After you've gone

We did something interesting Saturday night. Through the Welsh School we know a couple of comedy writers and through them we had a chance to join the audience for the recording of an episode of BBC sitcom After you've gone that goes out on Friday nights, now in its second series. Lead actors Nicholas Lyndhurst and Celia Imrie (as his live in mother-in-law) are the best in the game and one could see why.
I've never been to anything like that before so it was all new to me. BBC TV Centre has a certain familiarity from seeing it on the box. It's a rather cold and clinical place and the memorabilia on show serve only to give it a museum feel.

Studio 6 was set up with three or four parallel sets representing the Venables' London home. Three or four large microphone booms dominate the area in front of these. There are also lots of lights and the cameras themselves. All in all this means that you can't see much of the live action but it all comes up on large and small high-definition screens in front of you.

The first scene was set in a pub that they had set up at the back. The first take looked fine to me but they did it again and we had a bit of corpsing from Lyndhurst and others. Half the programme had been pre-recorded so we got to see those scenes too at appropriate points.

The live scenes were all shot twice and usually with a few 'pick ups' as they call them to add in. It amazed me to see how well the actors were able to replicate their words and actions, although they would occasional fluff a line. After each take the editing room behind us would check that they had what they wanted and once that was achieved the next scene was set up.

The floor manager (Clare) ran all this but the audience were kept on track by a 'warm up man' called Bobby Bragg. Without his coaxing, explanations and humour it would have been easy to be distracted but he was able to sustain our interest so that pretty genuine audience reaction was engendered. They were also taking shots of the audience for the DVD so five minutes of fame may lay ahead for us.
After the show we had a quick view of the high tech editing suite then spent a short while in a packed Green Room 2 with the actors, writers, etc. I think we were introduced to Windsor Davies's daughter and I saw Ruby Wax there (she is married to the director Ed Bye - the butt of most of Mr Bragg's jokes). I asked Ian Brown our host what happens if someone breaks their leg before the end of the series and he had some nice such stories from previous shows he has done (Drop the Dead Donkey and My family). He'd written this particular episode and it wasn't difficult to be complimentary about it. The story is a stock one but to write a whole half an hour of pretty funny dialogue like that is quite an achievement. It's a bit like pop music though - very clever stuff but rather ephemeral.

The programme goes out some time in October. I read of the series that 'the general consensus seems to be that it isn't anything amazing but if you have nothing better to do for half-an-hour then it is a fun way to spend your time' which sounds about right. Few sitcoms rise higher than that I guess.

More on the programme here