An edit is a point in a piece of radio or television footage where there is evidence that material has been removed. This occurs for five main reasons:

1) Legitimate reasons (e.g. edits due to corpsing/lines being fluffed)
2) Convenience reasons (e.g. sections cut due to restrictions on time)
3) Conceptual reasons (e.g. structuring shows to give them a ‘shape’)
4) Copyright reasons (e.g. music or images removed as financial short-cuts)
5) Slightly more sinister reasons (e.g. material removed due to ‘taste and decency’)

Editing occurs at several stages - adjustments and cuts made to a script before filming (firstly by the writers, then by commissioning editors or producers), followed by changes made during production itself, and, finally, last-minute edits which tamper with the finished package. The ‘finished package’ is generally regarded as the genuine article but is not always the one that’s broadcast.

The only foolproof way of checking for edits would be to compare the broadcast version of a programme with the unedited material (rushes), in tandem perhaps with the original shooting script. But edit-spotting is easy enough, and it can yield all sorts of conversations and debates.

Stuff to look out for...

Cutaways
In television, an editor will cut away to another shot in order to avoid a visible jump as an edit takes place. Cutaways generally look awkward, as there is often not enough extra footage to make such a device look natural or aesthetically pleasing. In extreme cases, the footage has to be played in slow motion to provide a suitable pause before returning to the source of the edit. Mostly, cutaways are long shots of the set, something which is easier in shows where the audience are usually visible (e.g. The Mary Whitehouse Experience). However, this is not to be confused with audience shots which are frequently used as legitimate cutaways in themselves, such as in LWT’s An Audience With shows. Producers these days often film shots of cutaways in advance (wild shots) to assist with the editing process.

Unnatural audience response
When there is studio laughter on a programme, editing is problematic - an editor cannot simply cut from mid-laugh into another sequence, as the laughter will cease abruptly. The same is obviously true in reverse. Editors therefore have to mix or ‘wash’ laughter across edits, and this can often result in lines being obscured. This is particularly evident in heavily-edited shows like The Smell Of Reeves and Mortimer, Harry Hill, and in certain, complicated episodes of Red Dwarf.

Where the style of the comedy is appropriate, studio-based comedy shows are generally performed in front of a live audience, and this allows performers to ‘surf’ the laughter and time their lines diligently. Most shows use a mixture of live performance and pre-recorded sections (played to the audience on monitors), and the latter is usually employed when a sequence demands complicated special effects, numerous costume changes or awkward camerawork. This can sometimes make for uncomfortable viewing (Red Dwarf again), but a few shows are purely pre-recorded, and the entire show (usually in a rough cut) is played to an audience from tape. Examples of this include Rab C Nesbitt, Big Train, The League Of Gentlemen, and the first series of Blackadder. The downside of this is that the audience will inevitably drown out certain lines, and the editor will sometimes need to insert cutaways to create fake pauses in the action. Sometimes laughter will also be mixed down to make a line more audible, and this often makes the dialogue sound uncomfortably compressed.

Overdubs
BBC1 used to have a censorship policy of replacing profanities in movies with less offensive words culled from other parts of the same film - something Harry Enfield pilloried to great acclaim in his parody of Goodfellas (‘This film has been specially ruined for television...’). The effect was unpleasant and obvious, and now thankfully obsolete - these days, they simply remove the whole scene. However, the trick is still used on some comedy shows - most notably on the tea-time repeats of Harry Hill's first Channel 4 series, where The Little Orphan Boy's cries of 'you slag!' were substituted with 'you slug!', a decision which required a special dubbing session. Unfortunately the actor who played the 'Little Orphan Boy' wasn't quite so little by that time and the level of his voice matched the descent of his testicles.

PRS Problems
There are two separate rules governing the use of music in radio and television programmes - one corresponding to broadcast, and the other to commercial release. With broadcast, the BBC pays a fee to the Performing Rights Society (PRS) in the same way that a radio station pays for the right to play a record on air. When a programme is released on video or CD, however, it gets complicated and expensive, and material is often edited out to avoid the paperwork. Music by The Beatles is generally the most problematic in this area. Sometimes it’s possible to overdub different music and still retain the joke (e.g., the CD of Lee and Herring’s Fist Of Fun), but idiot producers generally forget this problem before trashing the rushes.

Re-edits
If you know a classic comedy show well, keep an eye on repeat showings. BBC2 has acquired a rather tasteless habit of re-editing shows which originally had a 35-minute timeslot (something quite common in the 1980s) to 29-minute versions, often omitting a great deal of material, in order to accommodate their cramped, strict Friday night scheduling. Shows like The Young Ones and Victoria Wood As Seen On TV have been butchered this way, and many will follow as the dumbed down, blokes-in-from-the-pub attitude behind ‘The Comedy Zone’ allows this practice to continue unchecked. Write to Jon Plowman, the BBC’s Head Of Comedy Entertainment, and let him know your feelings on the matter. Contact him at: Room 4024, BBC Television Centre, Wood Lane, London W12 7RJ. Phone him on (0181) 576 7952.

Another phenomenon is the rare but wonderful practice of reinstating material. If a video is being prepared by a compiler who cares, it may contain extra footage absent from the transmitted edit. An example of this is the videos of Knowing Me Knowing You, where each show has a running time clearly designed for a 35-minute slot (were they originally conceived for such a timeslot, you may wonder?). Sometimes, swear words (hitherto bleeped out) will have been restored. Ponder on the story behind such occurrences - were they pieced together from the rushes (and, if so, how much rushes-footage still survives?), or was an alternative edit prepared at the time of the original broadcast?