Meta – Page 4 – Dirty Feed

Party of One

Published 20th July 2022

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.

I am not sure of this at all. ↩
What’s the difference between being interesting, and pretending to be interesting? Not that much, especially when you’re 18. ↩

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writing

A Quiet Season

Published 5th June 2022

Meta / Videogames

For various reasons, I feel I need to take a bit of a break here on Dirty Feed. No, not a six month break. But I do want a bit of a rest from the endless posting. Partly because I’m a little burnt out with my job and need to clear my head, and partly because I want to spend some time researching and writing some more in-depth pieces than I’ve published on here of late.

So rather than leave you with an obnoxious and self-serving list of my own favourite articles on here as a holding pattern, instead I thought I’d link to a few other sites putting out some consistently good work. In particular: those writing about videogame history.

* * *

The Digital Antiquarian by Jimmy Maher
Some websites, like mine, simply post exactly what the writer feels like writing about at any given moment. Others are rather more ambitious. The Digital Antiquarian purports to be nothing less than “an historical chronicle of interactive entertainment”, in order. Of course, as I’m sure Jimmy Maher would be the first to admit, this historical chronicle is filtered through his own personal biases and interests. You won’t find much on consoles here, for instance, while every single game Infocom ever published gets its own article. This is very much not a problem.

The best place to start with the site isn’t on the front page: it’s the table of contents. You can either scroll down and pick the pieces which look interesting, or start right at the very beginning. One of my personal favourites is “What’s the Matter with Covert Action?”, about a game which I had never even heard of before I read the article, let alone played. You need precisely zero familiarity with the game in order to fully appreciate the argument the piece makes. And Jimmy’s writing really does go out of its way to avoid the boring, obvious arguments.

I love The Digital Antiquarian so much that I support Jimmy’s Patreon. If you have the means and enjoy the site, it might be worth doing the same.

All the Adventures by Jason Dyer
If the ambition of The Digital Antiquarian is startling, then the project All the Adventures is thoroughly ridiculous. Jason Dyer has promised nothing less than to “play and blog about every adventure game ever made in (nearly) chronological order”. There are hundreds of posts on the site already, and he’s only up to 1982. This might take a while.

Again, I highly suggest that you start on the chronological list of games rather than the front page, and see whether you want to skip around, or just start at the beginning. I especially loved his investigation into Time Zone – a famous, formidable, daunting game which I was never, ever, ever going to play… but sure loved reading someone else doing the hard work instead.

Revs on the BBC Micro by Mark Moxon
My last suggestion is a little different from the others. For a start, it’s far more technical – perhaps impenetrably so for many. But blame the old BBC Micro user in me, I find it utterly irresistible.¹

The Beeb got a surprising amount of highly innovative games, considering its reputation among some people; Elite, Exile, and Aviator, to name but three. Some of those games are even covered elsewhere on the site I’m linking to here. But I was particularly taken by Mark Moxon’s articles about Revs, an extremely early racing sim. Mark’s work actually involves a complete documentation of the source code of the game, which I’m sure is fascinating for those people it’s aimed at, but for me it’s the articles which make the whole thing accessible to the lay person, albeit the technically-minded lay person.

My favourite piece on the whole site is this examination of the custom screen mode in Revs, which is the kind of thing I had a vague kind of idea about, but not how complex it actually was. It’s such a delight to find out brand new things about something decades old. While some people sit there pretending to write, it’s people like Mark who are calmly getting shit done.

* * *

I’ve only scratched the surface here of the fun stuff going on in retro gaming right now. There’s the Video Game History Foundation, who recently published this search for an important female pioneer in gaming. There’s The Genesis Temple, which takes a particular look at the oft-forgotten European side of gaming. There’s also the superlative 50 Years of Text Games, with the quite astonishing tale behind Silverwolf. I really do mean utterly astonishing. And so on and so on, across what must be hundreds of sites. And I’ve not even started on all the various podcasts or YouTube.

There seems to me right now to be some extraordinary work going in terms of retro gaming, both in terms of analysis, and pure software preservation. There has been for years, of course, but I feel it more than ever right now. In fact, I might almost be tempted to use that dreaded phrase “golden age”. If you want to know all about the games of your childhood – or even the games of somebody else’s childhood – there’s a quite astonishing amount of material out there.

So there you go. Plenty to be getting on with away from here. I hope at least one of the sites above is new to you. As for this place, the fact that this post has been a struggle to write, when it’s literally just a few links bunged together, probably tells you all you need to know about how well my brain is working at the moment.

See you on the other side. Toodle-oo.

