Fifteen for Fifteen

5 years • 10 years • 15 years

Fifteen years of anything is an odd anniversary to celebrate, really. Five years is a reasonable commitment to anything. Ten years is obviously special. Twenty years is miraculous. But fifteen? What does that actually mean?

Still, I wanted to mark fifteen years of writing Dirty Feed somehow. But just doing a list of my favourite pieces again seemed mildly pathetic, especially when I’m definitely going to do one of those for the 20th anyway. So instead, here is a list of the fifteen most popular articles on the site over the past fifteen years, in terms of traffic.

This sometimes matches with my favourite stuff… and sometimes very much doesn’t.

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fifteen / 24 Hours in Channel 5 TX (August 2015)
For someone who has spent sixteen years in broadcast, the majority of which was in playout, I feel I’ve written very little about how the nuts-and-bolts of television transmission actually works. The reason for that is simple: in a world where most playout is outsourced, there are client confidentiality issues which complicate everything. So this article is one of the rare exceptions, which I managed to write at exactly the right time, after I changed jobs. It remains one of the few detailed explanations online on how playout worked for a British PSB channel in the 2010s, and I’m still really proud of it.¹

fourteen / Tales from BBC North West’s Scene Dock (July 2022)
On the links between Red Dwarf and Chucklevision. You heard. Mainly notable for that ending, which is one of my favourite things I’ve ever written. Not because what I wrote is amazing in itself, but because I remember the sheer thrill of discovering that final revelation. I get a broad grin just thinking about it.

thirteen / Smashie and Nicey: the End of an Era (October 2013)
The differences between the broadcast and commercial releases of the seminal Smashie and Nicey: the End of an Era. There are a few things I’ve published on Dirty Feed over the years which were turning points, and this is the first of them: it’s where I finally figured out exactly what I wanted to do with the site. The echoes of this piece can easily be found in stuff I’m writing now, for instance.²

twelve / In Search of the Golden Brain (August 2022)
On a Spitting Image competition which many thought was a joke… and turned out to be anything but. In some senses, the perfect Dirty Feed article: something I idly wondered about as a teenager, and finally managed to drag out the true facts about 30 years later. It needs a proper rewrite at some point to tidy up the ending, which got a little confused by extra information coming to light after publication, but the majority of it works well, I think.

eleven / The Young Ones Music Guide: Series One (June 2020)
The clue’s in the title. Lots of fun, especially digging up the brilliant “Ain’t Nothin’ But a House Party” by obscure group the Paper Dolls. Again, the whole piece does need a bit of an update, as I’ve found out a few more details on various things since it was published.

Oddly enough, my Series 2 Music Guide got less than half the number of hits. The internet is weird.

ten / The Unexamined Sitcom is Not Worth Watching (April 2023)
One of my favourite things I’ve ever written, about reshoots for the pilot of Fawlty Towers. This is everything I want my writing to be: it was very pleasant to take incomplete accounts from various sources, not least John Cleese himself, and finally nail down what happened properly.

nine / Here’s To You, Mrs. Littlefield (April 2020)
From edits made to the pilot of Fawlty Towers, to edits made to the pilot of Cheers, and another object lesson in how to get your show out of a mistake after recording it. Sadly, this deleted material never was dragged out for the 40th anniversary of the show, if it even still exists. Oh well. I at least tried to nudge the universe in the right direction.

eight / The Pictures are Much Much Better on Television (July 2023)
Up to this point, I’ve been very pleased with how this list has been going. This is where things start to go a little strange. This piece on early Alan Partridge isn’t bad by any means, and touches on some history with the character which is rarely talked about. But I’ve written far better things than this, and I have no idea why it grabbed people’s attention, other than people really like to read about Alan Partridge.

seven / 11 Things Wrong with Fawlty Towers (February 2015)
It is perhaps mildly annoying that the seventh most popular article on this site is merely a transcript of John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers DVD commentaries. But I’ll let it slide, because anything which gets more people to set aside the time to listen to one of the best commentaries ever recorded is a good thing. Cleese is simply perfect at them: he’s clearly done his homework, and the result isn’t a lovefest, but a brutally honest assessment of what he thinks works, and what he thinks doesn’t. A six-hour masterclass on how to write sitcom.

six / Freeze-Frame Gonna Drive You Insane, Part One (January 2023)
Something I threatened to write for years, and finally made good on my promise: investigating flash frames in The Young Ones and Spitting Image. This series of articles corrects plenty of misinformation about the topic which has festered over the years; misinformation which sometimes sadly came from people who actually worked on the show. But then, nobody thought we’d still care about this silly joke four decades on from first broadcast, did they?³

five / Customs Clearance Ltd (April 2017)
Ha ha, this is thoroughly ridiculous. The very opposite of some of my carefully-considered pieces, this was a short moan about a crap website which looked like a scam but wasn’t… which loads of people found on Google, searching for the truth of the matter. The website itself doesn’t even exist any more. It’s incredibly bizarre that this is the fifth most-read thing ever on the site, but at least there was a good reason at the time…

four / More Trouble Aboard the Red Dwarf (March 2023)
…unlike with this one. There’s nothing wrong with this piece, about a newly-discovered trail for the first series of Red Dwarf, but it’s just a short blog about something someone else discovered, and for it to get this number of hits is just ludicrous. I believe this one just happened to get picked up by Google News, and away it went. Oh well.

three / What The Papers Say (April 2021)
I’ve got such mixed feelings about this one. In some ways, this piece – tracing a joke in Yes Prime Minister back to its source – is everything I want my writing to be. Loads of people absolutely loved it, and it’s one of the few things I’ve written which continually gets re-linked to by others.

