The Crystal Cube - Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson - Pilot, BBC2, 1983
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- Опубліковано 5 лют 2025
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The Crystal Cube was a pilot of a parody of a Tomorrow's World style show, with a bit of futuristic sci-fi thrown, starring Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, and written by the first two. It also co-starred Robbie Coltrane, and went out at 10.10pm on BBC2 in 1983.
The sound goes a bit awry in the last few minutes where everyone talks at once. I have re-uploaded the final 12 minutes with much improved sound, which you will also find under the Comedy Pilots playlist. This is the direct link: • The Crystal Cube - fin...
Please subscribe to my channel www.youtube.com/@billbobmatthews, which is home to many rarely seen comedy gems from the early to mid 1980s, when only early adopters had VCRs - as well as my own work as a writer and producer in TV and radio since that period. There are also riches from other decades too. The best way to navigate all the videos on the channel is via the Playlists... www.youtube.com/@billbobmatthews/playlists
Brilliant…and such fun to see them all when they were young again!!
Forty years on and this is the first time I'm seeing this.
-no kidding! -
Me too, I do remember watching Al Fresco with these guys in the early 80s - I think that it is on UA-cam - it was pretty good, ITV trying to do Not the 9 o'clock News type thing
I miss the '80's. I sometimes wish I could remember it.
Thanks for a hidden gem ..so many great actors .
No, the sound is funky.😮
Never saw this in Australia... excellent!!!
Emma Thompson sounds like a cross between Janet Street-Porter and Esther Rantzen, mixed with Pamela Stephenson doing an impression of Jan Leeming on Not the Nine O'Clock News!
And Gareth: "Good Moaning!"
I was thinking if Faye Fife of the Rezillos!
Yes, I'm sure she's taking off Esther Rancid.
First scene sure seems like a parody of Peter Ustinov, Jenny Agutter, and Michael York in the movie Logan's Run.
Yes, with a strong Blake’s 7 aesthetic.
@@rojavida pretty "inside baseball", nu?
@@rojavida I mean, not bad, I'm just saying, y'know? Or is that too recondite. If one can ever be TOO recondite, n' est pa? Is it not so?
@@lincolnyaco5626 surprisingly, we don’t have that metaphor in the UK. Since this is a UK show and I was around at the time I actually recognised some of the uniforms from Blake’s 7. It was a popular science fiction series in the UK during the ‘80’s. I certainly wouldn’t expect America to know the reference, but for anyone in the UK it definitely isn’t that abstruse.
@@rojavida True, true...."Inside baseball" means idiosyncratic, esoteric...I am familiar with Blake's 7 but for most Americans it would not be familiar--as you pointed out.
The term "Inside Baseball" is itself esoteric to many Americans and most Brits. Using it is an inside joke--probably most familiar to Rick and Morty fans,
Hugh Laurie playing an American doctor? Absurdism at its finest.
I have re-uploaded with improved sound quality, the last 12 minutes, which can be found here: ua-cam.com/video/d-cKLk6HPQM/v-deo.html. The sound goes a bit awry on this towards the end.
Thanks a lot for this, it's one hell of a find. It really is an excellent example of what normal educated people thought of Thatcherite Britain.
How wonderful, thanks!
These two have been great right from the start. Reminds me of watching old monty python sketches😁
I always thought it should have been," Bit of Fry, Laurie AND Thompson. What ho)?
Emma is remarkably funny! I didn't know that she was a comic wunderkind even in her early years!
You need to stay in more.
@@liquidsonly -?-
@@lincolnyaco5626 He means you should stay in and watch cool Brit comedy more often.
i miss clever comedy that requires an attention span longer than 18 seconds.
TL;DR
Well, that's mainly because he misunderstood the question...
Sorry I lost interest at 17 seconds
They sustained it for 30 minutes! Long form comic pieces are so rare.
It is a wonderful parody reminiscent of Blakes 7, and innumerable other Sci-Fi TV programmes, and dealing with world shattering concepts as did a lot of Fry & Laurie's comedy.
Logan's Run.
1:30 old fashioned 'Wimbledon" knickers!
Nice to see an early appearance of Arthur Bostrom (before ‘Allo ‘Allo).
I knew that was him! "Good Moaning"...
