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The Bucket List

Published 18th April 2024

TV Comedy

Some of you may think I’m a little too obsessed with studio recording dates for sitcoms. It is surely something deeply unhealthy, which makes me look less like a proper TV historian, and more like someone who enjoys wading through irrelevant trivia.

To which my answer is: if Harold Snoad is allowed to do it, then so am I. His book, It’s Bouquet – Not Bucket! (The Book Guild, 2009), is mainly known for his rather pointed remarks about Roy Clarke every other paragraph. But he also has this to say about the fifth series of Keeping Up Appearances in 1995:

“Because of Patricia’s involvement with the series Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, the start date for the making of this series of Keeping Up Appearances had been moved on by six weeks but, in spite of this, the powers-that-be still wanted to begin transmitting the series on the original agreed date, which created quite a few problems. In the past I had always been able to record the episodes (studio-wise) in the order that was the most economical. This was particularly the case when an episode involved additional artistes who would be needed both on location and in the studio, which meant they had to be paid a retainer fee for the period between the two elements – unless they happened to have other work (which, quite often, wasn’t the case).

In the past, to reduce this period – and the relevant payment – as much as possible, I had always planned things so that the studio recordings of these episodes were the first ones that we did when we returned from location filming. This meant that there was as small a gap as possible between the two elements, which saved the BBC a lot of money in retainer fees. Also, in the past, by having quite a few of the episodes fully completed by the date when the series started to transmit, I was able to arrange for them to go out in an order that reduced the chances of the public realising that elements of some of the storylines were shall we say, rather similar… well, all right, repetitive! I was now being forced into a corner where I was only ever going to be one episode ahead of transmission, which made life extremely difficult.”

You will, of course, note that Snoad can’t even get into a discussion about this topic without slagging off Roy Clarke.1

The question then: is what Snoad says above correct? Was the fifth series of the show really made only one week ahead of transmission? Let’s consult some interesting paperwork and find out. And for extra fun, let’s also go back right to the beginning of the show in 1990, and see exactly how far in advance each series of the programme was recorded.2

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  1. I’m making fun, but I think what Snoad says about Clarke throughout the book has the ring of truth. Your mileage may, as they say, vary. ↩

  2. A word about episode titles. There are precisely no episode titles given in either the original broadcast versions of each episode, or the Radio Times. Even the official paperwork simply states “Episode 1”, “Episode 2”, and so on. All the episode titles I use in this article were bestowed upon the show much later on, although most of them are currently used on bbc.co.uk, aside for Series 5, for some reason. I don’t really like using titles which weren’t applied to the episodes originally, but for the sake of clarity I’ve grit my teeth and included them. ↩

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The Voice of the Balls

Published 12th April 2024

TV Presentation

Saturday the 12th April, 2014. I’m sitting in NC1, BBC One’s transmission suite. I’m not yet fully running things by myself; I’m still training. And one thing I’m still learning is how to safely and effectively transmit a live show on the channel.

Such as: The National Lottery. Specifically, the first episode of a new series of In It to Win It.

In It to Win It is a perfect example of why the idea of a “live” show can be more complicated than many might think. All the quiz section of the programme with Dale Winton was pre-recorded, but the lottery draw itself hosted by Kate Garraway is live. And yet in NC1, I wasn’t involved in cutting between the live and pre-recorded sections; as far as I was concerned, it was packaged up to me by production as a complete live show, coming in down the line like any other live programme.1

And as it was a live programme, that meant: talking to the programme’s PA, to go through all the details about that evening’s broadcast. Nothing is left to chance with these things. Of course we talk about some of the obvious things: crucial information like exactly what time they’re on air, and the duration of the show. We also do a clock check to make sure we both agree what the actual time is. (Yes, sometimes that is wrong.)

But we also need to know some less-obvious things, such as how the programme starts. This is crucial for a number of reasons. Firstly, it helps presentation choose the correct visual transition into the programme: “Oooh, that title sequence would probably look nice with a 10 frame mix.” It means you can check that what the continuity announcer is going to say makes sense into the start of the show. It also means you can make sure the production is cued up on the right thing a couple of minutes before air.

