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So, it’s been and gone, Series 3 of The Harvo Show is over.

First things first, you may be wondering why there were only two episodes and not the usual 3, well, as some of you may be aware, this series was meant to move over to Amazon Prime hence the extended run time, basically I did make a third episode however this was a ‘best of’ episode from the previous 2 series so it would have been content you have seen before. Unfortunately, the deal with Amazon took longer than anticipated hence the return to YouTube.

So, when creating this series, we hit a bit of a dilemma we couldn’t do what we usually did with the series as there were some constraints with getting the show on Amazon Prime.

The main one is the minimum run time had to be 10 minutes and over.

We also had another problem looking at the surveys (I do them after each series) the learning of a magic trick and the standard magic trick was negatively received so I decided to cut them. This left only the puppet-based sketch, the producers and I agreed we should give the ‘sitcom’ format a go, I was initially hesitant to do this as I was worried it would draw comparisons to Sooty, however, I thought the idea would grow on me and I decided to take the plunge and give it a go as I enjoyed the ‘storyline’ format of the Christmas special.

“Welcome Home Flopper”

This was a back-to-basics episode I wanted the storyline to be simple and easy to understand. So, I came up with the idea for Flopper to return home from a holiday. That was it. I really enjoyed filming this episode as it contained a lot of simple slapstick gags which I thoroughly enjoyed although I did ruin my glasses slightly with the pie-in-the-face gag.

“Summer Days”

Now I am going to slightly contradict myself here and say this episode was deliberately made as a tribute to Sooty, I love the old Harry Corbett episodes that are just one static shot and could hold you in for 10 minutes. As much as I know this would never work on TV, I decided to try and see if I could make an episode like this for a modern audience, and I believe I succeeded.

Now talking about this series one thing that should get mentioned is ‘Shorts of the Week’ Now I know this segment is very out of the blue however each episode after filming underran by about 2 minutes and I didn’t know what to fill the time with. My first plan was to do a ‘Guest segment’ where someone showed off their talent, however, no one applied so I came up with the next best thing. I did plan to reshoot them however I thought this might stick out more like a sore thumb so I decided to keep them as is. Don’t worry though ‘Shorts of the Week’ is not returning for series 4.

Now then series 4 where do I begin with that one? Well, it is going to be returning to the variety format however episode 1 is going to be a ‘meta’ episode to help with the transition from the sitcom format. This is also going to be the last series for a while, unfortunately, the budget of £0 and a crew of 0 really limit the series and I feel like I have done all I can with those constraints, I do hope to return to the series in the future. Also, series 4 will also explain Flopper’s sudden ‘change of appearance’.

A big thank you for reading this long blog post and also a big thank you to Jamie and Sam for all their help in producing the series.

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