But there’s no getting round it: when the piece was first published, I missed out huge chunks of the story. And in my desperation to get it fixed, the updates now make it read like a bit of a mess, and with a completely pointless digression in the middle to boot. The result is something that many people think is some of my best work, but all I can see are the problems. It’s one rewrite away from being great, and I’ll get round to it one day.⁴

two / Miranda, Catherine and Andrew (January 2011)
A piece standing up for audience sitcom, and arguing against lazy critiques. For many, many years, this was by far the most-read article on Dirty Feed. I don’t mind admitting that I found it slightly galling that it wasn’t even written by me: it’s one of only two guest articles on the site, this particular one written by Andrew Ellard.⁵

The reason it did so well is obvious: it’s an extremely good piece which I’m proud to have on the site. It’s also a little more directly confrontational in tone than much of my own writing on here, which sure didn’t hurt in making people want to link to it. The result is a slight outlier; I haven’t published a guest post since, and the site has since developed its own voice. But it’s still a wonderful piece, and well worth reading all these years later.

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Time for the moment of truth. What is the most popular thing published on the site over the past fifteen years?

one / Sincerely Yours, The Breakfast Club (April 2018)
Slightly unbelievably… this. An examination of the famous monologue which opens The Breakfast Club. I spend a decade-and-a-half writing about TV comedy, and my most popular piece is about a film. Moreover, while it’s not exactly tossed off⁶, it sure as shit isn’t one of my huge, in-depth pieces of research.

The reason it’s done so well is simple: Google loves it. More to the point, Google loves it a little more each year. When it was initially published, there was absolutely no sign that it was going to do as well as it has. Perhaps the following stats will give you some idea of the escalating nonsense. In 2018, the year it was written, it got 325 hits. In 2019, it got 1,828 hits. In 2020, 4,830 hits. In 2021, 7,552 hits. In 2022, 8,166 hits. In 2023, 9,235 hits. And finally, last year, it got a staggering 12,742 hits.

That’s a total of around 45k hits since it was published, well over double anything else I’ve written for the site. And last year alone, it got three times more hits than anything new I wrote. The fact is that an awful lot of people every year search for the term “the breakfast club monologue” and similar – far more people than are interested in any of my other writing.

Still, perhaps I shouldn’t complain too much. I would have preferred that my most-read article was something I was really proud of – like this piece on Knightmare, or rescuing an old BBC Micro game – but never mind. After all, it still manages to capture some of the spirit of this site well enough; going back to source material in order to learn about something, rather than relying on dodgy memories.

If it’s not a piece which represents the best of my writing, at least it’s not something hugely embarrassing either.

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Thanks again to everyone who’s helped me with this site over the past fifteen years, whether it’s sending me that thing you taped on BBC2 in 1984, or just telling others about this silly place. I really do appreciate it. And to the people who, for various reasons, couldn’t be publicly credited in helping write some of the above pieces: I haven’t forgotten you. Without you, a lot of the above would be me noodling around going “I wonder what happened here? Oh well, I guess we’ll never truly know.”

As I wrote in my Best Of 2024 piece and in December’s newsletter, I genuinely don’t know quite what form Dirty Feed will take this year. I have to balance the need between trying some other things, and still wanting to write about, say, unbroadcast sketches from The Cellar Tapes. But don’t worry: I’m sure this place will still be around in some form in another fifteen years.

After all, you really think I’m going to manage to resist changing the logo to read THIRTY FEED in 2040?

1. I planned a follow-up to this piece… which was kiboshed by Channel 5 suddenly changing playout providers to my new employer. Oh well. ↩

2. Note that I started the site in 2010, and I feel the first “real” piece came nearly four years in. Sometimes it takes that long until you figure out what you’re doing. ↩

3. It is perhaps mildly annoying that only the first part of the series made this list; the remaining four parts are nowhere to be seen. If you’ve only read the first part, you haven’t got anywhere close to the full story. It isn’t even a near-run thing, either; the second most-popular part got only a quarter of the hits of this one.

   Seeing as I moved to multipart articles as a reaction to people who said my pieces were too long, it’s slightly discouraging to realise that longform writing is a difficult proposition for the site, no matter how I try to present it. ↩

4. A book of some of these pieces with all the rough edges fixed is very much on my radar. ↩

5. The other is this piece on George & Mildred, by Tanya Jones. ↩

6. I’VE NEVER TOSSED OFF… wait, sorry, wrong film. ↩

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end of year review