This Time with Alan Partridge

No I think the way I'm Alan Partridge was filmed was unique. It was the creative decision of the people involved and not to do with the period in which it was made.


The Thin Blue Line would certainly have been a traditional setup, Ben Elton is a traditionalist when it comes to sitcom, always aspiring to Dad's Army etc with ensemble casts who play to the audience.

It's not a modern concept for sitcoms to have sets hidden away from the audience. The upstairs of Fawlty Towers was at the back of the studio and relayed to the audience using monitors.

I imagine having some sets hidden has to be a neccisity once you're getting beyond having a certain amount, there's only so much you can have open to the audience, even if you film in a big studio like TC1.

Presumably the bizarre up-then-down layout of the top of the staircase was so that cast could still be seen coming 'up' the stairs, but still end up on studio floor level. (I think the Craggy Island parochial house had similar architecture.)

Famously, the seventh series of Red Dwarf was a four wall arrangement. Seemingly shown to a studio audience at a later date. The consensus seemed to be that (like so many things from that series!) it didn’t quite work and they reverted back to a live studio audience for the next series.

Yes, normally there would be the two or three main sets open to the audience and any others behind that which the audience could only see via monitors. That's different to a 4-wall set... the ones behind would still have 3 'walls'.


Of course if they had more scenes than they had room for sets then they'd pre-record those and play them to the audience. The same for anything they couldn't do, or didn't want to do in front of an audience.

Yes, this always puzzled me as a kid.... why did they have steps going up then down? But yes it's so that they didn't have to raise the landing set above the studio floor.


Though the stairs on Father Ted are very similar.... I have always wondered if they're more a homage to Fawlty Towers rather than a necessity

Yes, in Richard Webber's book about One Foot, it mentions that David Renwick and Susan Belbin decided to build the set like that so that scenes could start in the living room and move into the kitchen, and so on, to make it more natural. It's the kind of thing that helped make it such a great series.



And it's at this point I barge in and say that I was in the audience for an episode of I'm Alan Partridge Series 1, specifically Watership Alan with the farmers. Although the bits in the radio studio were pre-recorded, the bit where he interviews Chris Morris as the farmers' spokesman was done in the studio, "round the back". Coogan "hosted" the whole recording as Partridge and brought Morris to the front to see the audience, saying "This is Chris Morris, a very mysterious man, you're not going to say much to the audience, are you?", to which Morris replied "Not really, no", and then shuffled off.

FUN FACT: The tickets said Knowing Me Knowing You Series 2 on them.

I'd often wondered about the set for Patrick and Pippa's house in One Foot In The Grave which was the exact same layout as the Meldrews'. Did they construct two very similar interior sets in the studio, or was it a case that the one set was redressed between takes, changing furnishings, furniture, etc.?

I think John Cleese has said the only reason for the ridiculous stairs arrangement was so he could be seen careering madly around the top of the stairs only to have to come down some more. It’s all part of the comedy (though I have stayed in hotels where there are peculiar sets of stairs just like that!)

There seems to be some genuine amazement in this thread that sets are actually sets. Good set design should mean that the audience doesn’t actually see a set but sees a drawing room of an 18th century mansion or whatever.

The subject of canned or dubbed laughter is a very interesting one. A lot of people think they can spot it a mile away. It’s a lot harder than you might think though. In the U.K. a lot of sitcoms have always been done in front of a studio audience (to the point where it’s never been necessary to tell the viewing audience - unlike American sitcoms where they added a voiceover to the beginning to point this out!). However, location sitcoms like Last of the Summer Wine were (certainly in latter series) shown to an audience after editing, often in the BBC Radio Theatre, for the laughter track recording. Summer Wine was even still shot on film, presumably for that vintage look, long after almost everything else had transitioned to video. Live Laughter tracks have also often been supplemented in post. You’ll never get the same reaction to a joke if, for whatever reason, it has to be done again. I’m sure there have been flat nights when an audience isn’t finding a show as hilarious as the producers want and so they’ll add in some laughter afterwards. Quite where the line lies is debatable and often this is when the viewing audience might start to smell a rat.

An interesting approach to live audience reaction was taken with Victoria Wood’s dinnerladies. She had heard that in America for (I think) Cheers, they’d perform each episode twice for a live audience, tweaking the script in between to make it as funny and as tight as they could. Victoria mentioned this to Geoff Posner who decided they might as well record both performances as well. VW would often rewrite whole chunks for the second night, much to the annoyance of the cast! This extravagance was made up for by the fact that dinnerladies was (I think) entirely done within one set.

The BBC have officially announced the commission of The Goes Wrong Show, six brand new shows to be recorded in front of a live audience up in Dock10 Studios at Media City in Salford, where they also filmed the Christmas Carol Goes Wrong.

I would love to be in the audience for those shows. Filming starts in March.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2019/goes-wrong