Something New

On a Google Sheets document, I have a list of articles planned for Dirty Feed. As it stands today, there are 236 items on it. The chances of getting round to writing all of them are zero. The chances of getting round to half of them are also zero. What makes it even worse is that it isn’t even my only list of potential Dirty Feed projects.

But one potential article seemed so vanishingly unlikely to get done, it never even made it onto any of my lists. That article was a history of a little show called Parallel 9. A Saturday morning kid’s show from my childhood, which I vaguely remembered, clearly had a hugely interesting story attached to it… and yet nobody had really done any research on it at all.

Well, now they have. My old pal Jonathan Bufton is currently writing a multi-part history of the show. Part 1 and Part 2 deal with how that first series of Parallel 9 looked on-screen, but it’s Part 3 where things begin to get really special. Having been given access to plenty of never-before-seen documentation, Jonathan has put together the true story of how the programme was made. A story which has never, ever been told before, that people have wondered about for years… and suddenly, there it all is, 30 years later.

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I spent many, many years in Red Dwarf fandom. Along the way, you pick up… well, the odd in-joke or two. I swear, if anybody else ever asks me whether I would like any toast¹, they will get a kick in the face.

One of those running jokes, though, is a slightly odd one. Here is a line about Holly from the first Red Dwarf book, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, published in 1989:

“And, to kill the remaining few nanoseconds, he skipped briefly through Kevin Keegan’s Football – It’s a Funny Old Game.”

And here is the same line in the Red Dwarf Omnibus, combining the first two Red Dwarf books, published in 1992:

“And, to kill the remaining few nanoseconds, he skipped briefly through Joe Klumpp’s Zero Gee Football – It’’s a Funny Old Game.”

The name “Joe Klumpp” lands with an absolute clang. A rewrite presumably designed so the book wouldn’t “date” as easily², it manages to take away everything funny about the joke in the first place. And so instead, it becomes a different kind of joke, about how terrible it is, because fans are pricks.³

But that’s as far as most discussions got about the different editions of the Red Dwarf books. You might get a mention about “Champion the Wonder Horse” being renamed “Woolfie Sprogg, the Plasticine Dog”.⁴ But that’s really it. You pick out these things when you notice them, but nobody could actually be bothered going through both editions and checking out every single change.

Well, until recently, when Flap Jack over on Ganymede & Titan did exactly that. And also compared both book versions with the unabridged audiobook. And then wrote another article comparing them to the abridged audio versions. All something that Red Dwarf fandom failed to do for decades… and suddenly, there is all is, 30 years later.

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One subject above is a show which is little-remembered these days. The other subject is Red Dwarf. You would perhaps think that there was nothing left to drag out about that show. That’s not true. There is ALWAYS something new to discover, or document, or analyse. It can be something with an organised fandom, or something long-forgotten. There’s always far less of interest written about any given thing than you might think.

As part of the ongoing woes about Twitter, I’ve seen much talk about how this might inspire more people to write blogs again. This sentiment is typical:

“Elon M taking Twitter private and destroying it may be the shock we creators, who left our blogs and DIY internet endeavors in the late 2000s / early 2010s for various social media style micro-blogs owned by other people, needed to wake us up and shock us back into the Indie Web rather than the Corporate Web.”

The desire for many people to go back to blogging is a good one. But it does seem to me that many people have that desire, but then don’t quite know what to do with their blog. The result: people thinking that they actually haven’t got much to write about after all, and drifting off again.

In 2023, if you want to start writing on your own site again, why not pick your favourite TV, film, book, whatever… and give it a kick. More might just pop out of it than you’d expect. After two decades of doing this shit, I’m still surprised daily by what people manage to find.

We’ve barely scraped the surface. There’s so much more out there. It just needs a little digging.

1. Fun fact: I was responsible for picking out all those clips of Red Dwarf back in 2007, as one of my very first pieces of freelance work. It’s only now that I realise that was when YouTube was only two years old, so it was a very early example of that kind of work. Of course, as it was all uploaded in YouTube’s early days, the picture quality is absolute dogshit. ↩

2. I have a problem with this concept full stop, but that’s a whole other article. ↩

3. I’m a fan. I’m a prick. ↩

4. To be fair, I do actually think that rewrite is funny. ↩

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