Meta – Page 2 – Dirty Feed

Resurrection.

Published 1st November 2023

As someone who deeply believes in keeping the archives of everything you do online, I find it forever upsetting that I deleted all my 2000s-era blog posts from the internet. My penchant back then for “starting again, but this time I’ll get it right” lead to the deletion of a whole load of my stuff. It’s so totally the opposite of anything I’d do now.

Recently, this has been playing on my mind even more than usual. And then I remembered something. A few years ago, back in 2017, I resurrected an old Red Dwarf group blog from the dead. Maybe I should do the same for all my old blog archives. I’m sure somewhere, on some old hard drive, I’ve got a copy, haven’t I? And even if I haven’t, surely the Wayback Machine has kept most of it?

So I took a look. After all, there must be some good stuff there, even if it isn’t all gold. It really would be nice to practice what I preach, and revive all my old posts for good. That has to be a worthwhile thing to do.

thursday march 31, 2005

My willy smells of Scampi Nik-Naks

:-(

Posted @ 08:19 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

You know what, never mind.

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I Hate Doing Research, Part Six

Published 30th October 2023

Meta / TV Comedy

One of the most frustrating things about writing my series on flash-frames in The Young Ones and Spitting Image has been how absurdly difficult the research has been. There really is a ludicrous amount of misinformation out there. I already wrote a little about this at the start of the year, but I have more examples. Oh, so many more examples.

Take Peter Seddon’s Law’s Strangest Cases (Portico, 2016), which is one of the very few books to discuss the Norris McWhirter Spitting Image flash. To the point where it has been used as a main source in reporting elsewhere online. Quite understandably – this is a proper, published book, it really shouldn’t be getting major things wrong.

Sadly, we immediately run into problems:

“It all started with the television broadcast of a 1984 episode of Spitting Image, the series whose lampoonery through the medium of cruelly parodic puppetry has caused many a celebrity to fume.

The good news for Norris was that he wasn’t on it. Or was he? For thereby hangs the tale.”

I mean, he certainly wasn’t in a 1984 episode of Spitting Image. That was the famed “scriptwriters are incredibly good in bed” flash, not the Norris McWhirter head-on-topless-body flash, which happened in 1985.

But let’s not get grumpy about an incorrect date. That’s arsehole territory. The bulk of the reporting must surely be correct.

“The Times subsequently reported that Mr McWhirter, aged 59, had taken out an action for libel against the Independent Broadcasting Authority at Horseferry Road Magistrates’ Court. McWhirter was adamant that he had seen ‘a grotesque and ridiculing image of my face superimposed on the top of a body of a naked woman’. It really doesn’t bear thinking about.”

Norris McWhirter didn’t take any action for libel whatsoever. His case was solely concerned with subliminal messaging; libel was never part of his accusations.

Now true, the book does then go on to say the following:

“He asserted that the broadcasting of the image was a criminal offence under the Broadcasting Act 1981, but not because of ‘what’ it was – it was how long it lasted that was the real bone of contention.

‘And how long did it last?’ asked the judge with due concern. Norris McWhirter’s reply was brief but not nearly as brief as the offending image: ‘A quarter of a second,’ was his stunning reply.

McWhirter’s contention was that the image had been broadcast subliminally, using the sort of technique that unscrupulous advertisers or political regimes are said to employ to implant subconscious images and messages into the addled brains of the world’s couch potatoes.”

So the book does understand at least part of the case. But if you’re going to entirely misreport it as a libel action, you’ve pretty much fallen at the first hurdle.

[Read more →]

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I Hate Doing Research, Part Five

Published 4th October 2023

Meta

When you’re deep in research mode – I mean truly, the deepest you’ve ever gone – sometimes inspiration hits you like a coruscation from the azure. Surely, nobody has ever thought of checking this document before. It could reveal everything.

