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Abandoned.

Published 8th September 2024

Life / Meta

I started writing an article last week. It was going to be a good one. Somebody was going to get a thoroughly deserved slagging off. I don’t write many of those kind of pieces these days, so it was high time I really put somebody in their place.

Just to be sure, I did a little research first, in order to check I wasn’t being an idiot. And it fairly quickly became clear that while I did have some semblance of a point… so did they. The issue was rather more complex than it first appeared. In the end, I abandoned the piece entirely; the research needed to make it worth publishing was best spent on other things, although I might return to the topic at some point.

Which is fine. I’m not expecting any medals for a basic level of truthfulness and competence. Still, it seems a lesson worth noting publicly. If you never find yourself abandoning a position because it was fundamentally misguided, then you’re probably doing something wrong.

If you’re confident that your gut instinct and personal ideologies are always correct… they probably aren’t, you know.

*   *   *

One of the other blogs I follow has just posted something titled “Believing in Yourself”.

I never was very good at inspirational writing.

Commonness.

Published 3rd March 2024

Animation / 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.

A Proper Comedy Fan

Published 18th January 2024

Life / Radio Comedy / TV Comedy

I’m supposed to have grown up with radio comedy, you know. More specifically, I’m supposed to have grown up with a radio underneath my bedclothes. Ideally listening to Blue Jam, if I had been particularly with it.

I wasn’t, so I didn’t. Oh, I just about managed a Hitchhiker’s repeat, at some point in the 90s. Beyond that, there was a whole world out there which I just didn’t bother with. If the best pictures were from radio, I wasn’t really interested in them.

The obvious question is why, and I think the answer is one of love, rather than hate. I didn’t hate radio comedy; I simply didn’t listen to it. No, my love was for the telly. I distinctly remember recording every single episode of the nineties repeats of Fawlty Towers off-air; perhaps that was the start of my love of archive television, but it didn’t feel like archive television back then. It was just TV. And I loved TV. Especially sitcoms, sketch shows, and game shows.

But surely, even if I didn’t listen to radio comedy, I at least listened to the Top 40 and stuff? Not really. The radio was on at various points, but it wasn’t really my thing. My things were obvious and comfortable: when it wasn’t television, it was my computer, a BBC Master.1 Endless time spent playing games, or programming, or writing silly things on it.

I think, when I was younger, I needed visuals. That’s how I interacted with the world. Something to look at. I watched and loved The Day Today; it wasn’t that I hated On The Hour, it just wasn’t on my radar.

So when, in the early 2000s, I found a forum online, and saw everyone talking about radio comedy… I was slightly nonplussed. That’s what I was supposed to have been doing?

Nonplussed, and inadequate. I wasn’t a proper comedy fan. Damn.

*   *   *

Fast-forward to some undetermined day in the 2010s. I’m watching the bonus features on the Series 1 DVD of That Mitchell and Webb Look. And in the Making Of documentary, David Mitchell suddenly says the following:

“We’d always wanted to be on TV, ‘cos that’s where I got into comedy really, watching TV. Growing up, watching Blackadder, and Monty Python, and that kind of thing. So yeah, I’d like to say I grew up listening to Radio 4 and The Goon Show and that kind of thing, and I did have a few tapes of The Goon Show, but basically it was TV, so I’ve always wanted to be on TV. That in my own head, is where successful comedians are.”2

I grin. Because that’s me. I wasn’t stupid after all. Somebody who is very, very, very funny felt exactly the same as I had.

And that’s how a heterosexual white male can still experience that unexpected rush of feeling represented.

  1. Better than a BBC Micro. ↩

  2. It’s worth paying attention to exactly what Mitchell says there. He doesn’t say that successful comedians are on television rather than radio; he clearly says “in my own head”. It’s not actually true, and he knows it. He’s talking about feelings, not facts, and carefully flags it as such. ↩

“A Course of Leeches…”

Published 5th January 2024

Life / Meta

Paul Hayes, “Mopping Up… Or Moping Up…?”:

“Am I just a worthless parasite, leeching off other people’s creativity?

It’s a paranoia which does seize me, sometimes. Not often; not all the time. But last night, watching last night’s very enjoyable return of Doctor Who, I was at one point towards the end overcome with that melancholy feeling of knowing I could never, ever do this. I could never do what Russell T Davies does. […]

But that worry does take hold of me, every now and then. I’m so proud of writing books and articles about this show, making radio pieces about it. Proud that I can be a tiny little part of it in my professional life, be engaged with it and share that engagement. But is it all just worthless? Would I not be better off trying to create and do something of my own? Am I just a laughable figure, building so much of my life around something to which I have made absolutely no contribution whatsoever, and have never had anything to do with?”

