Doug directing bbc3 pilot

Doug Naylor Productions?

Dave Lister Seductions?

Big Facial Eruptions?

Killer Robot Destructions?

Architect Edwin Lutyens?

Darth Vader Destructions?

Big Hairy Ballsacks?

Dental Plan Beards?

Big fat hairy cocks!

Gnarls Barkley Enemas?

See you in ten minutes?

> See you in ten minutes?

The line that killed my dreams.

I’ve run out of cocking puns.

So what is it?

I haven’t seen one, no one has, but I’m assuming its a dead horse covered in whip lesions

a dead horse covered in whip lesions?

You see as a joke wears on over a period of a few days, the metaphorical horse gets weaker and weaker until it dies and you’re left just beating a big carcass with a stick

Anyone fancy a kebab?

Fluffy Wok’s horse has just died

I’d prefer chicken.

Atleast the horse’s stomach is pumped.

So what is it?

someone punch him out!

Hmmmm. Surely the only comedy that matters was shooting this week, according to Armando Iannucci.

Armando’s involvement really does seal the deal for me. Promisingly, he says they’re ‘typical Alan episodes’ with no mentions of Foster’s within. I don’t mind if it’s just Alan doing a radio show (something new, we can presume, not Radio Norwich) as those segments were always funny, as was, obviously, the Knowing Me, Knowing You radio series.

I bet there’s no laughter track… It still riles me that they ‘apologised’ for it’s use on IAP series 2. If anything suited laughter it was IAP series 2! Just imagine the Bond scenes without it or - ‘don’t put your foot on there’ ‘I’m not, I’m just doing a cockney walk!’ - without an audience laugh. It NEEDS the laughter.

Who’s “they”? I seem to remember Armando being very stubborn in its defence.

Worth pointing out that the radio show bits in I’m Alan Partridge were shot at on location at Unique’s studios, and then shown to the audience to get the laugh track. So whilst there’s still a debate as to whether the shows will work as well without an audience (and I don’t think they’ll add one), it’s not like Coogan could use the audience for timing or anything.

Having said that , I wonder whether the edits on IAP were done with the audience reaction in mind, which could help. One thing I noticed when creating my Partridge soundtrack is that there’s some fairly terrible edits in there, when you’re concentrating on the audio. The start of the Peter Baxendale-Thomas interview is really dodgy, and it’s massively clear that the most famous line in the series is actually: “Oh, f-fuck off!”

Just looking at it now Armando actually apologized in a pretty sarcastic way to people who didn’t like the laughter. I must have read that at some point and taken it seriously.

It did seem to be an issue at the time, as though people had watched a couple of episodes of The Office or the League series 3 (which I think aired right after Partridge series 2, if I remember) and suddenly forgot that countless sitcoms that came before had audience laughter.

There were even some fucking cretins who complained about the laughter on series 2, as they remembered there not being any on series 1. Even though there was.

(nice factoid from the IAP2 commentaries was the fact that despite being a four-walled set, the caravan scenes were shot in front of an audience - the audience looked down on it from above…)

I still can’t believe how realistic the set looks. In the parts between the caravan and the house no-one would say ‘that’s in a studio’, it’s lit to perfection.