Old time BBC Micro users will get the headine of this article, for instance. Yes, Yellow River Kingdom… ↩

Dear Diary

Published 13th May 2022

Internet / Meta

Some things I write would be better left unread, buried at the bottom of a drawer, thrown into the sea, and then blown up by an naval mine. This is one of them. If you’re really interested in my thoughts about where Dirty Feed might be going over the next year or so, by all means grab a cup of tea and settle down.

If you’re not, then don’t worry: something fun about The Young Ones will be along before you know it.¹

[Read more →]

Seriously. An off-air of something from 1984 which has been lost for years popped through my letterbox the other day. ↩

Website Says No

Published 21st March 2022

Meta / TV Comedy

If I was really interested in getting hits here on Dirty Feed, I would write a long series of articles detailing every last edit made to the new iPlayer version of Little Britain.

Ostensibly, it’s exactly in this site’s ballpark. Edits made to old comedy shows? I’ve dabbled once or twice in that topic. It’s something that deeply interests me. Why they are made, who has the right to make them, what the end result on any given show is. With the edits made to Little Britain being part of the news agenda right now, I imagine I could write something which would end up being the most popular thing I’ve ever written on the site. It seems an obvious thing to do.

I ain’t touching this one with a bargepole.

Sure, in terms of subject matter, it’s absolutely the kind of thing Dirty Feed would cover. But in terms of everything else, it’s as far away from anything I want to publish as you can get. Over the last two years especially, I’ve aimed to make this site some kind of calm retreat from the nonsense you get elsewhere. In particular, I took pride in updating this site with free, fun stuff during the height of the pandemic. It just felt like the right thing to do.

Little Britain edits aren’t a calm retreat from anything. They’re shrill, and in the news. And if I wrote about them on here, I would get swarms of bad faith arguments of all persuasions battering this site something rotten. Even if I thought what I had to say about the topic was valuable, I 100% cannot face turning this site into something which will attract that kind of attention. The thousands of hits I would get would absolutely not be worth it.

This is also why I never wrote anything about the edits made to “The Germans” episode of Fawlty Towers either. I have a great number of opinions about that – probably enough to piss everybody off – but I think this website might be a bit more useful as place away from that kind of thing. If the only opinions you have about edits made to comedy consist of the squawking you get in some areas of the media or on Twitter, then this place isn’t really for you. And the people I might convert to the cause to look at things a bit deeper wouldn’t be worth sticking my head into the shitstorm. I’ll stick to Thin Blue Line edits, thanks.

So if you think a place which avoids that kind of thing is valuable, and you like anything I’ve written on here, then I’m grateful for anything you can do to spread the word about this site. Whether it’s on Twitter, Facebook, or rude messages daubed on bus shelter walls. It’s difficult to get noticed if you deliberately stay away from the heat… but I like to think that’s a worthwhile thing to do sometimes. And not just for my mental health. Talking about stuff other people aren’t talking about has its own rewards.

As for Little Britain… well, maybe I’ll write something about it in twenty years, when nobody cares any more. Anyone interested in the toned-down BBC One edits of Series 3 that most people have forgotten about?

Jump The Shark ²

Published 14th March 2022

Meta / TV Comedy

I write about Red Dwarf a lot on here. Far more than I ever actually intended to. I thought, after 17-odd years¹ of talking about the show on Ganymede & Titan, that I might be kinda done with it. Turns out that there’s a particular strain of production nonsense that I still find interesting, and it can’t be kicked out of me.

But there is one aspect of the show that I don’t really talk about these days. One which probably deserves a bit of explanation. Let me quote a tweet I received yesterday; name stripped because this is about me, not them. In reply to my recent piece about the sets in “Back to Reality”:

“The last ever episode of Red Dwarf.

(Any episodes you may remember being made after this one are merely a product of your fevered imagination.)”

Now, did I find this tweet annoying? Yes, I did. But partly for a reason that this poor unfortunate person could never have known.

Because: after all those years in Red Dwarf fandom, I cannot over-emphasise how bored I am talking about when Red Dwarf stopped being good.

I mean, I have my opinions. God, I have my opinions. I could spray them all out to you right now, like so much fetid diarrhoea. But I talked about that shit for 17 years. It’s a topic which creeps in when you least expect it to. You could be having a lovely little chat about the mechanics of time travel in “Timeslides”, and suddenly somebody’s dislike of Series VII pops up in the conversation and ruins the whole thread.

I’m not exaggerating. It’d happen literally all the time. Sometimes, it would be me throwing the VII-bomb in, because I couldn’t fucking help myself.

Not that this is a purely VII thing. I also took part in podcasts about quite a few series that I didn’t really like very much. Don’t get me wrong; some of those podcasts were very good indeed, albeit not because of me. But I sometimes found making them a stressful experience; I wrote this in 2017 which captures some of my frustration. It’s not always much fun to be part of something like that, only to end up whining like hell. You get sick of the sound of your own voice.