So, about half an hour before the live transmission, I buzz through to the The National Lottery PA over talkback. I’m a little nervous; I still haven’t done loads of live shows on the BBC yet. Not to worry – tonight the PA is very friendly, as they always were on the lottery shows. She says she doesn’t recognise my voice; I reply that I’m a new channel director, and I’m training today. We do most of our checks, and say goodbye for now.

A while later, she asks me if I’d like to see their rehearsal of the start of the show. This is common practice; I’ll often watch the rehearsals down the line to make sure all is OK with sound and vision. I agree, and turn the volume up on the incoming line.

In It to Win It‘s opening is a little complicated anyway; all the Dale Winton stuff at the top is pre-recorded, but Alan Dedicoat’s voiceover at the top is actually live. After all, he’s got to voice the lottery numbers later on, so why not do it live?

Below is the entire show on that particular day, as transmitted. “Now please welcome your host – it’s Dale Winton!”

But that’s not what Alan said at the top of the show during rehearsal. Because that production wanted to do something special for me, as I was new. Instead, he uttered the immortal words:

“Now please welcome your host – it’s John from Presentation!”

In my ten years of directing the BBC channels, it remains one of the nicest, kindest things anybody has ever done for me. Going out of their way to do something like that, just because they knew I’d get a kick out of it.

It made me feel part of something special. And I’ve never forgotten it.

  1. This leads to a dichotomy between how some people at home consider things, and how you think of it in presentation. For the educated viewer, they may feel very pleased with themselves that they’ve figured out that part of any given show is live, and part isn’t. But in NC1, for practical purposes, all of that programme is probably considered to be live. What matters most to the channel director is how the programme gets into NC1, not whether all the action is literally happening at that moment or not. ↩

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Floor Is Lava Season 4, Which Sounds Like a Clickbait Post Title but I Swear It Isn’t

Published 11th April 2024

TV Gameshows

It’s a very peculiar thing, to absent-mindedly read a newspaper article… only to find a quote from yourself.

So it was the other day, when I was trying to find out whether the highly amusing Netflix game show Floor is Lava had been recommissioned for a fourth season. I now have the dubious honour of being immortalised in The Sun.

“Taking to X, formerly Twitter, one said: ‘Are we getting season 4 of Floor is Lava? My kid is dying to know!’

Another said: ‘My @netflix is costing $$$$ it really makes me wonder what Netflix is providing or changing that costs SO much?!? I need to have a new season of Floor Is Lava monthly! Where’s the new season?!? They cancel shows ALL the time! HIT shows!’

And a third echoed: ‘You can see with Floor is Lava, where Netflix have made just 20 episodes since 2020. Rubbish. Make some more television.'”

I’m the third person quoted there. Although they have slightly misquoted me; what I actually said was:

“Make some television” is a vaguely witty way of putting it. “Make some more television” is deathly dull. Oh well, at least my name wasn’t attached to it.

Anyway, in answer to the question: no, it doesn’t seem that Floor is Lava has been recommissioned for a fourth season. It doesn’t seem to have been officially cancelled yet either, mind you. It appears to be in an annoying limbo.

Moreover, calling it a “fourth season” is generous. Season 1 was ten episodes; Seasons 2 and 3 were five episodes each, and made as part of the same production block. It really feels like we’ve only had two seasons: one in 2020, and one in 2022. And you have to wonder: 20 episodes of what by all appearances has been a very popular game show, over four years? What the hell are Netflix playing at?

In the same amount of time – five different calendar years – Anglia Television managed to make 72 episodes of Knightmare. (I like using Knightmare as an example, because it seems to me that the more you think about it, the more similarities it has to Floor is Lava.) The BBC managed to make 69 episodes of Total Wipeout. Channel 4 broadcast 65 episodes of The Crystal Maze in its first five years; even the revived series managed 45, excluding the initial Stand Up to Cancer special. (And the revived Crystal Maze is widely considered not to have been the success Channel 4 hoped.)

Or if you’d prefer I compared the series to other Netflix shows: Nailed It! has managed 56 episodes over five years.

