The Camera Never Lies

If you search for "would i lie to you" on Shutterstock, you will be met with around 500 images related to said comedy panel show, most of which were taken on set during the fourth and fifth series. Quite a few of these actually depict moments that didn't make the edit of the final programmes. In some cases, the exact context is lost to time.

This particular photo might not seem remarkable at first; it's David Mitchell reading out a story which didn't make the cut. But back in the day there was a very good fan forum, That Mitchell & Webb Fansite, which reported back from each recording from Series 3 up to partway through Series 7 with, among other things, a full list of stories from each show, but not whether they were true or not. Sadly, only the Series 3-4 ones are still online (the forum having closed and gone offline very abruptly), having also been posted, and still preserved, at this LiveJournal community.

ZZZapped

The Children's ITV series ZZZap! notched up ten series and 140 episodes in just under nine years, airing between 1993 and 2001. The unusual concept of the series was that it was a comic you could watch (with Christmas editions being styled after annuals and Summer specials after, er, Summer Specials), but if you're not familiar with it, then going and looking up a few episodes on YouTube will probably be more helpful than attempting to describe such an outside-the-box show; primarily aimed at deaf children, it featured no intelligible dialogue and told stories through visuals and text where necessary, with several regular segments that were variously based around slapstick sketches, arts and crafts, puzzle pages, and a section oddly prescient of Taskmaster where children sourced from a local stage school had to attempt challenges ("Tricky Dicky's Mission Impossible" in Series 1, replaced with "Daisy Dares You" from the second series after the original character was deemed to be too frightening -- one of several tweaks apparently made after the mood was judged to have been a bit too surreal in places).

The first series also featured a unique opening sequence not used on the others, where a boy purchases an issue of ZZZap! in a shopping centre, and uses the attached "Free TV Zapper" to cause the comic to grow to 18 feet in size, to the mild shock of the other shoppers. This sequence was filmed in Chequers Shopping Centre in Maidstone (still open today but now known as The Mall Maidstone, and used for several other sequences in this and later series), and the prop comics have been placed alongside other, real comics the shop in question (there's nothing in the sequence to provide confirmation but it looks like it's probably a WHSmith) was selling that day: