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Raquel Welch’s Perfect Entrance

Published 7th October 2026

TV Comedy

As we’ve often discussed here over the years, the problem with stories and anecdotes about old TV shows is that as soon as you prod them, they can start to disintegrate. This can happen with articles initially look about as trustworthy as you can get, and have contributions from all the right people.

Take that oral history of Mork & Mindy on Gizmodo. I didn’t quote this section of the piece last time, but it actually has a whole section on the episode “Mork vs the Necrotons”.1 Story editor David Misch:

“There was a scene which was incorporated into the original script, where Raquel Welch was to torture Mr. Williams. But the “joke” was that all her tortures were sexy. So the idea was that there was going to be a hot tub, and she was going to torture him by rubbing him. […]

But my main memory of that scene was not our hilarious lines, but that after the scene was over, everyone was [supposed] to get out of the hot tub and to move on to the next scene. And Robin said, “I’m afraid I’m not going to be getting out of the hot tub.” Because he had, uh, a piece of physical anatomy that had gotten not appropriate for the audience to see at that point. Raquel Welch had been rubbing him all over.

That was an anatomical issue with Robin in general. Robin was always “primed,” let’s just say that.”

Which is a very funny story. The only problem is: it doesn’t really match what actually happens in the episode as broadcast, or indeed in the script. Sure, Raquel does touch Robin outside the hot tub, but it’s actually her two lackeys Kama and Sutra who touch him once inside the tub.2 The anecdote makes it sound like Robin is still in the hot tub at the end of the scene, but in fact he escapes halfway through, still pursued by the two young lovelies. And besides, he actually spends the second half of his time in the hot tub standing up, where he didn’t have much of a chance of being able to hide anything anyway.

Do I think Robin Williams had a problem with a great big throbbing erection during the shooting of that scene? Probably. But it can’t have happened quite as described. Unfortunately, “Raquel Welch gave Robin Williams an erection in the hot tub” is just too delicious a story to resist.

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  1. Not that the Gizmodo article actually mentions the episode title itself anywhere, which is mildly weird, but whatever. ↩

  2. The script suggests Kama and Sutra are wearing “futuristic bikinis”. The actual programme takes this to mean “silver”, in grand TV science fiction tradition. ↩

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The Dance of the Censors

Published 4th October 2026

TV Comedy

Is there a way of me trying to tell you that I’m currently doing a season of Raquel Welch films, without sounding like a dirty bastard? Maybe I could say that I highly recommend her 1967 film Fathom, a Bond pastiche which she is fantastic in, and which avoids every single Mary-Goodnight-shaped mistake you might worry they would fall into.

My feminist credentials duly restored, I also recently watched the double-length Mork & Mindy episode “Mork vs. the Necrotons”, broadcast by ABC on the 18th November 1979. This was broadcast during sweeps week – the period where the viewing figures set the advertising rates – and featured Welch as Captain Nirvana, one of the evil alien Necrotons. I’m sure they didn’t do anything too exploitative and over-sexualised, did they?

Raquel Welch, showing lots of cleavage and looking outrageously sexy

Robin Williams in a hot tub with Vicki Frederick and Debra Jo Fondren wearing silver bikinis

I can only presume that teenage boys across the land had a confused sexual awakening directly in front of their parents, leading to an awkward evening all round.

Truth be told, “Mork vs. the Necrotons” is a mixed bag of an episode, but then Mork & Mindy is a mixed bag of a series. One moment it’s superb, the next moment you’re checking your watch, particularly in the second half. And Williams himself can go from comic genius to somebody who deserves a slap in ten seconds or less. But Welch herself is very funny in her guest role; funnier than I think she generally gets credit for.

There’s also the requisite number of dirty jokes for which the series is famous. For starters is this amazing gag, when Mindy nearly sits on Mork when he’s hiding in the sofa. How the hell they got away with this one is anybody’s guess:

MORK: It’s alright for me to sit on my face, but I don’t think you can.

Bearing in mind they got away with the above, there’s one very very suspicious moment near the end of the episode, when Captain Nirvana’s two lackeys Kama and Sutra attempt to take over the ship. What the hell do you think is going on here?

