Another Garden and Oddie script, Garden even
briefly appearing this week in a cameo as a television presenter. This week,
the cameras of 'London Television' are filming a report about student life at
St Swithins'. In the words of Professor Loftus: "Television, Upton
- the cause of so many cases of myopia, bad posture, stagnation of the blood
and premature senility!"
This is an episode in which the set-up is slightly laborious - a succession of scenes of the students either behaving in a stilted manner as soon as the cameras start rolling, or being filmed behaving rowdily - but the pay-off (of the students watching themselves on the eventual televised report) is worth waiting for, rewarding the viewer with the novel experience of seeing what has already happened from a new perspective. Within the context of a Doctor sitcom, the report itself works in a different comic register, which requires a level of quick-witted televisual literacy on the part of the viewer to work out what's wrong about the sequencing and editing of how its been put together. Also relatively tricky to put together in the studio, I would have thought. Might this final scene, which requires an edited version of scenes from the recording to be assembled and fed through a monitor on the set, have been recorded at a later date?
This is an episode in which the set-up is slightly laborious - a succession of scenes of the students either behaving in a stilted manner as soon as the cameras start rolling, or being filmed behaving rowdily - but the pay-off (of the students watching themselves on the eventual televised report) is worth waiting for, rewarding the viewer with the novel experience of seeing what has already happened from a new perspective. Within the context of a Doctor sitcom, the report itself works in a different comic register, which requires a level of quick-witted televisual literacy on the part of the viewer to work out what's wrong about the sequencing and editing of how its been put together. Also relatively tricky to put together in the studio, I would have thought. Might this final scene, which requires an edited version of scenes from the recording to be assembled and fed through a monitor on the set, have been recorded at a later date?
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