Editing Bumpers Badly

Lately, I have been making my way through Men Behaving Badly for the first time. Here is a thing I noticed about it which I think I can get a blog post out of.

The first two series of MBB were broadcast on ITV in 1992. After Thames (who produced the show in association with Hartswood Films) lost their regional ITV franchise for weekdays, ITV declined to commission any more series, and the show moved to the BBC for Series 3 onwards in 1994. This means, of course, that the first two series were originally broadcast with advert break bumpers.

On the Complete Series DVD's (the re-release from a few years ago which includes the Comic Relief skits) versions of Series 1, those bumpers are cut out really sloppily - there is a sudden freeze-frame which fades into the next scene, and the musical cue that led into the ad break is still present. On the second series, however, the ad breaks are removed totally seamlessly.

A possible explanation for this discrepancy offers itself. In early 1996, the BBC repeated Series 2, but they never repeated Series 1, presumably because it was the only one not to feature Neil Morrissey. So, this is only my theory, but I think the versions of Series 2 the DVD has are the edits the BBC did for that repeat run - they would've cared about making sure the ad breaks were edited out smoothly, and might have had access to the original footage. Whereas the edits for Series 1 were probably done for some home video release (either the DVD or, perhaps more likely, an earlier VHS release) which might have lacked the time or resources necessary for a seamless edit.

By the by, I also noted that the BBC's repeats of Series 2 were shown in a half-hour timeslot, despite the fact those episodes only run to 24-25 minutes (having been originally shown in a half-hour slot including ads), although I doubt there's anything too mysterious about it - schedules need nice clean hourly or half-hourly junctions, so they probably just made up the difference with a few minutes of adverts between programmes. (Update! Thanks to Steve Williams for pointing out there was a second repeat run of Series 2 in 1999, and on that occasion they were shown in a 25-minute slot.)

As ever, if you can provide any further information (such as how the ad breaks originally looked on ITV's broadcasts, or comparisons between the DVD and the BBC's repeats for Series 2), please don't hesitate to get in touch.