After Nirvana’s line “See, I told you they wanted my job”, there’s an abrupt cut, and the tail end of an audience laugh. It looks uncannily like a line has been removed here. And it’s removed in every single version of the episode I can find; I highly suspect this was an edit made before original transmission back in 1979.

The question is: what, exactly, was cut? If only we had the script in order to check.

Well, we do… in a slightly odd fashion. Back in February of this year, a YouTube channel run by Duane Channcey published two videos where he takes the shooting scripts for “Mork vs the Necrotons”, and flips through them while playing the soundtrack of the episode. This makes it very easy to spot where changes and edits have been made to the final show.

From this, we know that the cut line in the above scene was:

NIRVANA: (TO MORK) I told you they were after my job.
MORK: Good privates are hard to find.

Which is very funny, and doesn’t really feel much different to other slightly dirty jokes in the show. Maybe somebody thought “privates” was slightly too direct, or maybe it became a sacrificial lamb to save other gags they liked more.

It’s even possible that the producers didn’t like how Robin Williams said the line, despite the good audience reaction. This oral history of the show, published by Gizmodo, goes into a lot of detail about the censorship problems faced by the show. But story editor David Misch also says:

“…in that second season, he would do relatively innocent lines, and put a sort of sexual smirk to them. Which got a huge laugh from the audience, but undermined the character.”

A censorship issue, or a creative decision by the production team? The true reason is almost certainly lost to time. But at least we can enjoy the cut line.

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Letterbollocks, Part 2

Published 25th September 2026

Film / Internet

Back in April, I complained about Letterboxd deleting one of my reviews without even telling me. Give it a read if you’re interested, I won’t reiterate all my complaints here.1

Well, I’ve been keeping an eye on this, and they’ve now deleted three more of my reviews, as TMDB have entirely deleted three more entries. All of them are Public Information Films. So I thought I might as well preserve the three reviews I wrote here. All three of these PIFs have been on DVDs released by the BFI, which may give you an idea of how stupid it is to delete these entries.

Firstly, Building Sites Bite (1978), which I watched on the 6th March and gave 3 stars out of 5:

“A “lovely” companion piece to Apaches, except that this film has an in-built way of distancing the violence that Apaches doesn’t have: the science fiction wraparound sequence, where our heroes keep sending Ronald to his self-induced doom. Perhaps this was well-advised – some of the gore, particularly from a head injury, is actually more explicit than Apaches.

The two kids playing Jane and Paul, Miranda Hunnisett and Terry Russell, are asked to do some quite complex sardonic dialogue, and they manage it extremely well. There’s also some very amusing class warfare here, as two working class kids terrorise a middle class one. (Or aspirationally middle class, at least.)

Strangely, the film falls apart with its very last segment, where – for some unstated reason – Jane and Paul go into the scenario itself. They also seem to be far more genuinely worried about Ronald – as though they won’t be able to go back and save him this time. This all makes very little sense. What would have made far more sense is if that final scenario had been real, and you have to wonder whether that was the original idea, and then they decided against it.”

Secondly, Drive Carefully Darling (1975), which I watched on the 7th July and gave 4 stars out of 5:

“An absolutely fantastic driving PIF, in the vein of Herman’s Head and Inside Out, featuring John Challis and Colin Baker.

Baker in particular is outstanding, especially during the – spoiler – unpleasant finale. If you were being a dick, you could say this was the best piece of science fiction he ever did.”

Lastly, and by far the most famously, Lonely Water (1973), a classic PIF which Letterboxd and TMDB are absolutely insane for removing. As per Building Sites Bite, I watched this on the 6th March, and gave it a full 5 stars out of 5. I also wrote what I think is a really nice piece on it, which goes a little beyond a standard review:

“Of course it’s incredible, and packs more menace in one and a half minutes than some horror films manage in a full length film.

It does, however, also make me ponder the randomness of what gets to survive and live on in the memory, and what doesn’t. I’m sure this did indeed scare a whole generation of children; but this isn’t my childhood. My childhood was instead scarred by the terrors of Knightmare. And yet Lonely Water managed to get lovely DVD and even Blu-ray releases. With Knightmare, we have to get by with scruffy off-airs. It has never had any kind of commercial release.

We can watch Lonely Water better now than anybody did at the time; Knightmare is forever poorer quality than I experienced as a kid. And yet it was one of the very best television shows ever made.

What gets to live on properly is not a meritocracy. It’s a complex mix of contractual arrangements, the right people being in charge and interested in releasing something at the right time, and dumb luck. Which is always worth remembering once in a while. The history we watch is a kaleidoscope, not a complete bookshelf, no matter how much we would like it to be otherwise.”

I think that’s one of the best little things I’ve written this year. It is absolutely infuriating that it just got deleted, and even worse, deleted silently, without even being told about it. It makes me very cross indeed.

If entries are going to be removed, informing users a) that they’ve done so, and b) why, is literally a bare minimum.

  1. Although note that TMDB seem to have now deleted their entry for Apaches entirely, rather than just reclassified it. ↩

Evil Count Dustbug

Published 20th September 2026

TV Comedy

Did Colin Baker ever appear in The Young Ones? And if he did, why the hell can’t I remember ever seeing him, when I’ve endlessly watched those 12 episodes for years?

Certainly, Wikipedia claims that he was in the show:

“Baker returned to television, notably guest-starring as the villainous Bayban the Butcher in the 1980 Blake’s 7 episode “City at the Edge of the World”. He also had a regular role as James West in the ATV soap opera For Maddie with Love (1980). Other programmes in which Baker guest-starred include Dangerous Davies (1981), The Young Ones (1982), Juliet Bravo (1982), The Citadel (1983) and Swallows and Amazons Forever (1984).”

Wikipedia gives us a reference for this information: Issue 40 of Doctor Who: The Complete History, published in 2016. Sure enough:

“TV acting roles soon picked up; as Bayban the Butcher in Blake’s 7 episode City at the Edge of the World (1980), Baker upstaged star Paul Darrow, a move later repaid in Timelash (1985). There was a regular role as James West in ATV’s afternoon soap For Maddie with Love (1980), and guest parts in Dangerous Davies (1981), The Young Ones (1982), Juliet Bravo (1982), The Citadel (1983) and Swallows and Amazons Forever (1984).”

Well, I guess Wikipedia made a vague stab at rewriting.

Let’s just turn to the place which should know the answer to this. Colin Baker’s official site also claims he was in the show, and even gives us a character name:

THE YOUNG ONES (Evil Count Dust Bag) 19821

What’s going on? Well, first things first: it is correct to say that Colin Baker never appeared in an episode of The Young Ones. But it is even more correct to say that Colin Baker never appeared in an episode of The Young Ones… as broadcast.

The DVD commentary for Episode 5 of The Trial of a Time Lord2 has the answer. When Christopher Ryan first appears as Kiv, writer Philip Martin and Colin Baker share the following exchange:

PHILIP MARTIN: Of course, he’d been part of The Young Ones, hadn’t he?
COLIN BAKER: Yes. I did an episode of The Young Ones with him… and I got cut out of it. So I was never seen. I was in a cutaway. I was the Evil Count Dustbug, who was in the groove of a record that Chris Ryan put on the turntable. And I tied a girl down in the groove, and the needle was coming down the track to her. And I was twirling my moustaches. They obviously decided that wasn’t as funny as they thought it was.
PHILIP MARTIN: Sounds pretty inventive to me.

This is, I believe, the most which has ever been revealed publicly about Colin Baker’s involvement in the show. We don’t even know what episode he was supposed to be in, beyond the 1982 date indicating it was the first series.

I think we can do better than that.

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  1. Yes, that’s Dust Bag. We’ll come back to this later. ↩

  2. Or the first episode of Mindwarp, take your pick. Yes, after over 15 years of running this site, I have finally waded into the controversy that is Doctor Who serial titles. I hate my life. ↩

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Pixel Area

Published 18th September 2026

Internet / Meta

As someone who has written a lot about the independent web in the past, then something like the newly-launched Pixel Area is like catnip to me.