You delve down into the archive, and hastily flick through. Enlightenment is just within your grasp, you can feel it. Ah, here it is—

A completely unreadable page

I really need a new hobby. Pottery, or winemaking, or something.

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i hate doing research

I Hate Doing Research, Part Four

Published 25th September 2023

Meta

The other day, I was browing through an old article on Dirty Feed. I do this quite a lot. Perhaps this should be an embarrassing thing to admit. Well, if everyone else has better things to do than write articles about inaccurate Fry & Laurie TX dates, I’ll just have to read my own again.

So there I was, scanning down this particular piece, and suddenly… my heart sank. Because something unpleasant had happened. It’s happened many times before, but it never stops being disappointing.

Because what I saw was this:

A missing video right in the middle of the article

A crucial link in the puzzle of working out that correct TX date: gone. Disappeared into the ether. Worse still, that deleted video isn’t archived anywhere on the Wayback Machine. I couldn’t even tell you which account it was which closed, let alone anything else, so I have no way of getting in contact with the people who originally uploaded it to acquire the material for myself.

Luckily, kindly soul Ben Baker supplied me with an alternative video link which more or less does the same thing. So with a small update, the article makes about as much sense as it used to. But it’s a reminder that just because you fully intend to keep your stuff online, it doesn’t mean everyone else is going to. And if you’re relying on other people’s work or content to make your point, you’d best make sure you keep your own copy of everything you reference, lest it’s yanked offline, leaving a gaping hole.

Entropy is a bitch, ain’t it?

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Why Do We Care About This Bridge So Much?

Published 15th September 2023

Internet / Meta

Recently, one of those kind of blog posts has been doing the rounds. One that gets picked up by seemingly everyone, and even crosses into the mainstream news media. I’m talking about Tyler Vigen, and The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge:

“This pedestrian bridge crosses I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport. It connects Bloomington to Richfield. I drive under it often and I wondered: why is it there? It’s not in an area that is particularly walkable, and it doesn’t connect any establishments that obviously need to be connected. So why was it built?”

It’s a great story – long, but well worth reading to the end. In particular, don’t miss the copious footnotes, which contain a lot of the really cool stuff. Put aside half an hour and take a nice, leisurely read.

But it’s also worth pondering exactly why the story is so interesting. Tom Scott in his newsletter called it “exactly the kind of fascinating infrastructure-nerd archive dive that I love”. Which it absolutely is.

And yet it’s also something else. Vigen:

“It is at about this point in the story that whoever is enduring hearing about it from me inevitably asks: “Hold on, why do we care about this bridge so much?” Which, yes, fair question.

Up until this point, it was curiosity. From here on out though, it is stubbornness.

I don’t understand why this question is so difficult to answer. There IS a reason that bridge was built, and by golly I am going to find it! Will it be a bribe from a local business? A conspiracy with the construction company? An ordinance that requires a bridge every 5 miles? A makeshift deer crossing built by the DNR? Someone accidentally copy-pasted a bridge when playing Cities: Skylines of Minnesota?

Whatever it is, I want to know!”

The reason this has captured so many people’s imagination isn’t because everyone is fascinated with BRIDGE FACTS. The reason is a little more primal. This is the sheer joy of ostentatious investigation. Or in other words: research porn. Which is a close relation of that old standby “competence porn”, as defined by TV Tropes:

“Competence porn is a term invented by Leverage writer John Rogers (see here) and used by a lot of critics since. […] It’s the thrill of watching bright, talented people plan, banter, and work together to solve problems. It’s not just “characters being good at a thing,” particularly if that thing is fighting – otherwise, the term would apply to virtually all fiction — but specifically about using cleverness and hard work.”

The thrill of watching people “plan, banter and work together to solve problems” is very much akin to watching somebody poke every single avenue of research, until they find the truth.

