TV Hell was a BBC2 theme night broadcast on 31 August 1992, showing a whole evening of archive television clips widely regarded by critics[who?]
[1] It followed an unrelated series of archive theme nights called "TV Heaven", shown on Channel 4 earlier that same year.
TV Hell was defined as programmes and broadcasts where the conception of the production was misguided, even though it made use of established television cast and crew.
The clips were linked by Angus Deayton, playing the part of the Devil, and Paul Merton, playing a shellsuited couch potato who had been condemned to experience the worst of British Television for all eternity following his death, caused by a television falling onto his head from an upstairs window in the programme's opening sketch.
The comic sequences with Deayton and Merton were used to link several short documentaries, comprising, for example, Disastermind (a review of the worst performances on Mastermind), an A-Z of TV Hell moments, Storm in an Egg-Cup – a look back at the downfall of TV-am – and a short documentary about the production of the television soap Triangle, with interviews with cast and crew, followed by a repeat of the first episode.