You have to wonder: why are Netflix so reticent about making more Floor is Lava? What’s going on over there? A worldwide pandemic explains some of the issue, sure, but certainly not all of it. At the back of my head is the idea that Netflix are embarrassed about making a silly show like Floor is Lava, but at this point I’m not sure that fully explains things either.

Shouldn’t they be on 60 episodes by now, and ready to call it a day? That’s what some television is: you make loads of it in a short period of time, it burns itself out, and then you move onto making something else. The churn of television is not a bad thing.

But with Floor is Lava, it feels like they’ve barely even got going. For a supposedly successful show, it’s just odd.

I Love Doing Research, Part Two

Published 10th April 2024

TV Comedy

One of the ongoing projects bubbling away in the background here on Dirty Feed is an extensive piece on Keeping Up Appearances. Just exactly what is broadcast on Onslow’s telly in various episodes of the show? It’s a question which somebody has to answer, anyway.1

So I obviously began my research with the pilot, now commonly known as “Daddy’s Accident”, first broadcast on 29th October 1990. This is the very first time we see Onslow turn on the TV in his own inimitable fashion.

He’s clearly watching a film, but which film? The paperwork reveals the answer:

Film used on television screen:
‘SHALAKO’: Weintraub Screen Entertainment
Taken off VT, spool nos: H82311 & H82301
Duration used:
Sound only: 2’21”
In vision: 0’10”
SLA number: 14777.

Ah yes, Shalako, the 1968 Western with Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot. Not a film I really know… and yet the name seemed strangely familiar, somehow.

And then it hit me. Right back at the start of my investigation about The Young Ones and flash frames, the climax of that very first piece was about the frame which was cut from the final episode, “Summer Holiday”. And what was that flash frame supposed to be of?

FILM:
1 frame from Shalako (+ BBC cap) property of EMI. Transferred to H25992.

Of all the films Keeping Up Appearances could have chosen, it had to be that one, didn’t it?

  1. No it isn’t. ↩

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“At Best, Misguided”

Published 18th March 2024

Internet

Or: Why Conversation on Social Media Is Often So Tedious, Part #264842.

The New York Times1, “Classified Material on Human Intelligence Sources Helped Trigger Alarm”, 27th August 2022:

“Mr. Trump and his defenders have claimed he declassified the material he took to Mar-a-Lago. But documents retrieved from him in January included some marked “HCS,” for Human Intelligence Control System. Such documents have material that could possibly identify C.I.A. informants, meaning a general, sweeping declassification of them would have been, at best, misguided.”

This section was quoted at the time by a popular account on Twitter, with the following statement attached:

“The way the NYT talks about what would amount to getting people straight up murdered.”

The replies were equally as scathing: “The level of unearned deference”, “misguided?!?“, “Misguided, they said! That was all… Misguided!!!”, “Jfc”, and so on. Or how about:

“Potentially misguided is generally reserved for thing like socks with sandals, not getting informants killed. But, you know, it’s all semantics.”

Here’s the problem: that’s not what “at best, misguided” means in this context at all. It’s clearly not meant to be taken at face value. It is deliberate understatement for effect. And that understatement, to me, reads far more strongly than an angry screed.

This isn’t a difficult thing to understand. Misinterpreting this is a very basic problem with comprehension. “At best, misguided” here simply means “terrible”. A very dry way of putting it, sure, but that’s what makes it grimly amusing. And there is place for such rhetoric in journalism, just as everywhere else, even on unpleasant subjects like this one.

With all the shit going on in the world, we cannot let ourselves be dragged into the idea that there is only one way to communicate. We cannot let pure fire and anger rule the day at all times, no matter how virtuous it might make us feel in the moment. We have to allow a range of approaches in how we write.

We do not win the day by reducing language to its most obvious, boring state at all times. We do not survive by being boring and one-note. Sadly, there are far too many people out there who think otherwise.

It vaguely frightens me.

  1. Disclaimer: I do actually have subscription to the New York Times. I can’t remember why I bought it – I think there was an old article I want to read – but I’m only subscribed to it while it costs me the offer price of £2 a month, as I don’t use it enough to justify any more. ↩

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The Dave Nice Video Show, Part One: “A 60s Version of The Word”

Published 17th March 2024

TV Comedy

NICEY: Freddie was my most glorious introduction to pop. I remember the morn after the show, I got up and looked at myself in the mirror and said: “Mate, you’re a great bloke. You really are a great bloke. Open your gorgeous eyes and look. Pop’s here. Look, I pondered to myself, look, you great big beautiful blue-eyed lovely man. You were put ‘pon this earth to be one of the world’s great philosophers. To teach people about the meaning-of-life-type stuff. To show ’em how to make a curious sense of this crazy-world-in-which-we-live-in-type scenario. With pop as your vehicle1, you can speak to the nation. For that is your purpose.”

Nicey belches.

What is the most memorable part of Smashie and Nicey: the End of an Era?

I would argue the show sets out its stall early on. Firstly, there’s the glimpse of Dave Nice seamlessly dancing with Freddie Garrity on Blue Peter. This is followed shortly afterwards by Nicey blatantly hitting on Paul McCartney during an interview. If End of an Era had provided nothing of interest but those two scenes, it would still have earned its place in comedy history. A perfect blend of archive footage, and brand new material, fused together to form comedy nirvana.

But where does the archive footage in these scenes originally come from? Surely we can do better than “a 60s episode of Blue Peter” and “footage of a Beatles concert”? Yes. Yes, we can. Much better.

All timings given are from the broadcast version of End of an Era, although I’ve tried hard to give enough video reference here that you shouldn’t need to find whatever dodgy copy you have of it.

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  1. Mere text cannot quite convey how Harry Enfield pronounces this word. ↩

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Hot 97

Published 5th March 2024

Jingles / Radio / TV Comedy

Over the last month and a half, I have been bulk-watching Seinfeld. Is it healthy to watch 128 episodes and counting in that time? Probably not, but right now I don’t feel like watching any other comedy show ever again.

But that’s not the topic of today’s post. Take a look at the following from “The Pool Guy”, which first aired in the US on the 16th November 1995. Kramer, for reasons best known to Kramer, is busy impersonating a film information line.

KRAMER: Hello. And welcome to Moviefone. Brought to you by The New York Times and Hot 97. Coming to theatres this Friday: Kevin Bacon, Susan Sarandon… “You’ve got to get me over that mountain! No!” There’s no higher place than Mountain High. Rated R.

And my ears pricked up. Hot 97. Why did that radio station mean something to me? After all, I’ve never lived in New York. And it’s not one of the especially well-known stations for radio geeks, like WABC.

Answer: because I remember a jingle for that station. But not just any jingle.

You see, Hot 97 wasn’t always called Hot 97. It used to be called Hot 103, and was owned by Emmis Communications. In 1988, Emmis bought WYNY 97.1 from NBC, and at the time, FCC regulations prevented a single company from owning two FM stations in the same market. Emmis thus decided to sell its old frequencies, and move its radio stations to the new ones.

I fully admit I had to look up some of the in-depth information above. But I already remembered the broad details: Hot 103 became Hot 97. And why did I know this?

Because on the 18th November 2018, I heard a segment on Jon Wolfert’s Rewound Radio show, where he plays lots of classic radio jingles. This particular segment was about how Hot 103 promoted its frequency change to Hot 97.

Yeah, here’s how. No Gloria, it’s not 1-2-3, it’s…

I only had to hear that jingle once, and it stuck in my head instantly. To the point where, more than five years later, a passing reference in Seinfeld brought it all right back. “Oh yeah, Hot 97 used to be Hot 103…”

I’m not entirely sure anybody can afford to sneer at jingles right now. Traditional broadcasting is in enough trouble as it is, without turning their nose up at marketing which patently works. It even grabs people out of time, where the actual message it’s getting across is completely irrelevant.

Hot 103 is moving down to 97, guys.

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Canon.

Published 4th March 2024

TV Comedy

Here’s one thing which mildly irritates me. When I get round to watching an old film or comedy show which I haven’t seen before, and I decide to talk about it on whatever social media platform I’m not sulking with at the time, I sometimes get the magic words:

“What, you’ve never watched that? How?!”

The easy answer is: I often go deep, not wide. I spend so much of my time researching and writing ludicrous, never-before-published nonsense about The Young Ones and similar. I ain’t got time to watch everything a sensible person does.

