Shot for Shot

On 29 December 2007, the second series of the BBC's latest adaptation of Robin Hood came to an end with a highly contentious finale where Guy of Gisborne stabbed Marian to death in a jealous rage.

It's perhaps not the most interesting thing about these episodes, but although produced as two 45-minute episodes, titled A Good Day to Die and We Are Robin Hood, they ended up originally airing as one single 90-minute compilation, on account of the BBC deciding to strip their Oliver Twist adaptation across five nights from Tuesday to Saturday, meaning no episode of Hood aired on the 22nd December.

All subsequent repeats, home media releases and streaming versions presented the story as the original separate episodes, so the compilation version -- only seen on the first UK broadcast, literally in the same week BBC iPlayer was launched and off-air copies of things started becoming a bit harder to come by -- became rather obscure.¹ However, I've been furnished with a copy of that original airing by Jim Lynn of VHiStory, and I am tremendously grateful to him for making this post possible. Because it isn't quite the case that they just stuck the two episodes together.

All timings given are for the compilation, and as we might expect from its seemingly quite-late-in-the-day nature, it takes until near the end of part 1 for the two versions to diverge:

40:42

The compilation version has an extra location tag at the start of this scene, 'NEAR PORTSMOUTH'.

However, on the episodic version (the one on iPlayer and the DVD), the sound of the location tag 'shooting' onscreen is still plainly audible despite the tag itself not being there.

My conclusion is that this was decided to be redundant at the eleventh hour, it was hastily removed from the episodic version, but left in the compilation; by mistake? Or maybe it was felt to be less superfluous in the context of the feature-length edit?

42:58

The 'spinning target' segue, which marks the transition between the penultimate and last scenes of nearly every episode, is cut from the compilation version.

43:25

This marks the end of A Good Day to Die, and the point at which it is spliced together with We Are Robin Hood. This results in the following changes:

The "To Be Continued" caption is cut, obviously, as well as the 'Next Time' trailer for WARH, closing credits for AGDtD, and the recap that started WARH (more on that in a moment); we fade from the last scene of Part 1 (a shot of forest scenery, after Robin rides out of view) to the start of Part 2. However, there are some tiny bits in the compilation version that aren't in the episodic one.

First of all, we get a bit more of the final scene of Part 1's incidental music in the compilation version to aid the transition; it's still going over Robin's final line in the compilation, but has already finished in the episodic edit.

The episodic version of the second part opens on an establishing shot of the Port of Acre:

The compilation version starts on a shot of the night sky, which pans down to that same shot:

It's only apparent when watched in motion, but the pan down from the starfield looks very much like a late addition to make the join between the two episodes look a bit neater in the 90-minute version, rather than something that got left out from other versions by mistake.

The DVD releases cut out all 'next time' trailers and, where relevant, recaps. This means that the recap at the start of episode 2 was never seen on original broadcast or home media versions; only repeats on channels such as Watch and BBC iPlayer include it. (Presumably international broadcasts also use it, but I can't say for sure.)

The original broadcast of episode 11, Treasure of the Nation, had a presumably hastily edited 'next time' trailer for the combined episodes 12 & 13, and this is also found on iPlayer. The iPlayer version of A Good Day to Die has a 'next time' for We Are Robin Hood, which was clearly used as a basis for the combined trailer; if there's a version of Treasure which has a 'next time' for the episodic A Good Day to Die, it is presumably only to be found in international showings or on Watch.

44:48

The incidental music that starts at this point, and continues over the next scene, is completely different between the two versions. The reason for this will become apparent in a few moments.

44:53

Back in part 1, we had a location tag that was only in the compilation version, and now we have one that's only in the episodic version!

This is a very brief scene (less than ten seconds in total) which leads into the title sequence in the episodic version, so presumably the tag was deemed redundant for the compilation.

45:01

The title sequence for We Are Robin Hood has been cut out of the compilation version, and the changed music is because it needs to lead into the next scene instead of the opening titles. Although the Radio Times billed the 90-minute version as "A Good Day to Die/We Are Robin Hood", the only title which appears onscreen is A Good Day to Die.

52:32

On the original broadcast, the location caption for this scene had a grammatical mistake:

By the time it got to DVD, this had been corrected, and the amendment also appears on iPlayer; presumably, this version was broadcast at least once also. (I would not be surprised to learn of similar quick fixes in other episodes.)

01:25:43

The movie version has regenerated closing credits to include the guest cast for Part 1 (and a few other tweaks, such as crediting Mark Davis, who edited part 1 but not part 2, under 'editors'):

Anjali Jay only receives credit on the movie version, as she was accidentally left off the closing credits for the 45-minute version of WARH. Despite the earlier correction, this appears to have never been fixed for any version. The credits come in at the same point on both versions, with the movie's being slightly faster to account for the extra names.

Apart from the work done to join the episodes together and one or two tiny things pertaining to the location tags, the two versions are identical -- even in some of the desert sequences where it looks a bit like they didn't get everything they needed in the can and the editors were struggling to bodge things together, but I suppose that's another story -- but the work done to create the compilation is quite nice, and anyone who remembers the similar edits created for some Doctor Who two-parters in 2015, or the BBC's 2018 version of Watership Down, probably knows that things could have been done with a lot less care. And if this situation had arisen today, it seems almost certain they would've just run the two separate episodes back-to-back rather than re-editing them at all.

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1. Following its 29 December 2007 broadcast, the compilation version was the one available on BBC iPlayer -- at that point, only for seven days. Whenever the complete series has returned to iPlayer since, the episodic version has been used. ^↩