To be clear, this isn’t a jab at fandom per se, Red Dwarf or otherwise. There is a nasty habit some people have of focusing on all the bad things about fandom, and ignoring the good. I have zero time for that point of view. Fandom of all kinds has been responsible for so many amazing things. I’ve especially warmed to fanfic and fanart for certain TV shows over the last few years, which I incorrectly turned up my nose at for ages.

But when I write about Red Dwarf now, it’s with a very specific aim. It’s about taking the bits of the show I love, and seeing what makes them tick. I really want to try and avoid all the old boring conversations about which episodes of the show are any good; I’ve done them to death. Nor am I interested in having any kind of opinion about the episodes I’m not that keen on. I’m reclaiming my love for the show by avoiding the stuff I’m bored with, and forging ahead with brand new actual facts. There’s always something new to discover.

So if anybody wonders why I don’t get into those discussions… there you are. Fandom can be great, but it can also leave scars. Consider the articles I write on here my laser removal treatment.

Very odd. ↩

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red dwarf

All the News That’s Fit to YouTube

Published 9th February 2022

Life / Meta / TV Presentation

Content warning: sexual assault, but no graphic details.

Yesterday’s article about Smashie and Nicey: The End of an Era brought up a problem that I have to contend with every so often. And that problem is: how to deal when a real, horrible thing suddenly intrudes on the silly kind of nonsense I usually write about on here. In yesterday’s case, what was supposed to be a shaggy dog story finding out how a production team adapted a newspaper, turned into a story about a 21-year-old woman being brutally stabbed to death by her husband.

When writing the piece, I had to figure out how to tackle that. Did it make the article inappropriate to publish? Did it at the very least require a warning? In the end, I decided no to both. The story is shocking, but was also ultimately quite short, with no gruesome detail beyond mentioning “multiple stab wounds”. Being over-sensitive can be just as awkward as not considering things enough. I decided to let it stand as it was, and while the piece does actually end as a joke, it’s a joke that acknowledges the awkwardness and hopefully puts everybody on the same page. A joke with a point.

But it did remind me of another issue I had a few years back. It’s something I never wrote about at the time; there is no way of discussing the actual case in question, for reasons that will become apparent. But a conversation on Twitter reminded me of it, and I think it’s an interesting thing to discuss in terms of the problems you can easily run into with examining old telly. So let’s try to examine it… without actually linking to the video in question.

Because this is a case of jigsaw identification.

The video I wanted to write about was a news bulletin. It was a news bulletin with something particularly interesting about its production, which is why I wanted to write about it; the actual news stories were mostly irrelevant to my point. But throughout the bulletin, there was a story about a woman who had been abducted, and then rescued. There was plenty of information given about the abduction: the woman’s name, place names, and the details of how it ended. It’s very, very easy to research what happened with this story after this news bulletin aired.

And when you do that, the woman’s name – so prominent in the bulletin – disappears. And it disappears for a very obvious reason: because she was raped during her abduction. This fact isn’t mentioned during the news broadcast – as much as anything else, it’s too soon for that information to come to light. But once it did, and the rape itself is reported, the woman’s name is entirely excised.

When I found all this out at the time, I was horrified that I’d managed to piece this together. These days, perhaps I’m a little less shocked; given that part of what I do on here is to drag out obscure things, I guess it’s not a surprise that I’d accidentally touch on stuff like this. But it’s a reminder of how easy jigsaw identification is, and you don’t have to be a journalist writing about current criminal cases to mean you have to be careful about it. You can run into these issues even just writing stupid things about old TV.

It’s also a reminder that we’re really not supposed to be able to see that bulletin, here in 2022. It was meant to be watched at that particular moment in time. I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been uploaded; far from it, in fact. But the intent with that piece of reporting was not that any random person would be able to see it in 2022.

There are historic videos and articles like these everywhere online. They’re not intentionally doing anything untoward. But you can piece together all kinds of things using them that you really shouldn’t be able to. I’m not sure there’s an easy solution; any potential “fix” could create a problem ten times worse.

But it’s why, even when writing about old telly… you have to be aware of certain things you might not expect to have to deal with.

Dirty Feed IV

Published 6th February 2022

Tedious Site Update

Published 29th January 2022

Dirty Feed: Best of 2021

Published 30th December 2021

Meta

2015 • 2016 • 2017 • 2018 • 2019 • 2020 • 2021 • 2022 • 2023 • 2024

“Hi there, John. Well, 2021 was pretty damn awful.”
“No it wasn’t.”
“What? Come on, a global pandemi-“
“Yes, yes, yes, but I’ve posted loads of great stuff on Dirty Feed this year.”
“Dirty F… really? You’re going with this?”
“Let’s have a look at all the brilliant things I’ve written over the last 12 months.”
“Let’s not.”
“Tough shit.”

