Is nothing to do with Christmas at all, but thanks to people on Twitter to alerting us to its existence.<\/p>\n
Basically it’s a gallery recording of Talking Telephone Numbers<\/strong>. But not just any episode of Talking Telephone Numbers<\/strong>, the famous episode where a show purported to be live suddenly started fast forwarding through Richard Digance’s act.<\/p>\n These days it’s fairly<\/em> common knowledge that in live shows, especially one with lots of elements, some of it may be recorded ‘as live’ earlier in the day and dropped in at the relevant point – some of the Strictly<\/strong> group dances and X Factor<\/strong> musical guests for example. Sometimes this is because the guests have to run to a different schedule, sometimes it’s to give the stage hands more time to set a later segment up. Viewers don’t tend to mind if they can’t see the joins.<\/p>\n But when this happened on TTN<\/strong> it blew our tiny minds. Does this mean the whole show is recorded then? Is the whole thing a fix? It isn’t and it wasn’t but it’s not the greatest shop window for a show that asked people to phone in to them (although unlike the more recent and for legal reasons completely different Magic\u00a0Numbers,\u00a0<\/strong>I don’t think 0345 was premium rate even then).<\/p>\n This clip shows us what was going out on television, but more crucially we can hear all the panic that’s going on in the gallery. What’s quite fun is the production willing the callers to lose because they have six minutes to fill with the endgame when evidently they’d usually only have about three. Schofield and Forbes look unflappable. Also it sounds like live direction of a musical act (The Human League in this case) takes a huge amount of concentration, “I can’t talk to presentation!”<\/p>\n