Due to complicated work stuff, it may be a bit of time before the next significant article here on Dirty Feed. So now seems a excellent chance to point you towards Jonathan Bufton‘s series of articles on 90s Saturday morning kids show Parallel 9. These started way back in 2022, and the final piece went up in April, which seems an good excuse to read them all over again.
- Part 1 – Series 1 on-screen
- Part 2 – Series 1 on-screen, continued
- Part 3 – The Making of Series 1
- Part 3a – An interview with a guest on Series 1
- Part 4 – The Making of Series 2
- Part 5 – The Making of Series 3
I’ve linked to some of these pieces before, both on the main site and my newsletter, but the reason they deserve so much love is because really are gold-standard stuff on how to write about the TV programmes of your youth: interviews, paperwork, and examining the actual material properly. So many people are content with a sneer, or half-remembered nonsense, and in unfortunate cases both. Jonathan does things properly.1
I found Part 5 particularly interesting; it’s about Series 3 of the show, long after I’d drifted away from the series. (I remember precisely nothing about The Little Green Man, by all accounts one of the most popular features the show ever had.) But if you’ve not read any of the above before, set aside a couple of hours, and throw yourself into some of the best pop culture writing you’ll ever find.
And as I always say – if you want writing like that online about your favourite forgotten show, and it’s conspicuous by its absence… there’s only one way to solve that one. Get scribbling. The thing I’ve learnt most from writing Dirty Feed is that it’s easier than many think to find a unique take on something. It hasn’t all already been written.
In fact, sometimes virtually nothing has been written.
Disclaimer: I did give Jonathan some minor help on these pieces, but that’s not why they’re amazing. ↩
2 comments
J. Wallace on 25 May 2024 @ 4pm
I’d add that, even if you can’t put the whole story together, do what you can. Taking the example above, I knew a fair bit about the phone in side of this and put it with other, similar shows. Ultimately, every little helps, as it duly contributed here.
John J. Hoare on 26 May 2024 @ 4pm
This is very true.
In fact, this site is a case in point – very few articles on here are quite as comprehensive as Jonathan’s work (a lack of interviews is a consistent weak point). But hopefully people can grab what I do manage to contribute on here, and use them to get a wider picture.
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