In one episode The Evening Standard was mentioned. The Evening Standard never had that title during the time the series is set. It was called The Standard and The Standard wasn't called The Evening Standard till the merger with The Evening News.
Tony Hancock was seen in a TV sketch with Syd James - didn't happen till the 60s.
In the last episode Freddie says 'She dumped you.' - Modern dialogue!!
I could be wrong but I don't want to look it up.
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One of his (Tony Hancock) most famous episodes of Hancock's Half Hour was called The Blood Doner. It was on radio first and then recorded in the TV series.
He was on TV in the 50s but not in Hancock's Half Hour with Syd James which was shown in The Hour.
A lot of the original 50s footage was wiped because TV film cost so much and producers didn't realise how valuable it would be in the future. I'm not sure how much 50s Hancock TV actually survives, and the alternative would be to get an actor to pretend to be him, which would be even stranger.
shareIn the last episode, Hector mentioned there were gremlins. Surely that's a modern term too?
shareModern-ish but invented in WW2 in the RAF to describe the imaginary mischievous Gnome-like creatures that caused all the technical problems in aircraft - as in "the Gremlins have been in this one " ... went into general use in the Military in technical areas and then into the population as a whole to describe the situation of things going slightly wrong ... would very probably have been in use in the BBC already and the use by Hector (an ex-military man) is entirely logical ...
shareI love the show, but in ep. 4 Lix says "note to self" and that is a recent expression. imho.
http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=44817727
I have only seen the first episode so far, but I felt that the continual references by Freddie to Bel calling her "Moneypenny", were perhaps a little premature for the times.
Although only 4 of Ian Fleming's James Bond, 007 books were around at the time this series is set (1956), the Moneypenny character only ever received fleeting references in the novels. IMHO, the character Moneypenny was only popularised when the films became widely seen about 10 years later and people began quoting the lines from James Bond films. I remember reading my grandfather's novels as a young fellow before the films were released, and perhaps because of the times and where I lived, I never remembered anyone making quotable references from the books.
Ciao!
Locked my wire coat-hanger in the car - good thing that I always carry spare keys in my pocket :)
An interesting technical goof pops up about 30 mins. into episode 1: at the end of the restaurant sequence where Eden's lackey comes to pay his respects to the Hour crew, the last shot of West looking at Garai is obviously reversed, as the smoke from an offscreen cigarette or cup of coffee is blatantly becoming more and more concentrated as it slinks downwards rather than rising up. The reversal isn't in and of itself a goof, as it was clearly a director's strategy to end the scene on a slightly different note, but the smoke is a definite give away.
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