From the site’s About page1, Oleh Providnyk explains:

“Pixel Area is a 100×100 coordinate grid with room for 10,000 websites. Each pixel belongs to a real person and links to whatever they have online: a blog, a project, or just a small site they made. You pick an empty spot, choose a color, add a short description, and visitors find you by wandering around the map, one coordinate at a time, without really knowing where they will end up. […]

Behind every pixel there is a person who wanted to have their own place on the web. Someone keeping a blog, a photo journal, or notes about their garden that maybe three people read – and they keep doing it anyway. That’s the part I care about: there is a person behind every square, with their own interests, ideas and way of doing things.”

It’s a concept which is best experienced rather than read about. Click or tap around, or hit “random space”, and discover loads of sites which you might otherwise never come across.

In some ways, Pixel Area is no different to a normal list of sites that you may enjoy, as per the early days of the web, and currently best-represented by the brilliant ooh.directory. But I’m a sucker for someone trying to find a genuinely new way of guiding people towards interesting stuff. (I hope the limited hashtags will be expanded on at some point, which will become more important as more sites join.)

And yes, I have claimed my own pixel for Dirty Feed. The coordinates? X: 20, Y: 10. Or… 2010, the year this site launched. I shall be smug about this for the rest of the month, yes.

  1. It remains bizarre to me how many websites either don’t have an About page, or make it a nightmare to find. It’s one of the first places I click on when I visit a new site; I need to get the lie of the land in order to interpret what I’m reading. More than once, I’ve resorted to reading a site’s bio on their social media feed as I couldn’t find an obvious link to a page which told me what the damn site actually is, which is faintly ludicrous. ↩

A Ginger Magician

Published 5th September 2026

Internet / TV Comedy

I always love reading people’s obscure TV memories. Here’s one posted to Bluesky recently by Jeff Billington; unlike some people who are convinced their memories are always correct, he willingly admits it might be bollocks.

“Something I insist happened but may have dreamt:

BBC2, mid 90s, snooker, Steve Davis playing, match is overrunning.

Between frames, host states that scheduled Red Dwarf will be shown after the match.

Return to commentator (Ted Lowe?) who says ‘…from the Red Dwarf to the Ginger Magician…’

The question is: can I – and a gang of fellow investigators – prove whether this happened or not, from the comfort of our own living room? Let’s find out.

STEP #1: Ray Newman draws the post to my attention.

STEP #2: Eddie Robson points out that if this happened, it must have been with a repeat, as to his knowledge no first-run episode of Red Dwarf was delayed by snooker. (Which is a very reasonable supposition – I’ve hung around Dwarf fandom long enough to know it would be a well-known incident if so.)

STEP #3: Justin Lewis suggests a date: 9th February 1997. This was the night of the Masters final, followed by Red Dwarf VII, where each new episode on Friday had a Sunday repeat. BBC Genome lists that repeat time as 10:30pm, as per the Radio Times, although the overrunning snooker would have pushed that later.

STEP #4: Eddie Robson also points out that Steve Davis was actually in the final, matching Jeff Billington’s memory.

STEP #5: I finally get involved, and find the whole of the 1997 final is sitting on YouTube. I initially suggest Part Two as a starting point…

STEP #6: …but Justin Lewis notes that Part Two is from the afternoon coverage, not the evening, and suggests that Part Five would be most likely.

STEP #7: I presume at that point we were all desperately scanning the videos, trying to find the moment. I know I was. It therefore seems appropriate that Jeff Billington himself found it first. It is indeed in Part Five; to be exact, at 11:40.

I’m even going to break my rule, and embed a video here which was uploaded in the wrong aspect ratio:

DAVID VINE: Well as promised, we’re staying with this gripping Masters final right to the very end. Those of you waiting for the Red Dwarf, well he’ll be following this final.
DENNIS TAYLOR: Well, from a Red Dwarf to a Ginger Magician here at the table…

So it was Dennis Taylor, not Ted Lowe, but otherwise, Jeff’s memory was pretty much spot on. And while you can make fun of David Vine’s “the” Red Dwarf, hey, there was precedent.

Total time from Jeff’s post to the solution: three hours and five minutes. And if we only count when people truly started poking at it, 37 minutes.

Which just leads me to contemplate: we complain, correctly, about how dreadful the world can be in 2026, in both large ways and small. But sometimes it’s worth sitting back and thinking that for years, researching this would have been virtually impossible. But with a combination of social media, YouTube, and BBC Genome, a long-standing mystery was cracked in less then an hour.

Modern life isn’t always rubbish.

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Closing the Gap

Published 24th August 2026

TV Comedy

On the 21st March 1988, Danny John-Jules appeared as The Cat in the Red Dwarf episode “Me2“, the final episode of Series 1.

On the 6th September 1988, Danny John-Jules appeared as The Cat in the Red Dwarf episode “Kryten”, the first episode of Series 2.

But between those dates, on the 30th May 1988, Danny John-Jules appeared as The Cat in something altogether different: a show called Babylon 2, part of the BBC’s brand new youth strand DEF II.

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The Outer Reaches of Human Imagination

Published 16th August 2026

TV Comedy / TV Presentation

Disclaimer: this is a personal post, and does not represent the views of the BBC.

What do most people use YouTube for? Surely, EVERYBODY uses it for the exact reason I do: to watch lots of lovely old BBC2 continuity from 1992. Such as the below video, uploaded by Andrew Wiseman. The whole thing is well worth watching; I particularly like the trail for The Addams Family. Or perhaps I just like the idea of TV channels showing The Addams Family.

But the interesting part of this video for our purposes today is right at the beginning: it starts with the original network continuity into the Red Dwarf episode “Holoship”, broadcast on the 20th February 1992. Sadly, the recording is not quite complete – some words are missing at the front – but it’s mostly there. Your announcer is Halyna Kozak.

“…Red Dwarf return for another tour of duty around the outer regions of human imagination, proving that love can even conquer uncharted space.”

A lovely announcement, for one of the most romantic episodes Red Dwarf ever did.

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A Specialist

Published 8th August 2026

TV Comedy

My recent four-part analysis of Mary was one of the hardest things I’ve ever written for Dirty Feed. When I’m writing stupid shit about The Young Ones, I have a base level of knowledge about the show in my head. With Mary, I was writing virtually from scratch, and that’s before you even get into disentangling fact and fiction surrounding the show.

But truth be told, I could have easily written ten articles about poor, maligned Mary. There’s simply so much to say about it, and a huge amount of contemporary newspaper reporting. I wrote a version of the first article which was almost twice as long, with twice as many review quotes. But I did want at least some readers to get to the end of the article without giving up.

Which means there’s shitloads of stuff I left out of those pieces. So let’s take one more trip back to the blog Tune in Tonight!, which has this to say about the whole notion of variety:

“If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know there’s been a whole month dedicated to variety shows, a genre that peaked in the 1960s, and died a hard, ugly, unlamented death by the early 80s. Variety shows existed for one purpose–to prove that the star (or stars, if you were Donny and Marie Osmond) was multi-talented. They weren’t just actors, they were great singers! They could dance! They could do slapstick comedy! They could grimace their way through scripted banter with a guest star they never met until three minutes before taping began!

The trouble was, of course, that they couldn’t do all those things. Sometimes it was so apparent they couldn’t do all those things that it made watching the show an endurance test, a challenge to see how much secondhand embarrassment one could take before switching over to a soothing, more entertaining test pattern. Mary Tyler Moore actually comes pretty close, but it still doesn’t save 1978’s Mary, which lasted a regrettable three episodes, from the stink of desperation.”

Which I think might be one of the most cynical things I’ve ever read. I do understand that it’s an over-exaggeration to make the point; I’m just not sure I agree with the point. I’m not being deliberately difficult, but I think the point of variety was to entertain people, wasn’t it? Which it managed, for decades. But there is something here about the way television was heading, for good or for ill.

