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.

While I never heard 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. There were two spin-off shows;Newman And Baddiel In Pieces starring Robert Newman and David Baddiel was broadcast on BBC2 in 1993, and this was followed byThe Imaginatively Titled Punt And Dennis Show in 1994 and Punt And Dennis Series 2 in 1995, both shown on BBC1. Although I had been thinking about this project for some years, I only started formal work on it on the 22nd of July 2010; when I made a post on the OriginalTrilogy.com forums asking for anyone with source material to get in contact. While this languished for months without reply, I did keep looking. All the The Mary Whitehouse Experience TV show episodes are widely available on the internet, but they are only poor quality VCD MPEGs, some with frequent screen breakups and some endings 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. The British bootleg DVD website DVD247Tripod.com also supposedly sells copies of both The Mary Whitehouse Experience TV series Here. I should warn prospective customers that I purchased the first series for £4 on the 3rd of May 2012 to incorporate into this project, and never heard anything whatsoever. After sending a number of emails I finally had to claim a refund through Paypal around a month later on the 8th of June never having received or heard a thing. 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 the project.

Over a year after the original forum post, 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). This project then languished for months on my hard drive while I was busy with other projects.

Then on the 18th of September 2011, OriginalTrilogy.com forums user MrBridger made a post on my 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 for which I had to re-encode an internet AVI version to complete the set.

In the meantime, I thought to make the set truly as complete as I could make it, I should include the four 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 Shaftsbury Theatre, Punt & Dennis - The Milky Milky Tour Live!. I sourced all four tapes second-hand via Ebay & Amazon and transferred them to DVD using a JVC HR-S7600EK S-VHS PAL VCR, connected to my PC with an Asus My Cinema ES2-750 PCI-E 1x TV Tuner Card via an S-Video cable and Left & Right audio phono leads. The full tapes were captured to an AVI file using VirtualDub 0.9.6 with the Huffyuv 2.1.1 video codec and uncompressed WAV audio. From that I used Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5.1 to edit the video (leaving the hard interlace as it was originally captured) using the packaged MainConcept MPEG-2 Encoder for the MPEG2 M2V encode, and Wav To AC3 Encoder 5.0 for the AC3 audio. The M2V & AC3 files were then multiplexed together with ImagoMPEG-Muxer 1.1 giving the final MPEG2 files. I began putting together the DVD set on the 2nd of November 2011, finishing on the 6th of December. I used GIMP 2.6.7 to design the DVD cover, which then made the disc artwork & DVD menu screens background simple as they were assembled using many of the same edited graphical elements. I also added high quality 600dpi scans of the four VHS retail tapes & covers to the DVD-ROM folder, along with the 44 episode radio show in MP3 format. To add to the nostalgia factor, the 20 TV episodes on discs 1 to 3 are each preceded by a BBC2 ident intro (which were collected together from YouTube), and also have BBC2 promo sequences which play before the main menu (which are Bottom Game-On & X-Files, Fist Of Fun, and The Outer Limits, again sourced from YouTube). Adobe Encore DVD 1.5.1 was used to author and assemble the final dual layer DVDs. In an ideal world I had wanted to also include the Steve Punt & Hugh Dennis spin-off shows; The Imaginatively Titled Punt And Dennis Show and Punt And Dennis Series 2, and I do have low quality AVI downloads of both series', but I'm happy settle for what I have at the moment till I can get higher quality source footage to expand the set. Even though there is no current or prospective DVD release of any of the elements which make up this project, it's still being kept offline for phsyical trades only. 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.