Re-Editing the Guilty

Here's a thing. BBC Two's new sitcom, Defending the Guilty, started life as a one-off pilot last year, off the back of which a full series was commissioned. That full series began airing this week, with the pilot repeated on Tuesday, followed by five new episodes.

That pilot, now identified as Series 1 Episode 1, is up on iPlayer here, and is identified as having been originally broadcast on 19 September 2018. The part of Nessa is played by Claudia Jessie, and Pia is played by Hanako Footman, both of whom go on to play those roles in the following five "series proper" episodes. However, according to IMDb, when the pilot was originally broadcast in 2018, those role were played by Jessica Ransom and Emily Berrington.

So all the scenes with those characters in the "repeat" of the pilot, which is also the version on the iPlayer, are reshoots (the British Comedy Guide concurs with this), necessitated when Ransom and Berrington turned out not to be available for the full series... and yet the iPlayer makes no difference between the two versions, with the original pilot no longer available to view, and the revised version listed as being the one that was first broadcast in 2018. This is probably an error rather than anything else, but you may not be totally surprised to learn that it annoys me.