Review: ‘Great TV Mistakes - Cutdowns’

This programme was originally screened by BBC Three on December 4 last year, and was rebroadcast Saturday night. Repeats are cheap, and so are some of the sets featured herein, but cheap can mean inexpensive as well as tacky. Fortunately, this programme is the former but not the latter.

Great TV Mistakes - Cutdowns speaks for itself; presenter Robert Webb introdoces a non-stop series of cameos from a plethora of TV programmes mustered from both sides of The Pond, and points out to the viewer the changing sign on the wall, the clock that gains six minutes in a few seconds, the monster from Dr Who that gets its boot tangled in a carpet. What, you thought it was a rock?

To be fair, bargain basement it may be, but a lot of work has gone into this programme, and most of the mistakes - especially the wobbly sets - will be missed by the vast majority of viewers because they require a practised eye; most of them are over in an instant. There are some classics though, like the gaffe from Thunderbirds, where a hand can be seen holding a puppet at the waist, and several where film crew can be seen lurking in the background, or even the foreground, including in Charmed, Friends and Xena: Warrior Princess. Not to mention the corpse that blinks on the pathologist’s table (from The X-Files).

For those who can receive it, Great TV Mistakes - Cutdowns is currently on iplayer, and there are more to come.

For those who can’t, there are websites devoted to this sort of thing, and more than a few such clips on YouTube.

[The above was first published September 2, 2012; the original wasn’t archived.]

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