The answer, of course, is that Paul Hayes is the very opposite of either a worthless parasite or a laughable figure, having done incredible work when it comes to documenting Doctor Who. But this is obvious, and Paul knows it. The rest of his blog post is a brilliant analysis of exactly why researching and documenting a show is a worthwhile thing to do, and I highly recommend you read it.

And yet… I know exactly what he means. And I think most people who make things about other people’s work feel like this at times. You can logically know that what you do is worthwhile, can fully defend someone else from worries like these… and yet still feel that troublesome pang when it comes to yourself. Not all the the time. Just occasionally.

If I’m brutally honest, I sometimes have slightly darker worries about myself: that my writing is about trying to have control over the shows I loved as a kid. I’m very proud of this piece on Knightmare; it was everything I had floating around in my head for years, and managed to write about at a level which I don’t always manage. It’s one of the very best things I’ve ever done. But there is definitely a certain amount of trying to control and compartmentalise my feelings about the show. And perhaps, a little of trying to own a part of it.

Even as I write that latter remark, it seems a foolish thing to accuse myself of. Why can’t writing things like that simply be a positive thing? Why does my brain attempt to turn it into something unpleasant? But these are the cynical things you worry about, when you spend a long time writing about other people’s work, and not making anything which stands on its own.

Because sometimes, I wonder what might have happened. If I hadn’t had the confidence kicked out of me at secondary school. A time when I showed vague hints of promise in drama class… only to be stamped down on. If only I could have been one of those people who managed to stop bullies by “making them laugh”. The kind of thing you read about in interviews with very, very funny people. The Platonic Ideal of how to deal with that kind of nonsense.

I couldn’t do it. I reacted by shrinking in on myself instead.

None of which, in 2024, is especially useful. But it’s something I’m pondering at the back of my head. For many reasons, I haven’t had the best start to the year. I think I may need some kind of outlet for creativity which isn’t just writing about other people’s creativity. Exactly what, I don’t know, beyond a few stray thoughts. And if those stray thoughts cohere into something bigger, it won’t be anything I’d put in public for a very long time, if ever.

But I think I might need something.

Lies.

Published 4th January 2024

Life / Meta

I can’t remember how old I was. I was at secondary school, I know that. But I mainly just remember the dead badger.

It’s lying at the side of the road. Absolutely still. No blood, or at least not that I could see, although I didn’t investigate it too closely. I might be a teenage boy, but I’m not that kind of teenage boy. Death is safer in books.

But it sticks in my mind. When I get back home, I tell my family what I saw. And it’s that lack of blood which captured my imagination. That badger looked normal, just deathly still. It could almost have been alive… except, it wasn’t.

*   *   *

Hacker News comments, Terence Eden:

“The best thing about the Dirty Feed blog is that it shows just how fragile history is.

We’re talking about stuff that happened in the last few decades – and yet people’s recollections are faulty, the documentation is inconsistent, and the contemporary commentary is already wrong.

Now extrapolate that back a hundred years. What conventionally accepted history is wrong? What cause and effects have been mixed up?

Popular culture isn’t always well researched – and John shows just how difficult it is.”

*   *   *

It’s what, a few months on from the dead badger? I can’t remember. Whenever it was, it was a short enough amount of time for my family to remember me telling the story the first time round.

But I’m telling it again. And this time, I get a bit carried away. I talk about the blood. I’m in full flow, in fact. Describing the blood and gore which never, in fact, existed.

And my sister stops me. She’s mildly irritated. Hang on, I said there wasn’t any blood last time, that it was the stillness which really struck me. It was that which was interesting about the story. What’s changed? Why the blood and gore?

I can’t remember my reply. I have a nasty feeling I mumbled something about a “different badger”. But I was caught in a lie, and everyone knew it.

*   *   *

People lie for many different reasons. They can lie to get evil deeds done. They can lie to big up their tiny role in something important. They can lie because examining the truth is too difficult. They can lie because the truth is just fucking awful, and it’s far easier to just tell everyone what they wish had happened.

But people also lie for more prosaic reasons. They can lie because without the lie, there would be an awkward gap in the conversation.1 They can lie because right at that moment, the real story doesn’t appear in their head, so they leap to the end with the story which “should” have happened. They lie because they’ve forgotten the details, and it’s embarrassing, and they should know this, so it probably happened this way, right?

