, including the Chipmunks and Raccoons episodes"
This is a brilliant programme, technically it's absolutely amazing. The only odd moment comes during Feed The Dog where a caller seems somewhat distressed, but they don't dwell on that. Richard Marson, who was the Assistant Floor Manager on the show, talked about it on Twitter a while back, he said they did a complete run-through of the whole thing the day before (Pip does refer to that when they're at the lighthouse) and it was great fun to work on.
This was the last of four episodes of Going Live which were entirely live on location (they did a Gone Live from Longleat but it was pre-recorded), following Center Parcs in the 1988/89 series (that was in November, on Bonfire Night in fact as it ended with a fireworks diplay, the rest all in March), then a cross-channel ferry in 1989/90 and the Watercress Line steam railway in 1990/91.
Anna Home said in her book about kids' telly that the latter was the most incredible technical feat ever attempted, and indeed somewhere on YouTube there's a clip of Saz visiting the carriage decked out with all the technical equipment. I was hugely impressed at the time by the cross-channel one, it absolutely blew me away and I couldn't believe they could do an entire episode of Going Live from a moving ship in two countries - and I was suitably inspired by it that when I was writing my made-up TV schedules in exercise books (we all did it... didn't we?), I invented endless live shows from cars and boats and so on, based on that episode.
In this Isle of Wight one all the graphics and effects work as normal so presumably it came through the usual TC7 gallery rather than an OB truck, I guess?
It was a two-part special entitled Benny Hill's World Tour: New York, filmed in 1991 following his axe from Thames. It was produced by DLT (the American distributor of Thames shows) because there was still an appetite for Benny Hill in the states. (well, there was still an appetite in the UK too but that's another story)
Anyway, by the time it aired in the UK, Benny had died and it was renamed Benny Hill Unseen.
Yes, and Benny's renaissance was already well underway when he died. He was dropped by Thames in 1989 but in 1991, not only was he doing this but there was also an Omnibus about him on the Beeb which I think went some way to improving his reputation. Then ITV were actually in the middle of a repeat run of his shows when he died, and as mentioned Central were already planning new shows with him (which of course they still made, with Freddie Starr). So his wilderness years didn't last very long at all, he was back on ITV within three years of his departure.