I speak from experience. One of the big turning points for Dirty Feed was back in 2020, when I wrote this ridiculous investigation, about a recording of some Gregorian chanting used in The Young Ones. It became something of an epiphany for me when it came to my writing. For the first time, I understood that the story of the research meant as much as – or possibly even more than – the answer at the end. This knowledge has informed all my real investigative writing on here ever since.

And I think this kind of research porn does mean something, beyond the thrill of the chase. I see so much bullshit every day, often from people who should know better. Not just “stuff I disagree with” – I can cope with that – but pure bad faith arguments, deliberately misrepresenting everything. Writing something which attempts to get to the actual truth of something in 2023 can feel like a revolutionary, dangerous act.

Even if that truth is just about an old sitcom. Or an old bridge.

* * *

At the start of this month, I had to delete a post I published here on Dirty Feed. For the first time since I started writing the site back in 2010. The reason was simple: it was badly researched, or at the very least so incompletely researched as to make it fairly worthless. If you really want to read it, the article remains intact in August’s newsletter, but I no longer stand by the piece in its current version.

Now, I’m not really interested in self-immolation for this error. I made a mistake, I got rid, I admitted it rather than hiding it, and I’ll publish a revised version of the piece at some point next year. I did everything I should do. I don’t think any of it materially hurts either me or the site.

But the error annoyed me, and it annoyed me not because the research was incomplete per se – people correct me on things all the time – but because it was ostentatiously incomplete. Or, to put it another way: incompetence porn. If you’re stupid enough to think you’ve cracked an article about a TV show by watching just a couple of minutes of the relevant programme, rather than watching the whole series and appreciating the full context, then that’s your funeral.¹

Onwards and upwards. One bad mistake in 13 years isn’t bad. But it’s a decent reminder: ostentatious investigation is this site’s forte, not leaping to the end because I want an easy update to the site.

Be more Tyler Vigen.

I once made fun of someone who criticised A Bit of Fry & Laurie in an article, based on watching a single episode. As I watched two minutes of a 60 minute episode of something here, this was 30 times worse than that. ↩

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Read My Newsletter, Do It Now, Do It

Published 23rd August 2023

Meta

“No, I don’t want your fucking newsletter, I want a proper website.”

— Me, 29th January 2019

Today seems a good day to be a PAIN IN THE ASS again and remind people that I’d love you to sign up to my newsletter.

It’s out once a month, I won’t spam you, and I think it’s quite good!

— Me, 18th August 2023

I find my Road to Damascus on the subject of newsletters to be a bit of an odd one. When I started one up for Dirty Feed back in January, it was done grudgingly at best. With Elon busy destroying Twitter – my primary source of traffic – and with no appetite to start again on another social network, I saw a newsletter as a forced life raft. A way of getting my stuff in front of people, sure. But I wasn’t going to enjoy it. I wanted to write here, on my actual site; doing a newsletter seemed a guaranteed way of reducing the available time for my efforts here.

Eight months in, I have to admit: I was entirely wrong, and should have started one years ago. It’s some of the most fun I’ve had with Dirty Feed in ages, and I’ve come up with a format which is entirely different to the main site.¹ Indeed, writing the newsletter scratches a slightly different writing itch to my main stuff here on Dirty Feed full stop; the time I spend on the newsletter wouldn’t necessarily translate into extra articles here. I treat it a little like a worry stone throughout the month: every time I have a spare five minutes, I do a little work on the newsletter. It’s rather soothing, in fact.

So if you haven’t already signed up, please do so here. It’s only monthly, so I won’t spam your inbox. You’ll generally get one brand new piece of writing, a summary of the best recent things here on the main Dirty Feed site, and a bunch of fun links from around the web. The brand new piece of writing does usually make its way onto the main site after a few weeks, so you’re essentially getting an early look at what I’m working on.

Surely it’s got to be better than tickling Elon Musk’s balls.

