On the 6th of January 1995, viewers of BBC Two were treated to a new series of Waiting for Godot Bottom. Stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel, Vyvyan and the People's Poet Eddie and Ritchie wait to see what the cruel hand of fate has dealt them in this week's episode "Hole".
At one point, Captain Edrison Peavey Edward Elizabeth Hitler pulls out a newspaper to read.
It may surprise you to know that the "Hammersmith Bugle" is not a real paper and they never ran a headline "No News Shocker". At which point, it is time to rip off Dirty Feed's shtick and find out what that paper really is.
Sadly, Bottom has been cruelly denied a 4K remaster by the philistine bastards at the BBC, so you'll have to make do with potato-quality images from a DVD. Here's a lovely shot of the back of the paper.
Alas, "Cup Tie Chaos" isn't a particularly unique headline. As the paper flicks open there's a photo of what looks like a famous shot from Pulp Fiction.
Pulp Fiction was released in the UK in October 1994. So, again, not especially helpful except to narrow down the publication date of the paper.
As the paper flaps open again, we glimpse the sports pages.
Although something about a "enjoying a finish" doesn't help much, with a bit of "ZOOM! ENHANCE! ROTATE!" we can see the headline "Seesaw Swans hit back". A much more likely candidate for finding a unique hit!
And, indeed, a trawl of the British Newspaper Archive (courtesy of the Wikipedia Library) reveals that exact headline!
That's from the Surrey Herald, published on the 3rd of November 1994. About 9 weeks before transmission.
The other pages in the paper can be matched with their on-screen appearance.
There's also this very hard to spot headline about how "Wartime tales inspired poet":
Which can be exactly matched to page 8 of the Surrey Herald.
Case closed! Let's go home and get off with some smashing birds.
Hold The Front Page
But, that's not quite the whole story.
Let's compare the front page of the Hammersmith Bugle with that of the Surrey Herald on the 3rd of November 1994.
Ah.
The good news is that the advert for a mobile phone in the top left corner looks the same, as does the golf equipment advert in the bottom right.
The bad news is that the main photo is not the same. In Bottom, it appears to be two people reading a book or magazine. The headlines and surrounding columns all appear to be different.
You can just about see through the front page onto page 2 - there's a logo near the top, a headline just under it, and a face bottom centre. Whereas the Surrey Herald's page 2 looks nothing like that.
Fuck, shit, bollocks, pissflaps, and arse!
It doesn't look like any of the Surrey Herald's front pages from around that time.
If we go back to the "Seesaw Swans" snap, we can see a bit more of the inside of the front page.
That actually looks like the Stork Margarine logo they were discussing!
If we flip the semi-translucent shot, it becomes a bit clearer.
It says "STORK MARGARINE". Here it is highlighted in Super HD.
Was that mocked up for the show or just a happy coincidence? I think it is a mock up because, if you look a little further down, you'll see:
That's the name of the invisible character Slip Digby who won the competition.
There's a brief shot of the full page where the logo is slightly more visible:
Followed by a frame where you can see more of the page:
If you look towards the bottom of the paper, you'll see a headline about "Heady Sixties" and a small black box in the corner.
Which, I think can be traced back to page four of the paper:
I think the props team have taken the top half of the page and moved it down to the bottom - then added in the Stork Margarine content to the top.
But that still doesn't explain how and why the front page is so different.
Another search for the "Heady Sixties" headline brings back the Staines & Ashford News of the same date. Exactly the same page layout for that and a few more pages as the Surrey Herald, but the rest is substantially different. Similarly, the Sunbury & Shepperton Herald of the same day shares some pages, but the front page is completely different. It can also be found in the Staines & Egham News.
Without a clearer photo of the front page, it is impossible to search for any of the headlines on it.
Now, when I earlier castigated the BBC for not remastering the series, that was a bit of a clever lie. There's a 1080p version on the official BBC Comedy Greats YouTube channel.
That allows us to get the highest possible quality shot of the front page.
Through the paper you can just about see the face from page 4 and the "Heady Sixties" headline next to it.
On the front page, I think the two headlines I can make out are:
Elsie is 100 years young
and
FA Cup tie mix up angers Walton boss
I can see that Walton played Swansea City (and lost) on the 21st of November - and the "mix up" is referred to later in the paper under "Cup tie chaos" - but that specific headline is missing from the archives. Dear old Elsie is also absent.
And there, I must confess, I hit a brick wall. I looked through all the front-pages of Surrey papers in October and November 1994 - but there was nothing. Given that Bottom was filmed in Television Centre, I went through hundreds of front pages of London papers without success. I listened to the Talking Bottom podcast for the episode. I even looked through the VHS-only release of Bottom Fluff to see if the newspaper featured in any of the out-takes. Sadly not.
My working assumption is, in order of most to least likely:
- An earlier or later edition of the Surrey Herald was used, and that hasn't been archived.
- One of the Herald's sister papers was used, and is missing from the archive.
- The props team did a completely new front page using stock photos and lorem ipsum.
I was so hoping I could have closed this post with "BOTTOM STAINES!!!". But, alas…