This Time with Alan Partridge

Summer Wine was even still shot on film, presumably for that vintage look, long after almost everything else had transitioned to video.

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.

Frasier apparently double taped their episodes, leading to some editing of the two episodes taped together to create one episode for transmission. This caused a little bit of continuity errors with certain clocks and props on occasion apparently.

That's not really the case. Summer Wine has shot in a number of different ways - and actually switched from all video to all film ISTR.

Summer Wine was originally multicam studio video interiors with single camera 16 film exteriors - like most sit coms in the 70s and early 80s. Then, once single camera location video became available at a decent quality, the show transitioned to single cam video exteriors ISTR (shot by the film dept not OBs I think).

Frasier may have shot each episode twice, but they weren't taped, they were filmed. Frasier was shot on 35mm film, not video tape.

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

The outdoor backdrop on One Foot In The Grave is very ropey. You can often see the point at which it meets the floor and in at least one scene you can clearly see a studio light.

Actually on the subject of One Foot In The Grave, they also used an elaborate set which had four walls. The living room faced the audience, but if a scene was taking place in the kitchen, the audience would be in the background so they'd roll a fourth wall into place - sometimes mid take.

In this image the audience is behind the wall you can see through the doorway.

You can understand why they made the switch though when you look at how location heavy the episodes were by the late 80s/early 90s, getting an audience, cast & crew in the studio to only shoot a few scenes and the audience watching most of it on monitors was probably an inconvenience. Changing it to being without an audience presumably meant they could shoot multiple studio scenes for different episodes at the same time and get it all done a lot quicker.

As the series went on both neighbours on both sides of Victor's house had the same layout. Did they just dress up the one set to look like another house or did they make two more sets that looked the same?

Frasier may have shot each episode twice, but they weren't taped, they were filmed. Frasier was shot on 35mm film, not video tape.