This was a project to upgrade to my 2011 The Mary Whitehouse Experience DVD Boxset to Blu-Ray, with more footage, on fewer discs, in higher quality.

The Mary Whitehouse Experience was a British topical sketch comedy show produced by the BBC in association with Spitting Image Productions. It starred two comedy double acts; David Baddiel and Rob Newman, and also Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis, all of whom had graduated from Cambridge University. It was broadcast as a radio show, and later as a TV programme in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I remember watching both TV series' fondly.

The show was named after Mary Whitehouse, a campaigner against the decline in television standard & public morality, who became a target of mockery in the UK for her attitudes. While I didn't listen to it at the time, the Radio show began in July 1989 on BBC Radio 1. The two pairings of Newman and Baddiel and Punt and Dennis were central to the show, with support from Nick Hancock, Jo Brand, Jack Dee, Mark Thomas and Mark Hurst. The show also included musical interludes from Skint Video and The Tracy Brothers. The radio show was originally aired at midnight on Friday, before being moved to a 10:30pm slot, before being moved again for its final series to 7pm on Saturday evenings. It ran for four series and a special (44 episodes in total) from July 1989 to December 1990. A television pilot aired on BBC2 shortly before the fourth and final radio series, on 3 October 1990. The first series of the TV show started on 3 January 1991 and ran for six episodes, with a second set of six episodes in 1992. The television series was a mix of observational comedy sketches and monologues. The show featured a lot of satirical takes on famous people, films and TV shows of the day along with original character material. There were two spin-off shows; Newman And Baddiel In Pieces in 1993, and The Imaginatively Titled Punt And Dennis Show in 1994 and Punt And Dennis Series 2 in 1995. Newman and Baddiel in Pieces was more of a sketch comedy show written by and starring comedians Robert Newman & David Baddiel, broadcast over 7 episodes on BBC2 from 20 September to 20 December 1993. The show combined monologues and observational routines, often with very dark themes, and character comedy. Newman and Baddiel both made observational comedy monologues to camera, in sets representing their respective flats. Their monologues were usually done independently from one another, but occasionally they would share scenes. The monologues were mingled with numerous sketches and recurring characters.

The Imaginatively Titled Punt & Dennis Show (known as Punt and Dennis in the second series), was a stand-up routine & sketch show written by and starring comedians Steve Punt & Hugh Dennis. The two had already appeared as a double act in Canned Carrott, and impressionists Alistair McGowan and Ronni Ancona were among the guests on the show. The first series of 6 episodes was broadcast on BBC1 between 7 July and 11 August 1994. The second series of 6, was broadcast between 28 July and 1 September 1995. It featured a mix of stand-up, spoofs of known television series, but also a number of character based sketches.

The idea for this updated Blu-Ray set started back in August 2021. I was contacted on Facebook by someone asking if I had anything to do with the UK bootleg site 'classictv.online', which I discovered was selling that original 2011 The Mary Whitehouse Experience DVD Boxset (here) along with my 2011 Gamesmaster Series 1-7 DVD Boxset (here). I did get in touch with the webmaster, and even pointed out that my name was on the back of the covers pictured on his website, but he obviously had no qualms about the situation. The site is packed with bootlegs of the latest high-profile Hollywood films, TV shows & music concerts, so I highly doubt ripping off Joe-nobody's would mean a thing to him. Don't get me wrong, I'm under no illusions that I'm ultimately ripping off someone else's work myself, in creating most of my preservation projects including this one, but at least I'm putting some effort in finding and transferring old footage from VHS tapes and creating artwork for it. Not just wholesale copying/downloading, and selling anything I can get my hands on. It's just lucky that many of my projects are so exceptionally niche, that it's some protection in itself.

This made me think about my own 'brand identity', which previously only extended to putting my forum username 'SeeNoEvil' on the back of most of my covers in small print. I spent a few weeks coming up with an 80s style generic-intro-text & ident to play at the start of all my new and upgraded DVD & Blu-Ray projects from now on, as a sort of branding for my efforts. Then people can find their way back to my website regardless of where they got the project from. As the original title 'Online Portfolio', and latterly 'Rob's Online Project Showcase', didn't make much sense when used here as a branding/title logo, I rebranded this site and my Facebook page to 'Rob's Nostalgia Projects'. That's a more distinctive catch-all title which reflects my work, as just about every project on my list is related to some element of personal nostalgia. This situation also minded me to stop putting each sets' cover & disc artwork on a DVD-ROM/BD-ROM on each respective disc.