Inspired partly by Tom Scott’s newsletter, though it’s also become its own thing. ↩

BBC100: Epilogue

Published 22nd April 2023

Meta / TV Presentation

Right at the beginning of this project, I gave a bit of context about who these pieces were originally written for. It’s worth adding a bit more clarity to this: it wasn’t actually for the BBC themselves, but rather one of their many service providers.¹

But the end result is the same: it was meant to be read by fellow colleagues in the broadcast industry, rather than archive TV nerds. Of course there are some who are both, including yours truly. But I couldn’t assume a huge level of knowledge about the intricacies of old television. Indeed, I couldn’t really assume that everybody reading it was in the United Kingdom.

With that in mind, here’s what I wrote as my introduction to this set of articles, when it was originally published.²

Working in television sometimes requires a special kind of double thinking. It’s both extremely important, and not important at all.

Take a typical Sunday night, when I sit down to direct a busy shift on BBC One. Firstly: there can be millions of viewers watching, so you’d better get it right. Secondly: thinking about that too much will make you so nervous that you can’t actually talk, let alone direct a television channel. For that reason, during huge events like a recent overrunning FA Cup Final, there were only a few people watching in my head… and they were all sitting right next to me. I’ll only think of the rest of the country on the train ride home, thanks.

And yet there is something special about sitting in BBC One’s pres suite, known as NC1. You are essentially transmitting a service which has run uninterrupted since 1946, when television returned to the UK after the Second World War. That’s over 75 years of continuous service. The weight of history occasionally hits you when you sit in that chair, whether you’re broadcasting the latest events from Ukraine, or Homes Under the Hammer.

NC2 is different, of course. BBC2 was launched in 1964, so that’s nearly 60 years. A mere drop in the ocean.

Of course, the BBC is even older than the above would suggest, when you take into account pre-war television broadcasting, and the early days of radio. In fact, 2022 is the BBC’s centenary year. And while I might try and ignore the BBC’s long history during stressful moments of directing, it’s nice to recognise it in some way here.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be looking at some of my favourite programmes the BBC has made over the last few decades. Some of them are still well-known; others are less so. All of them mean a great deal to me, and stand as the reason why I’m proud to be a tiny part of this particular thread of history.

Because none of these programmes would have been seen by the nation, without people doing jobs like ours. And whatever part of the industry we work in, the same is still true today.

Reading it back, it does somewhat seem to be a rallying cry, doesn’t it?

But I post that introduction here because I want you to know. That despite the nonsense that inevitably happens, despite how stressful things get… there are people there who understand that when you’re in that chair, you’re part of something which stretches back over the decades. That your job is, as far as humanely possible, to protect something important.

And if that comes across as vaguely pompus, I’ll choose it over not giving a damn.

This isn’t a secret. ↩
Lightly edited to remove a specific detail. ↩

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bbc100

BBC100: Introduction

Published 17th April 2023

Meta

This week on Dirty Feed, I’m going to try something a little different to usual.

As part of the BBC centenary celebrations in 2022, I was commissioned by my employer at a certain broadcast facility to write something about my favourite BBC TV shows over the years. What was supposed to be only one or two pieces quickly turned into one article per decade, because of course it did, this is me we’re talking about. These ended up being published on the company’s internal intranet, and were never really supposed to be seen by anyone else.

The result was a little different to the kind of stuff I usually post here. These pieces weren’t written for a bunch of archive TV nerds – yes, I’m talking about you. They were intended for a bit of a more general audience, who might not immediately be au fait with old telly. As a result, I found some of them a little tough to write, as they went slightly beyond my usual wheelhouse. But looking back over them now, it seemed there was some stuff that you lot might enjoy, and would be worth republishing here.

