Welcome to Episode Four of From The Archives. We're now halfway through the first series of The Yesterday Show - how time flies. This week's episode has an American focus, centring on the opinionated and stupid Texan car dealer Hank Timbuck II (a.k.a. Timbuktu - geddit?).
I talked a couple of episodes ago about many of the characters being essentially constructed around one joke, with Freddy Croker being essentially a foil to Sir Anthony and not much else. Mr. Timbuck is another example of this, but also an indication of how little time Tom and I had to play with between shows. Sometimes we would strike lucky and come up with great material, but other times we'd have to just go with what we thought we could run with at the time. It's something that comes with the territory of producing a regular series, and while still funny in places I do regard this as one of the weaker episodes.
Mr. Timbuck is based off a car dealer who appeared in an episode of Jeremy Clarkson's Motorworld. I was a big Top Gear fan as a student, and we would mine the world of cars on two more occasions: once for an International Report (coming next week), and once for an F1-themed episode in the second series. Essentially I took the short clip from Motorworld (which you can watch below), added in stereotypical stuff about religion and improvised as best I could. Hardly a stretch, but then again we were students.
What I do want to single out with this episode is the editing. Back before I even knew what Audacity was, Tom handled all the editing for the show and other recordings that we made. He was used to doing it, being a songwriter and musician, but he did a really good job mixing in the music and balancing out the recordings. In this episode we didn't really have an ending for the first part, so we just had me talking out Tom's outro until he shouted me down. The two tracks mix really well and provide a good lead-in to Alex's section (which is, as per usual, pretty funny).
Hank Timbuck does make brief appearances in the two series finales, the first of which is a better vehicle for his character. But while I personally think this is one of the weaker episodes, I'm more than happy for you to disagree in the comments below. So sit back and jet off to Texas and the Church of Job-ing Christians:
Daniel
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