#souvenir programme

The Plan

The music is from a library; before we chose it, sound editor Rich Evans and I listened to some David Holmes - specifically 69 Police because we really wanted that Ocean’s Eleven feel. 

Leopard

We considered having a sound effect for the leopard, but of course, no, Simon doing it live was funnier. Listening back I wish I’d put a bit more FX in the background, to avoid the fishbowl FX being too prominent, but it doesn’t seem to have irritated anyone...

Weather

This was in one take. I think ideally we’d have only had one Radio 4 parody in this episode, but once we decided to make this episode the one with The Heist in, we wanted it to be as strong as possible, so it went in on the grounds of excellence.

Leaving Do

This was actually recorded at three different recordings - once with John singing solo, a capella; once with John singing solo accompanied; and twice at the final recording, as heard here. It also involved a little bit of choreography, because with everyone needing to be quite close on mic for their line, but a good distance for the chorus lines, it involved a constant clockwise rotation of the cast - coming up to the mic over the previous singer’s left shoulder, allowing the previous singer to slink off to the right. 

Memory Technique

Slight street atmos added afterwards. 

Cake

Nothing added or taken away from this, although as John points out, “A sketch that starts with ‘ding ding’ and ends with a reference to Wittgenstein is very Radio 4.

Interview Sketch - So

I’d have preferred an animal interview sketch to go here, to set up the following sketch more comprehensively. But as I said - we were picking sketches on quality...

John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme Accidentally

Well, after doing The Archers, The Afternoon Drama, Poetry Please, The Moral Maze, etc, it seemed only fair to turn the guns on himself. I saw Jake Yapp over Christmas, and I told him about this sketch - and that the thing I was proudest off was that he wouldn’t have been harsher on John than John was...

There was a moment where I wanted to open the series with this. But once we’d decided that was an act of hubris too far, there were really only two places it could go in this episode - right at the start, or here, the penultimate sketch. We decided on here because mocking ourselves for being a traditional sketch show seemed like a fun thing to do right before the final sketch.

Since You Ask Me - The Heist

Hopefully you didn’t see this coming.

I guess the main thing is the flashbacks - we needed to put reverb on those lines, and that’s really hard to do afterwards (because I’m given the recordings as a single sound file - audience and cast and music and effects all on one track - so if I add reverb to an actor’s voice, I’d also add it to an extraneous noises, which would sound weird). So the flashback lines were from the rehearsal, treated, and played in for the audience. I’m trying to remember how we did it for the Time Travel episode of series 4 - I think we repeated those lines live, but there was a bigger effect (the time machine) before each one, and there was no reverb to control.

It was also really important to make all the sketches feel like sketches in and of themselves; if they hadn’t felt like complete sketches then you’d have known something was up. It’s all in the order Carrie says it in the first sketch too - a Sticky Fishbowl, a Mary Poppins, and a That’s What She Said. (There was one sketch in the Time Travel episode that we cut from the Time Travel sequence and re-edited as a standalone sketch - because the time travel intervention was so out of place, it let you know that there was something else going on, which made the reveal less of a surprise.

Caesar’s Last Words

I wanted to use the same music we used for the Herod sketch in series 2, and indeed the Since You Ask Me in the Christmas special, but it didn’t work coming out of the sig tune & applause. We also cut the last two lines, because one of them was “You bastard!” - which is fine, a little light swearing is fine - but when it got put next to Carcassonne it became a problem. In the end, we decided which one got to have “You bastard” as its penultimate line.

Carcassonne

I don’t doubt for a second that this actually happened to John. As with the other ‘voice in my head’ sketches, John and Simon to the conversation on the mono mics to either side, which you can get really close to. Then for the real-world dialogue, he moves over to the stereo mic which captures a bit more noise off. 

Animal Designers

A sequel of sorts to the snake sketch from last year. Rich Evans and I added lots of whiteboard noises to the brainstorm, to add some texture and dynamism, but while it sounded great in Rich’s studio (see below), it sounded weird on headphones, to we took it out.

Grains of Rice

This is the same storytime music that we used for the Magic Mirror sketch in series 5. I am nothing if not consistent. There’s a version we recorded where the moral was “don’t be a prick” in case “dick” was too rude for the radio, but it wasn’t. 

Interview Sketch - Centaur

John isn’t really eating anything here, it’s acting.

George & The Dragon

It occurs to me that the only reason there isn’t a pub atmos is because of the set up - “First customer of the day!”. Whereas if we’d dropped that part and just had it in the afternoon (say) we could have given this a bit more texture with a small crowd of people already hanging around the bar. I should have spotted that.

Animals & Kings

We recorded this last series. We also recorded it once before in this series, but I demanded it get recorded because the performance was rubbish. See:

https://soundcloud.com/edmorrish/animals-kings-take-one

(I also think it didn’t work because there was no need for it to be me that challenged him - it worked for the Belgium bit in series 4 because the show had ‘ended’ and only the producer has the authority to challenge John at that point. Also it would make sense that the embassy would phone me. But if it’s just a quibble about the show - Simon and Margaret are always challenging John, so the fact that I was doing it over the PA (in fact, on a microphone from the back of the room) was just weird. Also, I was rubbish.

Once we decided to include this sketch, we obviously had to have a run of animals and kings sketches before it - because otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to anyone who didn’t really know the show.

Sunset

Just added some light outdoors atmos to this. (It’s weird, but afternoons genuinely sound different to mornings. Look them up in FX libraries, you’ll be able to tell.)

Parting Words

Even though this was a monologue, John did it on the stereo ‘sketch’ mic, so that Simon could swoop in over his shoulder. The music, an organ version of Abide With Me, was added afterwards.

Desensitised

This was the second time we recorded this, and the only change between the first and the second was we made sure the word ‘scarecrow’ was said out loud a bit earlier, because it felt like the audience didn’t quite get what was going on until fairly late in the sketch...

Question Times

The only production note here is that we faded John’s “onwards and upwards” quite markedly in the edit and had Simon’s announcer come in a little over the top, because it sounded too much like an actual end, and that meant Simon’s confusion didn’t play as well. By fading it out I think we managed to emphasise the idea that the programme was being cut short in some way.

Since You Ask Me for a Card Trick

Listening back, I’m not sure why this is post-credits. Could have worked just as well before, I think. But John says the card he chose is the most likely one people will think of when you ask them to pick ‘any’ card, so that’s why it probably got more than 1/52 of you. (1/52 of the Radio 4 audience = about 25,000 people...