(Is it mean to call these kind of things a “lie”? Maybe it is. But if people aren’t careful enough with the truth, then it really does become a matter of splitting hairs, no matter what the reason. Especially if someone keeps repeating it.)

These things get silly. I would have gained zero social capital from lying about that badger, even if I’d got away from it. My tongue simply ran away with itself, and my brain accidentally told the wrong story. The one which might have happened, which does happen to badgers on a daily basis… but in this case, didn’t.

And this is what I think is what usually happens when I’m trying to figure out the truth about the things I write here. I’m sure in some rare cases, there are people acting entirely in bad faith, who are deliberately lying for deeply unpleasant reasons. But I think the majority of lies are the prosaic ones. When unpicking the falsehoods in my Young Ones flash frames pieces, do I really think Paul Jackson was deliberately trying to trick us all with the idea that the “Summer Holiday” flash frame was present on VHS and DVD releases? Of course not. His brain simply leapt ahead and accidentally filled in the gap incorrectly.

But crucially: the effect is often the same. A deliberate lie, or a prosaic one: both have the same effect on the story. To warp it. Sometimes irreparably, if you can’t find out what really happened from elsewhere.

I’m not stupid. Dirty Feed will have all kinds of falsehoods on it. With some of them, I’m merely reporting other people unchallenged; elsewhere will be things I have made up entirely off my own back. But it’s important to at least try and get this stuff right, even when you’re not writing about an important news story. Even when it’s the silliest piece of pop culture nonsense in the world. And I could give you a long, pretentious, deep explanation why. But the real reason is: the truth is usually more interesting.

The stillness of the badger? Beats a bucket of blood any day.

  1. Or podcast. Or DVD commentary. ↩

Loss.

Published 12th June 2023

Life / TV Comedy / TV Presentation

A couple of years ago, I had a great idea. In the BBC’s centennial year, I wanted to write a diary of the BBC presentation department. Capturing not only what we did, but what it felt like. The nuts and bolts of putting together reactive linear television at the coalface, no holds barred. All the great things about it, and all the awful things too. Oh, not for publication now, you understand. Or even in 10 years. At least 30, probably more. But there would have been no more worthwhile thing I could have done in 2022.

I failed. I never even started it.

It wasn’t laziness. I did loads of writing last year; over 50k words here on Dirty Feed. But I can’t do my fairly stressful job all day, and then go home and write it all up. Nor can I use my days off to do it either. My brain desperately needs to think of something else. I can put on Eurovision, and then go home and write about Fawlty Towers. But I can’t put on Eurovision, and then go home and write about putting on Eurovision. A few vague tweets is the best I can do.

All of which makes me sad. Because I mean it: there really is no better thing I could have done with my time last year. For all the fun stuff I published on here, that pres diary would have been far more useful. In decades to come, capturing what we did in our corner of the BBC to make everything work on air would be an amazing thing to have. But it was impossible to write. For me, at least.

Oh well. Sorry.

[Read more →]

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Nightmare of an Archivist

Published 2nd June 2023

Life / TV Comedy / TV Drama

They say moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do in your life. This is, of course, entirely correct. This is the case in triple when you haven’t thrown out enough of your old shit before you move. Finding the Donald Duck tracksuit I wore when I was ten was a low point. Actually packing it away and moving it anyway was even lower.

Also present is boxes and boxes of my schoolwork. Some of which is pretty good, and some of which is utter bullshit. Here’s a good one:

Here’s a bullshit one:

And some, well…

I presume we’re at least a couple of years away from ITV commissioning Masturbate and Shit Yourself.

Anyway, all this rubbish got loaded up into storage years ago. (We’ve been trying to move since the start of the pandemic. It’s finally happened, three years later.) And as I was idly talking to my mother the other night, she revealed that she used to have some of my best schoolwork… and a fair amount of it got chucked out when she moved to London. Not all of it. But some.

In other words: I’ve kept loads of absolute nonsense, and some of my better stuff ended up in the bin. No matter how hard you try, variants of the above will happen. Sometimes, the things you put aside to keep, are the exact things which end up being destroyed.

Including things rather more important than my dumbass schoolwork.

