An early draft of the title sequence for Andrew Marr's tv show was nearly an hour long, a BBC insider has revealed. Viewers now see an edited version in which Marr climbs into his car and drives to the studio, but the original revealed far more about Marr's morning, and begins with him being woken by his wife vomiting noisily into a bin.
"Marr and his wife Ashley had been out to a gala media dinner the night before we filmed the sequence", revealed Daniel Throstle, a cameraman with the popular broadcasting monopoly. "We set up the cameras while the pair were still sleeping. I don't know how much they'd put away at the charity meal, but the air in the room was pretty rank. Four of us tried to clear the air with some matches, but he'd obviously eaten something that disagreed with him. His flatulence was near-constant, it sounded like a chimp ripping up paper in a thunderstorm."
Throstle displayed extraordinary courage in remaining in the room for the full two hours before Ashley awoke, and he started the camera rolling almost as soon as she put her head in a waste paper basket and hurled her guts up. "We filmed it in HD so you could see the splashback very clearly, a close-up of her glistening, vomit-matted hair is one off my best bits of work. There was a surprising amount of chipsticks in there", revealed Throstle. "Then there was a groan, another sound of tearing carboard, and Marr rolled on to the floor and made a lunge for the bathroom."
Throstle's team had set up cameras throughout the house, but there were fears that they didn't have enough film to capture Marr's extended stay on the toilet. "He was obviously in some difficulty, the noise and the smell were hurrendous, but he's a professional, and just as we thought the tape would run out, he was up and wiping", enthused Throstle. "Then he gargled some aftershave, sprayed one of his armpits with shaving foam and stumbled back into the bedroom, crying."
Throstle's footage shows that Marr is an expert at dressing himself, although it took him several attempts to find a pair of pants that passed the 'sniff' test. Industry insiders have been astonished at how quickly Marr managed to chew through two pieces of burnt toast while he picked flecks of sick off his shoes. "This is what you pay professionals for", declared Throstle. "He necked that coffee before he'd even reached the hallway, and he only banged his face with the front door twice while he frantically searched his pockets." Once he'd found his car keys, he stumbled into the garden and extracted his car from the neighbour's hedge.
For legal reasons, Marr's face is pixelated for much of his drive into work, in particular the awkward ten minutes he spent arguing with a policeman as he attempted to reverse back out of a demolished bus shelter. But Throstle managed to patch together 30 seconds of footage that wasn't incriminating and digitally remove the cut on his forehead that he received in the crash. The edited version is still used by the show today.
"Obviously, Marr was livid when he found out we'd had to ditch over 50 minutes of the title sequence, he has to work much harder to fill his Sunday morning programme as a result", admitted Throstle. "Fortunately we managed to reach a compromise, and much of the extra content is just him staring at people while they read the newspapers."
