Centre in April and May 1992 for the first series, and 12 November until 18 December 1993 for the second. Studio recording sessions were normally completed quickly; Gillies recalls "an hour and a half, tops". To a large extent, the editing occurred live during the studio recording with only tightening later. At the end of the recording on Sunday evenings Spiers would review the show before retiring to the bar, with the bulk of the work complete. Moffat contrasts this with the editing of modern sitcoms, which, he says, are edited more like film. Structure Many of the first six episodes of Joking Apart were constructed non-sequentially, with scenes from the beginning of the relationship juxtaposed with those from the end. Moffat describes this non-linear technique as a "romantic comedy, but a romantic comedy backwards because it ends with the couple unhappy". Moffat had experimented with non-linear narrative in Press Gang, such as the episode "Monday-Tuesday". Various episodes of Coupling played with structure, such as the fourth series episode "9½ Minutes" which showed the same events from three perspectives. All of the episodes open with Bathurst portraying Mark Taylor, a sitcom writer, apparently performing stand-up in a small comedy club. These performances are fantasy sequences, playing out in the character's mind and portraying his internal creative processes as comedic monologues; these monologues mainly employ material from the character's failing marriage and are intended to show that "he thinks in punchlines, in comedy". Episodes regularly cut back to these fantasy performances, which usually open with the signature line: "My wife left me ...". Moffat felt that audiences needed to know from the start that the relationship would not survive. However, it was unclear to some viewers that the fantasy sequences were set in the writer's mind; many journalists reported that the character Mark was a stand-up comic, not a sitcom writer. In the fantasy sequences for the pilot, Bathurst was filmed against a completely black backdrop, which Moffat describes as "hell to look at". For the series, the sequences were filmed in a real club. Moffat describes this as the "wrong direction" as it became unclear that the fantasy sequences were "not real". Moffat observes that, like Seinfeld, an American sitcom that used a similar device, Joking Apart used less of the stand-up as the series progressed. In retrospect, Moffat regrets including the stand-up sequences. Bathurst, however, has considered refilming them