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My Friend Flicker

Published 5th February 2023

Life / TV Presentation

The other night, I was sitting in a anonymous playout suite in West London, in charge of an anonymous channel. It was around 1am. Some people are surprised to learn that there is, in fact, plenty to do in a darkened playout suite at 1am. Thoroughly checking the next day’s schedule is one of those things. It’s better to find out you have a problem with your 3pm programme a full twelve hours before it airs, rather than twelve minutes.

So there I was, watching a programme – yes, an anonymous programme – which was going out in a few hours’ time. In general, we watch the opening minute and the closing minute of each show, to make sure all is well. Opening minute, fine. Closing minute, fi… hang on, what was that? A brief flicker on the end credits? What caused that? It wasn’t the credit squeeze, was it? Or the monitor wall having a funny? Let’s run it through again.

No, it’s still there. Hmmmmm.

I load the material up on the desktop PC in the suite, and step through the offending section frame-by-frame. There we have it. A single erroneous frame in the end credits, where the moving background jumps ahead unexpectedly.

A single erroneous frame. A flash frame, in fact. Completely 100% unintentional; just an editing error, rather than any kind of deliberate nonsense. But nonetheless, there it is: a sodding flash frame. I spend months and months researching and writing about them at home, and then one pops up at work too.

I need a new hobby. One that has nothing to do with my job. In fact, one that absolutely, categorically does not involve any kind of screen.

Knitting, maybe. Or orienteering. Cheesemaking?

Procrastination.

Published 28th October 2022

Internet / Life

Hey, everyone! Fed up with your ridiculous procrastinating? Don’t worry, this article will tell you how to stop once and for all.

“Most of the tech industry is designed to turn you into a vegetable. They invite you to click on things until you click ads, and then they try to make you click ads until you click buy. Since many of us work on the screen, it can be confusing to discern between consumption and production. Here is a guideline:

  • No one came back from YouTube feeling fresh and energized.
  • No one peeled out motivated and happy after two hours of scrolling through Instagram.
  • No one ever got inspired to finish things up after a Netflix Bonanza.
  • Buying some stuff online is not very productive. It’s consuming.

Hang on.

I can’t comment on Instagram; I don’t use it. But I most have definitely come back from YouTube feeling fresh and energized; I most definitely have been inspired to finish things up after a Netflix Bonanza, and I most definitely have been productive through buying things online.

Take YouTube; it never occurred to this person that someone might genuinely be inspired by what they see there. Or, in my case, use it as a proper research tool. Which I do, endlessly. You only have to read my articles on here to know how useful people’s uploads are to me on Dirty Feed; here’s a particularly good example.

Or how about having a “Netflix Bonanza”? Well, there’s a loaded phrase if ever I heard one. So let’s replace it with the rather more normal phrase “watching television”. Now we have the phrase “No one ever got inspired to finish things up after watching television”, which is a self-evidently ludicrous phrase. As though television can’t be inspiring. As though television hasn’t inspired most of the writing on this site. It’s the same old “television is mindless” stuff, all dressed up for a new generation. There are times when I have watched some TV, and not been able to resist the urge to immediately go to my laptop and start writing about it.

As for buying things online? Bang go all the books I’ve bought which have been vital while researching one of the most popular things I’ve ever written, then. Writing that article took the purchase of four books, none of which I could easily access any other way.

Indeed, discerning between “consumption and production” is difficult at best. So much of the writing I do here involves both. I consume in order to create. The two are entirely intertwined. Consumption here is being painted as entirely passive, and I really don’t think that is the case at all.

But the further I get into the article, the more I blink in confusion. Here are some things which have apparently “never ignited any meaningful action”:

  • Discussing with strangers

Discussing things with strangers has lead to endless improvements and corrections to the articles on this site.

  • Reading the comments
  • Reacting to comments

Comments on here have lead to endless improvements and corrections to the articles on this site.

  • Reading tweets
  • Liking tweets

Tweets have… fill in the rest of this sentence for yourself.

Some of my best work here has involved reading tweets and comments. Without them, the site would be far less worthwhile, as I wrote about recently. “Reading tweets” was responsible for a major update and correction to one of the most popular pieces I’ve written all year.

Now, if you want to argue that writing this site isn’t “meaningful action”, then that’s fine. I feel awkward making the argument that it is, because if you’re a certain kind of person, you’re conditioned into thinking that’s arrogant and self-important. But this site has given enough joy to people over the years for me to confidently state that what I do here is, in fact, meaningful. And all the above would be absolutely terrible advice for me, and I think many others.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be careful. I presume what the writer is trying to say is that you should be careful about distractions. I get it, I truly do. But trying to entirely silo off “consumption” and “production” is not the way to make your case. It’s not that simple. Nowhere near so, in fact.