Let’s take a look at one example in particular. Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night (Harper, 2017) by Jason Zinoman, has some material about Letterman’s appearances in Mary, including a routine dissecting a magic trick which I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else. But the anecdote about his guest appearance on Mork & Mindy is, if anything, even more interesting:

“If Mary taught him that he couldn’t sing or dance, his cameo role on Mork & Mindy was a lesson in the dangers of acting. Letterman was cast as an obnoxious motivational speaker who kept telling his followers to sit down and shut up, and bragged about his Rolls-Royce. The casting agent probably thought that Letterman’s stage persona would make him a natural for this superior jerk. But in a villain role that required him to commit, he looked as uncomfortable as he did in a chorus line.

In an era of entertainers who did a little bit of everything—singing, dancing, and a few jokes — Letterman was a specialist. And while his early experiences were failures, they helped him understand his limitations. Wil Shriner, a fellow stand-up comic and friend, recalled how miserable he was on the drive to the studio to shoot Mork & Mindy. On the way home, Letterman said, ‘I will never do that again.’”

This was the episode “Mork Goes Erk”, broadcast on ABC on the 8th February 1979. Letterman is only in one scene, half of which I’ve embedded below.1

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  1. If you want the other half, buy the DVD. You can get every single episode for under £30 now. ↩

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There’s Something About “Mary”, Part Four

Published 4th August 2026

TV Comedy

Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four

Last time, I asked a simple question: Why is it that Mary attracts so much negative comment today, with people falling over themselves to slag it off, when I’ve rather enjoyed what I’ve seen of it so far? Do I simply have terrible taste in television?

That is a distinct possibility. But I also think there’s a few deeper things going on here.

Vince Keenan, in this piece about Mary, makes a very good point about modern attitudes towards the show. He correctly notes that recent documentary Being Mary Tyler Moore does not cover Mary.. and also that it was far from a surprise that it goes absolutely nowhere near it. Why?

“…because the Mary/The Mary Tyler Moore Hour debacle is perceived not only as a failure, but the wrong kind of failure. One seen as a dead end. But every show business narrative needs the right kind of failure, an early misstep that opens doors and creates second acts.”

He goes on to suggest that the “right” kind of failure with Mary Tyler Moore was her disastrous 1966 stage musical Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and her subsequent middling films, which ended up leading to her renaissance on television. I think Vince is exactly right that this is why Being Mary Tyler Moore didn’t cover Mary: because it essentially lead to nothing, at least when it came to Mary herself.

But I think we can take this a step further. Because Mary is the “wrong” kind of failure, it also means that people find the show difficult to judge on its own merits. Something that was pulled after three weeks because it didn’t get the ratings is just “obviously” a poor show. The juggernaut of received opinion rolls on, the narrative takes over, and before you know it, nobody’s really analysing the show properly, they’re just trading insults about it.

Vince himself doesn’t seem immune to this: in a paragraph explaining why he thinks the show is bad, he simply states “Moore opens with Loudon Wainwright III’s ‘Dead Skunk.'”1 As though this is a self-evidently terrible thing, with no justification needed. Now I personally think the segment is hilarious, but that’s a judgement call; what I find interesting is that multiple people who have looked back at Mary just don’t seem to understand the gag. For the avoidance of doubt: America’s Sweetheart™ opened a show by singing about a dead skunk, instead of about something nice. The inappropriateness was the joke.

All this already seems to have put up a barrier when it comes to how to interpreting Mary. But it’s compounded by something else: numerous people who worked on the show have often had negative things to say about it. Vince quotes Swoozie Kurtz calling Mary’s dancing “bossa-nova-meets-yeast-infection”, which is extremely amusing, albeit unfair. But the most obvious and famous criticism comes from Michael Keaton and David Letterman, and particularly with Letterman’s agony at doing the dance numbers.

Vince goes on to mention the following segment from Letterman which aired on the 28th April 2015, featuring Keaton as guest.

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  1. Vince doesn’t identify this show as unaired, but he does correctly state that it’s an incomplete edit, which is more than many people bother to do. ↩

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