So anyway, that percolated for a while, and I came round to the idea of making an upgraded Blu-Ray version. As far as newly available footage, nothing much had changed since made the 2011 DVD set. Both The Mary Whitehouse Experience series' are still widely available on the internet, but only as poor quality VCD MPEGs, some with frequent screen breakups and sections missing. Newman And Baddiel In Pieces, The Imaginatively Titled Punt And Dennis Show and Punt And Dennis Series 2 however, are available in AVI format but the quality really varies. There is also a bootleg The Mary Whitehouse Experience DVD available which can usually be found on eBay, but that just uses the VCD files re-encoded to DVD. Finally, there is also a widespread BitTorrent download containing all 44 episodes of the original radio series in MP3 format. While the quality isn't brilliant in places, it was certainly a fine addition to this project.

On the 27th of August 2011, a friend sent me a link to an eBay auction in which a seller called TapeThat had listed 149 VHS tapes, which included home recordings of shows like The Big Breakfast and Top Of The Pops, as well as The Mary Whitehouse Experience. In the end, the auction went above what I was willing to pay; £52 and collection-only from Leicestershire (a fair distance away) didn't help. I got in contact with the seller and luckily he'd transferred all these tapes around 8 years previously using a brand new top of the range Panasonic S-VHS machine with Digital Noise Correction. I traded for DVD copies of what he had; all six episodes of The Mary Whitehouse Experience Series 2, and six of the seven episodes of Newman And Baddiel In Pieces (among trading other assorted TV shows). Then on the 18th of September 2011, OriginalTrilogy.com forums user MrBridger made a post on a thread I had started about this project thread stating he had DVD-Rs of both The Mary Whitehouse Experience series' and Newman And Baddiel In Pieces too. Although it took a good few months, I finally got copies of those DVDs on the 3rd of May 2012. Between TapeThat and MrBridger's transfers, I had 19 of the 20 episodes I needed, just leaving the Newman And Baddiel In Pieces Christmas Special, which I had to re-encode an internet AVI version to complete the DVD set. I also bought and transferred the four retail VHS live stand-up shows which were subsequently released; Newman & Baddiel - History Today, Newman & Baddiel - Live & in Pieces, From The Mary Whitehouse Experience - Newman & Baddiel - Live At The Shaftesbury Theatre, and Punt & Dennis - The Milky Milky Tour Live!. The DVD set was completed in December 2011. Fast Forward to December 2021, and I thought with a bit of effort, I could re-author the five dual-layer DVD discs on to three single-layer Blu-Ray discs. This would make it quicker to duplicate, and I could add in some additional bits & pieces.

While I've never been that keen on upscaling for upscaling's sake, but when it's unavoidable, you can still get some cracking results, far better than just scaling the raw video in an editing program. I had been experimenting with Topaz Video Enhance AI on other projects, and I thought I could use that to somewhat-restore and upscale various content to 576i, which I could then add in, not least of which the two missing spin-off series' The Imaginatively Titled Punt & Dennis Show and Punt & Dennis series 2, which I had really wanted to add in the first time round. The AI upscaler really excels when you have sharper and mainly static footage, which much of these two series are. It really struggles to upscale very fuzzy/blurry lower quality footage, and the results can look somewhat worse than the original raw video. I used Topaz to upscale MrBridger's The Mary Whitehouse Experience series 1 Half-D1 (352x576px) DVD footage, and a torrent download of series 2 (for gap filling) at 592x448px, both to full PAL 720x576px. I also switched from TapeThat's Newman And Baddiel In Pieces VHS to DVD transfers, to a torrent download which looked a little sharper & clearer once upscaled from 592x448px. Finally there was the The Imaginatively Titled Punt And Dennis Show torrent scaled from 560x416px, and Punt & Dennis which was already 720x576px, but heavily compressed. This was processed to improve the look of the footage.

The second series Punt & Dennis has an issue throughout, probably related to capture of a poor quality tape with a poor quality VCR. This unfortunate combination can occasionally result in the capture device mistakenly thinking the tape has Macrovision copy protection, making the image pulse bright and dark throughout. It's an issue I've come across myself once years back. It's far from ideal, but this is the only copy of this second series available. That issue aside, and except for the odd little jitter and a couple of breakups, the quality on the rest of the set is far better.