Thanks for putting this on the UA-cam, i think the phasey sound is from one side of the stereo sound arriving later so parts of the left channel sound waves are cancelling or reinforcing the right channel sound waves. If you can just record one side it should be fine. I recognise the sound from trippy electric guitar effect pedals. I see you have put a link into video with sound sorted out but id already started this msg so im leaving it to feed the algyrythims 😅
I can see why other commenters like this, but personally I'm glad this pilot wasn't picked up for a series and we got Fry & Laurie's sketch show instead. That was much better!
Obviously, pilots are hardly ever as good as their resultant series, but in 1983 we were all watching The Young Ones. This would never have been able to compete with that.
Having just watched this for the first time, I can't but help thinking of Look Around You. Very similar humour and the music at the end sounds extremely similar to the intro and exit parts on that show.
Maybe this was too ahead of its time for the BBC in 1983.
What's going on with the sound, it sounds like the video wasn't running smoothly, the resistor on the output seems to be going too as evidenced by the slightly over bright nature of the video
It's explained in the comments. Should be second one down but if not, then here it is again: "I have re-uploaded with improved sound quality, the last 12 minutes, which can be found here: ua-cam.com/video/d-cKLk6HPQM/v-deo.html. The sound goes a bit awry on this towards the end."
Obviously they have acting chops already here, some nice character work all around.
I think the Alpha, Beta, Gamma categorising if people is from Brave New World book
What happened to the sound at the end? Was that part of the show or just a recording?
It was like that the whole time they were in the studio. It just got worse as it went along, some kind of reverb feedback.
Hugh Laurie's American accent got better.
Oh, Wow.
Imperialist College...nice touch.
Is that officer Crabtree?
I'd argue this does a better job of dissecting fascism and eugenics than Huxley did.
I say its Fred Elliott
5:51 this joke was later recycled on ABOFAL
🥰
Is it just me or is the sound all phasey and weird?
I think it's VHS.
I think it,s part of the joke, to make it to apear older@@Cnumbers
Very phasey and weird and as a child of the 90s I can say that is not how VHS sounds (unless perhaps it’s from England where they would reuse tape until it disintegrated)
This is as cheesy as "Flash Gordon" was back in my day. 😅😂😂
He must be really tall, because she's tall too!
Shame about the audio quality
Hi Vynce, I am looking into this. Can you please give me an example of where the audio quality is especially bad (please don't say 'all of it'), and what kind of device you watched it on (i.e. iPad, laptop, smartphone etc)? Thanks. I expect it's the confrontation at the end where they are all talking at once. The audio for the rest of the episode seems fine to me. I have tried it on an iPhone and Fire tablet.
@@billbobmatthews I mean it is almost all of it; though the intensity seems to come and go. There's like a quarter second delay echo or something. But for example, at 1:40 you can hear that all the percussive noises are "sproingy" and at 27:46 it's almost impossible to hear what's going on.
I'm on a mac laptop. Builtin speakers and headphones both have the same problem.
I really thought Fallout would be better.
Never played the game... show was fine.
@@ThisGuy76ok. I made my comment after watching the first minute of this… It’s a subtle joke.
i wondered how Fry and Thompson knew each other so well that they could share all these stories on QI.
Or why a oscar winning movie star would come on it in the first place.
Fry, Laurie and Thompson were at Cambridge University together and became friends performing in the 'Footlights' student revues.
Then I strongly recommend Peter's Friends!
How fit is Emma Thompson here!?
Uh… this started like the first episode of Fallout. lol
🤣
👎Terrible sound ❗
See comment below yours!
@@billbobmatthews That's no excuse, I have video tapes that are older and better.
@@4623620 Excuse me? I am new to this and I made a mistake in my setup of the audio in OBS in transferring from the source to my computer, which I diagnosed and have now corrected. I have tried to make up for this initial error by re-uploading the section where the sound is a particular problem. Apparently though, that's not good enough for you.
@@billbobmatthews Okay, being a beginner is a bit of an excuse, but apparently the sound isn't completely fixed yet.
Throughout the video the audio still has an unpleasant reverb, making it very difficult to understand what's being said.
@@4623620 I can't fix the sound on this video, which is why I have directed people to an upload of the second half, given that the sound on this is at its worst towards the end. As this has proved to be my most popular upload in terms of both views and likes, I am unwilling to replace it entirely. If you know of a way of fixing the sound without losing the views and likes, I'd love to find out how to do it.