FROM THE ARCHIVES: The Case of the Brown Ruby - Part II (11/6/09)

Welcome back to From The Archives, as we continue our course through The Yesterday Show's spin-off, The Adventures of Battenberg and Schnepps. This week we're bringing you Part II of their first adventure, The Case of the Brown Ruby.

Having managed to wangle our way back onto RaW for a few more editions of Mumbling On, the first episode of The Case of the Brown Ruby was broadcast on June 4th. Tom and I were very happy with the episode, as we are a lot of our loyal fans, but we were left with one small problem: we had no real idea about where to go next. With The Yesterday Show, we could just leave a character hanging after their little segment and never speak of them again; even with Alex's two-parters, there was often a small gap between the events we depicted. This time we couldn't do that, and we only had a few days to come up with a gripping second part.

What followed were a number of fraught afternoons spent in various pubs and people's living rooms, trying not just to write funny lines but to make sure that it all made sense on a plot level. We had made ourselves harder in this regard by writing a story involving time travel, although this episode wasn't nearly as much of a headache as the final instalment, which you'll hear next week. It was still a really creative time, but when we came to do the later spin-offs we wrote the whole thing in one go to avoid repeating this situation.

Having set things up very nicely last week, this week allowed us to play around more with sound effects and absurd humour, such as Battenberg's overly elaborate plan for breaking into the museum. Our villain is a classic pantomime villain, at once completely obvious, hilarious and intriguing. In putting the video together I've tried to use photos that reflect the character in some way, and with Jim Poster (geddit?) I think it's come together rather well.

Here then is Part II for your enjoyment. We pick up the story in 2009, as Battenberg and Schnepps plot to break into the National Museum of Antiquities in Yorkshire, and enlist the help of an unusually generous Cockney...

Daniel