Being an audience member for a TV show recording can sometimes be daunting. Being an audience member for a live broadcast TV show, where your seating placement means you are almost always on camera, can be even more daunting. This was the position I was in at the recording of last Friday’s The Last Leg, and it’s amazing how having a camera pointed at you can make you conscious of your every movement. Luckily, a brilliant edition of the Channel 4 comedy meant that self-consciousness soon faded away, and the experience of watching such a show turned out to be fascinating.
I’d been to TV and radio show recordings before, but always for the BBC, where I’d needed to walk through metal detectors and get my bag scanned before I’d barely got through the door. The Last Leg is filmed at Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios, and as you might expect from Channel 4, the atmosphere was a little more relaxed. Riverside is a gorgeous place for a TV recording: waiting audience members have the opportunity to have a quite fantastic-looking dinner and drink wine before going in. The studio itself is quite small, but that only added to the intimacy of the recording, and a sense of unity between the audience and those on the screen.
Due to being first in line, my friend and I were ushered to our seat, directly above the couch where Alex Brooker and Josh Widdicombe sit. From this vantage point, you get the full view of the workings of a TV show. We could see the audience sitting opposite, the full stage, and the backstage area, where guest Richard Ayoade was practicing manoeuvring a specially adapted electric wheelchair for use in snow. As with many live recordings, we had a warm-up act, who highlighted the star of the show, an audience member who had chosen to wear a stetson. (As it transpires, this man ALWAYS wore a stetson in public, except his first date with his girlfriend, where he wore a top hat. It’s a shame the cameras couldn’t pick him up.) As the crew set up, our warm-up (whose name I sadly didn’t catch) led the audience in a rendition of the Home & Away theme song, as Adam Hills serenaded an audience member from Brisbane. This is the kind of thing that tends to happen at comedy recordings, where some of the weirdest, funniest moments occur when the cameras aren’t rolling.
Detailing exactly what happened on the show seems superfluous, as everything that happened aired, but the main themes were, predictably, the Winter Paralympics and Oscar Pistorius. Richard Ayoade was there as the host of Gadget Man, to demonstrate some of the technology used in the various sports, eventually having to guide Alex Brooker through a blind obstacle course using a walkie-talkie, as with blind skiing. The second guest was Summer Paralympics Gold Medallist Hannah Cockroft, who, along with two of her colleagues, challenged the Last Leg boys to a game of wheelchair curling. But the absolute stand-out was another of Hills’ now famous rants. The focus of his take-down this week was Paddy Power, the betting company who had created a tasteless advert to encourage punters to bet on the outcome of Pistorius’ murder trial. For anyone who hasn’t watched this episode, I highly recommend you search for this moment on 4OD immediately.
The only downside to being at a live recording is how quickly it all happens. The programme itself lasted 45 minutes, and with filming the pre-recorded opening and the promo videos, the whole process only took around an hour and a half. At other recordings, audiences get to see retakes, out extra material rejected from the final broadcast, which often leave them feeling like they’re in on some private joke. I guess for the audience at The Last Leg, the private joke was Home & Away, and novelty hats.