To add to the set, I edited a 60 minute compilation of all of the History Today today segments, including the TV shows, live shows, and the skit shown during Comic Relief in 1993. I also edited a 27 minute compilation of Punt & Dennis's sketches from series 2 of Canned Carrot shown from November 1991 to January 1992, from a torrent download at 720x576px, which was processed with Topaz. There is a torrent available of series 1, but at 480x360px with very low bitrate & poor quality, upscaling & including this would have been pretty pointless since the resulting footage would look terrible. There were also more special & one-off episodes shown; Specially Selected Canned Carrott (3-10 September 1991), More Specially Selected Canned Carrott (15 September 1992), The Juicy Bits (24 May 1994), and More Juicy Bits (1 July 1995). Since there's nothing out there available to check, it's unclear if these are edited best-of shows or new material, or even if Punt & Dennis are featured. In January 2024 I was able to upgrade the original series. I was contacted by someone who'd seen this project, and owned four VHS tapes containing both series of The Mary Whitehouse Experience; the original airings, plus repeats. I loaned and transferred them. Most are very decent upgrades to the existing material and nearly all are complete episodes from start to finish. My old S1 transfers were particularly ropey, so it was nice to finally be able to replace those. One of the tapes was too far gone; phasing in and out of noise throughout, but this was just later repeats, so no huge loss. To add to the nostalgia factor, each of the are preceded by a , and there are various which play in between each entry. These were mostly upscaled/processed from YouTube clips, along with a few junctions & promos I already had from other transfer projects. This gives a grand total of 110 separate clips; 32 TV show episodes, 4 live shows, 2 compilations, 40 junctions & promos, and 32 BBC2 idents. While The Imaginatively Titled Punt And Dennis Show and Punt & Dennis were actually shown on BBC1, I have stuck to BBC2 idents & junctions for everything since it keeps things simpler. The junctions & promos date from 1990 to 1997, and I've tried to keep them roughly contemporaneous to at least the year range each series' were broadcast, but there are some anomalies in there as the choice is not that wide, and there were some favourite entries I really wanted to shoehorn in.

I was just about ready to begin compiling the final discs in Encore, when on the 26th of January 2022, Tony A got in touch enquiring about a copy of the old DVD set. We got chatting and he mentioned he had series 2 of The Mary Whitehouse Experience on VHS, and I could loan and transfer the VHS tape. I got that on the 24th of February 2022. As there was a delay between his first contact and getting the tape, I got busy with another project; an Evil Dead Shorts & Trailers Blu-Ray. With that done, I transferred Tony's tape on the 2nd of February 2022, and this project could finally move to completion.

On seeing the outstanding quality of Tony's tape with my current capture set-up, I decided to re-capture the four live show VHS tapes (I was intending to use my old 2011 DVD captures); Newman & Baddiel - Live At The Shaftsbury Theatre (1991), Newman & Baddiel - History Today (1992), Newman & Baddiel - Live & in Pieces (1993), Punt & Dennis - The Milky Milky Tour Live (1992). The quality certainly is an improvement, with sharper details and a H.264 encoding.

While test-watching through the three discs, I ran across the issue that given there is around eight hours of footage per disc, and that the first episode will continue playing through to the end of the disc, you can loose track of which episode you are watching if you want to stop and resume later. I recycled a trick I used in my 205 hour The Big Breakfast Blu-Ray Box-Set; having a pop-in menu for each episode, so pressing the pop-in menu button on your remote will display which episode you're watching, so you know where to come back to. It's worth adding that this set is still very much a work in progress, awaiting footage out there to become available. Tony A's The Mary Whitehouse Experience series 2 is the only footage I would regard as excellent VHS quality. Series 1 is probably the worst overall, with Newman And Baddiel In Pieces, The Imaginatively Titled Punt & Dennis Show and Punt & Dennis AI upscales variously ranging somewhere in between. All of those four would really benefit from replacement with high quality VHS transfers, if anyone reading this could help. You'd get your tapes back of course, along with a free updated copy of this set.

If you're interested in any of my fanmade projects, you can contact me via email at , or through the Rob's Nostalgia Projects Facebook page. Check out & 'like' that Facebook page to see the latest in-progress updates to any current projects, and check out my Wants List to see if you can assist me with any future projects or upgrades.