So every day this week, I’m going to bung one of these articles up on Dirty Feed. Here’s what you have to look forward to:

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954)
The Nigel Barton Plays (1965)
Fawlty Towers (1975-79)
Paul Daniels: Live at Hallowe’en (1987)
Smashie and Nicey – the End of an Era (1994)
The Quatermass Experiment (2005)
Richard Osman’s House of Games (2017-)
Epilogue

A couple of disclaimers. I’m not usually one for ranking things; my choices here were as much about having a variety of programmes, and whether I have anything even vaguely interesting to say about them, as opposed to really being my “favourite” show from each decade. You’ll note that I manage to cover drama, sitcom, variety, and quiz shows in the list above. (The big missing genre is documentaries; Washes Whiter from 1990 was going to be my choice there, but Smashie and Nicey kicked it out.) So I love every show I mention above, but please don’t take the list literally.

Also, in my opinion, the pieces generally get better as they go along, especially once we hit Fawlty Towers. Regardless, I hope you get something out of this; if this works, it may inspire me to write further articles which can be stripped across a whole week. All my best ideas come from Channel 5 in 1997.

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WordPress: Not Completely Terrible

Published 8th April 2023

Internet / Meta

Today, I was idly thinking about the kind of thing I used to spend ages doing: designing loads of different websites, rather than just Dirty Feed. Among them were stuff like Ganymede & Titan, Gypsy Creams, and Noise to Signal, all at one point using the CMS Drupal.

None of those sites still use Drupal, however. The spectre of those sites breaking whenever I tried to update the backend still haunts me to this day. The incompatibility and general unpleasantness was absolutely rife. In the end, Ganymede & Titan and Gypsy Creams were converted to WordPress, and as Noise to Signal was changing from an ongoing site to an archive, I just made it all static HTML pages. Has Drupal improved its upgrade path since then? I haven’t the foggiest. I was burnt multiple times, and was warned off it for good.

Anyway, in an odd bit of coincidence¹, today I also spotted designer Greg Storey posting about his current CMS woes:

“In fourteen days the CMS I use to run this site, Forestry, will be shut down for good and until I migrate to another system this site will be frozen in time. Don’t stop the presses here, the world will continue to rotate but this situation sucks. It’s like when a commercial or government entity makes a mistake that you have to now find time to fix. While software as a service makes a lot of sense, someone else’s problems are now my own. And I have to be honest, I’m not thrilled by my options because they either tie me to the same situation or they require time and money to fix.”

This must be especially annoying, as Greg’s site was only rebuilt and relaunched in 2019. In less than four years, the site has gone from relaunched, to stuck in stasis.

* * *

Ever since I launched Dirty Feed in 2010, it has used self-hosted WordPress. No Drupal, no Movable Type, and certainly none of the more modern or interesting solutions. Do I love it?

Not really. I like designing my own themes from scratch, but this is now really quite complicated, and has only got worse over the years.² And it’s not the only thing which is complicated: the whole thing is clearly over-powered for what I need here. I only use a fraction of the features WordPress offers. Of course, everybody needs a different fraction of those features, and that’s where the problem always starts. We’ll find a proper solution to that one in the year 2942.

But WordPress has done two things for me. Firstly, it’s remained remarkably free of upgrade woes; there were a couple of wrinkles with comments and videos a few years back, but nothing like the bad old days of Drupal, and certainly nothing which has stopped me making new posts on here And secondly, it’s got the fuck out of my way, and let me concentrate on the thing I want to do most these days: writing.

Monocultures are bad, and everybody using WordPress would be a terrible thing. I fully admit that I’ve taken the easy way out. But sometimes, you have to pick your battles. My experience with Drupal taught me one thing: I needed software which wouldn’t keep kicking me in the balls.

WordPress isn’t cool. For most needs, it’s bloated. There are far more elegant solutions out there. But upgrades aren’t a hassle, and it ain’t going anywhere.

Sometimes, if all you want to do is write, those are the only things which really matter.

I do realise that this is the kind of coincidence which makes it look like I’m just trying to write a blog post which flows smoothly, but I swear it’s true. ↩
Partly because the web has got more complicated, of course, but it’s not just that. ↩

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