15/01/23 Update! Please see here for a version of this piece that, er, isn't totally wrong after the third paragraph.
So, I'm once again talking about a subject which has become what this blog has become best known for over the last few years: the deeply obscure Children's ITV serial The Diamond Brothers: South By South East. If you are new to the blog, you may wish to acquaint yourself with the whole saga before reading on.
But the most important thing to know here is: On 9 April 1991, ITV attempted to broadcast episode 3, but partway through there was a technical fault they couldn't fix. One week later, on 16 April, they picked up episode 3 from where they left off, then showed episode 4. This resulted in a fair amount of oddities, which you can read about on the link above, but one thing I still didn't know even after the series resurfaced was where exactly the cut-off was, as when Neil James -- who provided me with his copy -- was recording the series back in 1991, he managed to pretty successfully splice the end of the 9 April interrupted transmission and the 16 April chunk.
However, the Twitter account Glad You Remember noted that they had a memory of where it might have happened from watching the original broadcast. If you go and look episode 3 up on YouTube, then the line they cite happens about 16 minutes in. Early on in the next scene, at just after 16:30, there is a sudden jump which, once you're looking out for it, doesn't look like tape damage, but a different recording cutting in. So I am happy to consider that particular matter closed: that is indeed where the transmission fault happened. (A previous post on the matter noted that the 16 April recommencement had a hastily added title card reading "EPISODE 3 CONT."; this is not on the extant copy, but it's easy to imagine it appearing during the long pan across the railings at the top of the scene.)
But then, on 16 April, airing that missing section would have resulted in the Diamond Brothers' timeslot being seven and a half minutes longer than usual. Can we work out exactly how they would have coped with that?
Well, way back when in December 2017, Steve Williams sent me the Radio Times listings for episode 1:
An immediate solution presents itself: Presuming the schedule for later weeks was pretty much the same, ITV would've just scrapped the "Cartoon" at 5pm (which would've been a Merrie Melody) to accommodate the extra running time of South by South East. That seems like such an obvious thing to do that it's tempting to just assume that's exactly what happened... but might the TV listings for 16 April have been able to reflect this? Thanks to Stuart Ian Burns, I have The Independent's listing for that very day:
So, yes, it seems the listings were in time to take it into account, and CITV did just drop the Merrie Melody for that week (and also presumably the week before, given -- as famously documented -- they threw back to CITV continuity whilst trying to fix the problem on the 9 April broadcast; one assumes they kept going in the hope they'd be able to show the remaining seven minutes until CITV ran out of time).
Oh, and one final note: on 16 April, the exact sequence of events was this: CITV showed the missing bit of episode 3 with opening titles thrown on and the end credits removed, briefly went back to the in-vision continuity fronted by Tommy Boyd, then went straight back to episode 4 with the title sequence removed. Most of Boyd's link bridging the remaining one-third of ep 3 and ep 4 is cut off on the YouTube upload, but it is on the copy I have: Boyd amusingly notes, perhaps calling back to the 20 minutes of dead air he'd had to present the previous week, "that was the last part of last week's episode... now, fingers crossed, here comes episode 4, 'Eighty-Six'!"
Thanks again to Glad You Remember and Stuart Ian Burns
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