It's been quite nice having a bunch of Christmas specials to watch on BBC iPlayer this year, but I just came across The Two Ronnies Christmas Sketchbook, which I'm sure ran for an hour when it was originally broadcast, especially as Ronnie B called it a "bumper" edition.
But inexplicably, it's been cut drastically to only 19 minutes. Even tomorrow's airing of it on BBC Four is only a half hour slot. Does anyone know why it's been butchered so badly? I don't recall anything grossly offensive by today's standards, but even then, Porridge is preceded by an on-screen warning about such a thing and an objectively racist joke is still intact.
Isn’t it just a short edit that the BBC have used as Christmas Day filler the last few years?
Although it is the one episode of The Two Ronnies Sketchbook that’s not available on BritBox.
Ronnie C’s introduction/tribute used to be available on YouTube but the only version available now of the full episode is a repeat from 2011 that doesn’t have it.
Smith and Jones is a very strange oddity programme-wise, its almost as if they like to pretend it never happened, though it was on air in one form or another for best part of 15 years (and of course they were both prolific on Not The Nine O'Clock News as well, though it was rarely seen outside of UK Gold until the re-edited versions appeared in 1995 - which they were also happy to repeat ad-nauseum).
Regarding the Two Ronnies, it looks like the entire run was edited into 30 minute episodes after it appeared on Gold and it seems the BBC have decided to use these instead of the 60 minute originals. I suspect the Sketchbook is something they believe can be hacked to any length they need to fill a gap in the schedule - find a suitable section of material and just top and tail it with an intro/outro and Bob's your uncle.
It's interesting that The Two Ronnies Sketchbook still airs as filler but the Smith and Jones Sketchbook did one series and hasn't been shown since.
As Neil says, nothing much that's Smith and Jones related gets repeated now. In recent years all we've had is the Home-made Xmas Video on BBC Four, and a compilation show from 1995 shown when Mel Smith died — even then they didn't repeat the sketchbook. To be fair though, the tribute programme for Mel Smith shown at Christmas 2013 was excellent.
I wonder if there's some contractual reason why it doesn't appear in any form on TV anymore — they did have a large number of writers over the years, giving some people their first breaks in TV comedy. It wasn't hyper topical like Not the Nine O'Clock News was, so repeating or making available full episodes shouldn't be as big of a problem in that regard.
I've just remembered, there is something S&J related that gets repeated every year - the video for Mel Smith & Kim Wilde's Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree.
Smith & Jones was made by an indie... I think one of the earliest BBC shows to be, maybe that has something to do with why it isn't as readily repeated? As it was made by Talkback, I'm assuming Fremantle have the rights and the BBC would have to buy them in, which they don't have to do with the Two Ronnies.
Wiki suggests Chris Langham was a regular contributor to Alas Smith & Jones, and Langham was convicted in the late 2000s on possession of inappropriate material. As you might expect he promptly vanished from the limelight for a while, although he has appeared in work since then, but nothing particularly mainstream. This may (or may not) be a contributory factor as to why the S&J show is seemingly absent in any form including the Sketchbook.