And if you truly think that watching television is always that passive, or that reading tweets is always that pointless, I would suggest that you aren’t very good at either watching television, or reading tweets.

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Party of One

Published 20th July 2022

Life / Meta

It was in a field aged 18 when I finally realised just how boring I was.

It was a party. One of those all-day parties that teenagers are supposed to have a great time at. Moreover, it was an all-night party too. My friend was pretty cool. His family owned a farm, so we could pitch tents in one of the fields and sleep over. I don’t know how much sex happened in those tents. I wasn’t invited to those. I do know there was some fingering going on. I wasn’t invited to that, either.

It was an odd mix of people at those parties. I had the fortune – or perhaps misfortune – to fall in with a vaguely cool crowd, without being remotely cool myself. This could make things fun. It could also mean you spent a long time looking around you, feeling vaguely inadequate. As for who was there: it was a real mix. There were nice people there, there were utter dicks, there were nice people pretending to be utter dicks, and there were utter dicks pretending to be nice. I’m sure everyone has grown up and is lovely now.1

But at this party, I was particularly at a loss. There were just too many people. Sometimes these parties were smaller affairs, but with this one, everyone had managed to show up. Including loads of people I’d never met before. I worked best in small groups; put me with too many people, and I used to freeze up entirely.

Not to matter. I’d managed to find myself part of a circle, with the nerd group. The computer guys. Surely I could be happy here? The party’s host admonished us; we should stop being sad and go and talk to other people, rather than take the easy way out. I don’t think we listened. It was scary out there.

Except I had a problem. What had felt like a safe group turned out to be anything but. They all knew far more about computer stuff than I did. I very rapidly came to the conclusion that I had nothing to say to these people. I mean, literally: nothing. What possible thing could I actually say? They knew far more than I did about any given topic that might have cropped up. I had sod all to offer.

I have rarely felt more alone than at that moment. If I had nothing to say to the computer nerd gang, I had even less to say to everyone else. I suddenly became acutely aware of how utterly boring I was. I knew nothing, I had no interesting ideas, I couldn’t even talk about stuff I liked with any kind of wit.

I felt… empty.

*   *   *

I get the idea that looking back, I’m supposed to say that I wasn’t really that boring after all. That everyone is pretending to be interesting at 18 – or 28, or 38 – and that nobody else at that party was more interesting than I was.

There’s an element of truth to that, sure. There was no doubt a lot of posturing from others going on. But I don’t think my appraisal of myself was completely off the mark either. When I was 18, I really didn’t have very much of interest to say. More to the point, there were very definitely loads of people at that party who were more engaging than I was.2 And I really did know jack shit about computers compared to others there, my supposed area of interest. If I was harsh on myself at the time, I wasn’t entirely incorrect either.

Am I better now, over two decades on? Yes, better. But not perfect. Sometimes, the spectre of that party will suddenly make itself very obvious indeed. And I’ve dealt with that in various different ways over the years. Certainly, the shortcut of just saying something shocking is something I’ve dragged out rather too often in the past. Sometimes, it was actually funny and worth it. Sometimes, it was… not. A few particular memories of when it was not aren’t stories I’m going to bring out in polite company, Or indeed any company.

But even without resorting to that, I can struggle my way through nowadays better than any other time in my life. I’m not brilliant. But I manage. Just.

*   *   *

I sometimes think I post too much here on Dirty Feed. This didn’t use to be the case; there have been times when I’ve struggled to find the time or energy for this place. But not any more. And over the past few years, even when I’ve tried to take a break, I’ve spectacularly failed to do so.

Most obviously, this happened at the start of 2021, where I wanted to put the site on hiatus and do something else for a bit… and then didn’t. But even last month, I tried to take a smaller break, and just couldn’t manage it. I was back posting here just two weeks later.

There are lots of reasons why I find it hard to step away from here, both good and bad. But one big reason is that I eventually figured out how to write in a way that some people find interesting. Certainly not to all people, or even to most people. I’m interesting to a vanishingly small number, really. But that number is still enough to make me happy.

Because while I manage to write things that people find interesting here, I can battle those demons of when I was 18… and the least interesting person who ever lived. And if I squint, maybe it can feel like I won.

Just briefly.

  1. I am not sure of this at all. ↩

  2. What’s the difference between being interesting, and pretending to be interesting? Not that much, especially when you’re 18. ↩

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