The grumpy answer is: OK, have you ever seen [a cool show that not nearly enough people have watched]? No? WELL I HAVE, NOW LEAVE ME ALONE.

But the hard answer is: I seriously want to push back on the idea that there’s any kind of canon that anybody is “supposed” to have watched. There is no such thing. I can’t think of anything more tedious than watching film or television by rote. Surely the best way to destroy Fawlty Towers is to blink quizzically at people who haven’t yet had the pleasure.

The joy is in our own personal route through a world of fun things, not a bizarre expectation that everyone who lived through a certain decade have all watched the same thing. Some of us were busy.

*   *   *

Anyway, I’m currently watching Seinfeld for the first time, and I finally know what comedy is.

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Commonness.

Published 3rd March 2024

Life / TV Presentation

Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age (2003):

“Walt Disney’s Snow White has virtues – of kindness and compassion and maternal love – that the Queen never had; she will win a victory of some sort over age, with a beauty of spirit if not of the flesh. Disney thus introduced a note of hope and love into a very stark, elemental story, without violating that story’s basic structure. To do that, he had to deal directly with emotions that most of us are reluctant to express, lest we be embarrassed by their very commonness.”

Those emotions are at their height, of course, in the scene where the Dwarfs mourn Snow White’s apparent death near the very end of the film.

Barrier goes on to quote I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1929):

“…these thoughts and feelings, in part because of their significance and their nearness to us, are peculiarly difficult to express without faults of tone. If we are forced to express them we can hardly escape pitching them in a key which ‘overdoes’ them, or we take refuge in an elliptic mode of utterance hinting them rather than rendering them to avoid offence either to others or to ourselves.”

*   *   *

Today marks ten years since I started my job in BBC presentation. Ten years of directing BBC One and BBC Two, among the BBC’s other domestic channels.

And I think back to my Dad. He died thirty years ago, in 1994. I was just 13. We were just beginning to have the vague stirrings of an adult-adult relationship… and then he was gone. We never truly got to know each other.

But he loved television. I remember him watching, long into the evening, well into the night. And I really, really hope he would have been proud of me.

The specifics might be different, but such feelings are common. They are embarrassingly common, exactly as Barrier describes. You can’t help but wish you had a more original thought. But some of our most important thoughts are some of the least original things in the world.

Such as: thirty years on, I still miss him.

An early version of this post was first published in the January issue of my monthly newsletter.

“Are You OK With This?”

Published 28th February 2024

Internet

Jason Kottke, 21st December 2023:

“Substack explains why they are paying Nazis to publish on their platform. Friends who publish on Substack, are you ok with this? If not, maybe try Buttondown or WordPress or Ghost or literally anything fucking else.”

Greg Storey, 27th February 2024:

“Tumblr and WordPress user data have been sold to train AI, and Automattic intends to do it again moving forward. Content posted on both platforms between 2014 and 2023 was shared without user’s permission. Even worse, the data exchanged included private and deleted posts, private answers, and “content from premium partner blogs” for clients like Apple. […]

If you’re using Tumblr or WordPress it’s time to seriously consider moving on to software made by companies with more integrity. Any integrity frankly is better than what you have now. I can’t say enough about Ghost, Kirby, and Craft.”

*   *   *

It doesn’t matter what I actually think about the above two issues. I’ve come to believe that Substack’s Nazi problem was at least a little overblown, and I’d need to research the WordPress issue more thoroughly before coming to any kind of conclusion. But it’s all kinda irrelevant.

Instead, let’s take a hypothetical example. Some poor soul is running a newsletter on Substack. They read about all the Nazi stuff in December, and try to do the right thing: so they move to a self-hosted WordPress installation, as Jason recommends above. All sorted, right?

Only to now be told this month by someone else that, sorry, you backed the wrong horse. Don’t go with WordPress, they’re the bad guys.

That’s two moves, in the space of two months. I guess our hypothetical person could move again… but will the next service they choose turn out to be the bad guys too? How long will it be before that happens? A month, two months, maybe a whole year?

How long do they get to spend writing, before the tedious admin kicks in again?

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