31 on 4

Between 29 September 2019 and 17 May 2020, Donald Trump was impeached for the first time, the United Kingdom held a general election to decide who out of the two worst people eligible for the position would become Prime Minister, then went on to leave the European Union, the primaries for the 2020 US election got underway, that actress from Casualty referred to Greta Thunberg as "Sharon" on Celebrity Mastermind, and then the COVID-19 pandemic shut down most of the planet.

With all that going on, you'd be forgiven for forgetting that between those two dates Fox aired the 22 episodes that make up Season 31 of The Simpsons, which began airing in the UK on Sky One on 24 December 2019, and then weekly from 17 January to 29 May 2020... although there are a few little footnotes on those broadcasts we'll get onto in due course. At some point this autumn, Channel 4 will bring those episodes (or at least nearly all of them) to free-to-air television; the twentieth season of the show they've premiered, and almost certainly the sixteenth consecutive one to debut in the tried and trusted early evening slot on weekdays -- but that looks like it might be changing just a bit, as the scrapping of the terrestrial broadcasts of Hollyoaks means that from Monday 25th September, Our Favourite Family moves back half an hour to 6.30pm. Time will tell if this is a permanent change, I suppose.

For the fifth year running, then, I present my guide to possible cuts, censorship and outright cancellations to watch out for; as ever, I advise you to keep an eye on Wesley Mead's UK Scheduling Information page at The Simpsons Archive for news of when exactly these episodes will arrive on C4, and I'll be back with a full list of edits and whatnot after they do.

My Scintillating Observations on the Recording Order of the First Series of Red Dwarf

The first series of Red Dwarf was originally scheduled to be recorded and broadcast in the following order:

1. "The End"

2. "Bodysnatcher"

3. "Balance of Power"

4. "Waiting for God"

5. "Future Echoes"

6. "Confidence & Paranoia"

However, before the episodes could be recorded, an electrician's strike at the BBC put paid to the planned filming dates in early 1987. The series was eventually remounted towards the end of the year, but as the story famously goes, during the hiatus, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor took a second look at the scripts and decided to drop the planned second episode, "Bodysnatcher". They rewrote the ending of "Confidence & Paranoia" so, instead of successfully resurrecting Kochanski as a hologram, Lister unwittingly brought a second hologram of Rimmer online instead, and wrote a new finale, "Me²", following on from this. The episodes were thus recorded in the following order:

1. "The End"

2. "Balance of Power"

3. "Waiting for God"

4. "Future Echoes"

5. "Confidence & Paranoia"

6. "Me²"

(7. Reshoots to "The End")

"Future Echoes" turned out so well that it was bumped up from fourth to second, giving a broadcast order as follows:

1. "The End"

2. "Future Echoes"

3. "Balance of Power"

4. "Waiting for God"

5. "Confidence & Paranoia"

6. "Me²"

The story of "Bodysnatcher" getting dropped is a pretty well-known one to any Dwarf fan, but the changing of "Confidence & Paranoia" seems to be a less-discussed one -- had Grant Naylor already changed their minds about this ending when they decided to drop "Bodysnatcher"? Were the two decisions made in tandem? Was the originally planned ending a consequence of deciding to bump all the episodes after "Bodysnatcher" up one and write a new finale, rather than write a new second episode?