It is one of the headline acts of the BBC's festive television schedule, enjoying a prime time one-hour slot at 9pm on Christmas Day.
But the Yuletide special of the comedy The Royle Family watched by around 11 million people last year became one of the most expensive, it emerged
yesterday, after a mystery fault with the camera equipment turned it into a £100,000 ($223,000) farce.
The first few days of filming passed without incident but, to the horror of the show's producers, when the film came back from the processing laboratory they discovered that all of the cast members' heads had been cropped out.
Phil Mealey, the writer of the Bafta award-winning series, said: "When we looked at the footage, it was like my holiday photographs everyone's head was cut off ...a ground glass piece or something had dropped in the lens."
The problem meant that the stars of the programme had to be reassembled to film everything again.
- INDEPENDENT
