top and tail
v.— «The big surprise at the moment is the success of Seven’s The World Around Us on Sunday nights hosted by Lisa McCune. It’s really “topped and tailed” in TV parlance. She just reads some scripts in a studio in front of a flat that can take a digital graphic. An editor and producer “tops and tails” the segments and intros and the end. And off it goes to rate between 1.2 million and 1.6 million viewers on Sunday night.» —“TV shock—original programming works” by Terry O’Dial Crikey (Australia) May 26, 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Ophelia in Johnson City, Tennessee, wonders about the exclamation her great-grandmother often used when something surprised her: Cat bristle! That may be her own version of a minced oath, although it fits with the idea of how a cat’s tail might look...