YMMV / 8 Out of 10 Cats

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In series 4 episode 5 of 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, Sean Lock jokes that Jeremy Clarkson couldn't get fired from Top Gear no matter what. That turned out to not be true. In 2015, he was fired after assaulting a producer.
  • In Series 7 episode 14 of 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, Jimmy asked Sean where he saw himself in 10 years' time. When Jessica Hynes started laughing, Jimmy and Bill Bailey joked that she was thinking he wasn't going to make it. Sean played along, joking about how he had arranged with a taxidermist to have himself stuffed, but then concluding that in ten years, with his luck, he'd probably end up married to Gwyneth Paltrow. The scene becomes a bit more sombre to watch, knowing he died six years later.
  • Katherine Ryan's joke about Ivan Brackenbury not being allowed to touch the patients looks a lot harsher in light of Brackenbury's actor Tom Binns being charged with having indecent images of children.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Episodes are filmed a long time before they are broadcast, and often Out of Order. This becomes painfully obvious in 2020, when the COVID-19 Pandemic made it hard to film new episodes so series 20, beginning on 21 July,^note Series 19 was aired from 9 January to 14 February that year, ending just before the pandemic really got bad. consisted entirely of holdover material from 2019,^note Turned up to eleven in the case of the 2020 Christmas special, recorded in February 2019. with some interesting consequences:
  • Episode 3 has references to Richard Ayoade's appearance in The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, which is described as "recent" even though it premiered eighteen months before the episode aired.
  • Rachel Riley is suddenly eight months pregnant again, having already given birth.
  • There's a non-acknowledgement of the virus itself during 2020. Episodes are recorded with a full studio audience, no masks, no social distancing and at one point Jon evens gives "Corona" as his word and only knows it as "the halo you get 'round the sun during the eclipse".
  • Six episode in to the season that started with a tribute to him, Sean Lock shows up in an episode aired 6 months after he died.

---