* * *

I’m afraid you will have to forgive a rather more indulgent format than usual for my roundup this year. I’ve done so much writing on the site – almost as much as 2019 and 2020 combined – that there’s plenty I really want to relink to. (If you just want the short version, the images link to various interesting things.)

January was meant to be a quiet month for the site, as I intended to take a bit of a break. Instead, I published one of the most popular things I’ve ever written: a look at what exactly is on the telly in an episode of The Young Ones. This pretty much set the tone for the kind of thing I ended up doing all year: investigating obscure mysteries about sitcoms. For instance: we also found out what Vyvyan really wanted to say about Thatcher.

February saw me looking into the history of an obscure piece of Grant Naylor material, in a post which pretty much defines the phrase “satisfying ending”. This was followed up by an investigation into Grant Naylor radio sitcom Wally Who?, and how obvious facts can easily become lost.¹ Finally, I took a proper look at the pilot of Yes Minister, and how an assumption I’d had for years turned out to be complete bollocks.

March was the beginning of a series of articles looking at stock footage in Hi-de-Hi!. This turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it’d be, and these pieces are somewhat annoyingly incomplete. I’ll hopefully get a chance to improve on them next year. There was also this speculation about Drop the Dead Donkey which I have precisely no proof of whatsoever, but I firmly believe to be 100% true.

April saw the big one. My investigation into the authorship of one of Yes, Prime Minister‘s most well-known routines blew up in a quite ridiculous fashion, and got the site noticed well beyond its usual readership. Thank you, Popbitch. Thus it’s all the more irritating that it has to be one of the articles here which I’m least happy with. In its originally published form, it entirely missed the actual authorship of the joke, despite the fact that the real information was actually public knowledge, if you hung around on the right corner of the internet. The true story only came with the updates after publication. Oh well, what would life be, if it wasn’t utterly infuriating?

On a smaller note, but for me personally more satisfying than either the Hi-de-Hi! or Yes, Prime Minister stuff, was this piece identifying a mysterious piece of Red Dwarf footage. Some people find a mystery exciting; I think finding the actual truth is even more so.

May was my 40th birthday, so I couldn’t resist writing something rather more personal than usual. We also spent another day with The Young Ones in the studio, which is an object lesson in the dangers of hiding the most interesting thing in an article near the end. But my favourite thing this month was proving everybody wrong about when Series 1 of The Brittas Empire was shown. I love writing about The Brittas Empire. I love proving everybody wrong more.

Alf Stokes as a cowboy in You Rang M'Lord

June had two of my very favourite pieces I published all year. Firstly, there was this look at reshoots and pick-up weeks in early Red Dwarf, which puts a brand new spin on one of the most famous sequences in the whole show. Then, I investigated this extended version of the You Rang, M’Lord? pilot, which – to my knowledge – hasn’t been transmitted since 1988. Both these pieces are pretty much a mission statement for what I want the site to be.

July saw Dirty Feed’s first dive into A Bit of Fry & Laurie, with another exciting TX date discrepancy. There was also a look at a particularly noteworthy topical reference in The Young Ones. But my favourite piece – possibly my favourite thing I wrote all year, in fact – was a look into how the studios at BBC Manchester can be seen in early Red Dwarf. That piece is everything I’d like my writing to be, and don’t always manage to get there.

Staircase at BBC Manchester used in Red Dwarf

August had a look at deleted scenes in A Bit of Fry & Laurie, before we came to the main event: an examination of the recording dates for every single sketch in Series 1. That’s one of those articles which takes an absolute bloody age to write, and is so niche even by the standards of this site that not many people end up reading it. Oh well. It’s worth it just for the incredibly interesting revelation about which sketch in Series 1 was actually shot for the 1987 pilot.

September saw an article I’d been planning to write for literally years finally see the light of day: about a literally unbelievable claim about the viewing figures of Danger Mouse. No, I have nothing better to do than prove people’s childhood heroes INCORRECT. There was also the start of an obsession with One Foot in the Grave production minutiae, which ended up being some of the most popular things I wrote all year.

October turned out to be a ludicrously busy month. Firstly, we had Men Behaving Badly and the cut Diana joke. Then, there was possibly the most ridiculous thing about Red Dwarf ever written… well, at least, until next month. There was also the start of an analysis between the broadcast and DVD versions of The Thin Blue Line, which is mainly notable for me finally figuring out how how to edit video. (Which might come in useful next year.)

But my favourite thing all month was this poke at a oft-repeated anecdote about The Young Ones. This was something else I’d been meaning to write for ages, and finally got round to. This is one of those rare pieces where I think I might have actually scraped together some kind of real truth about a show that nobody has quite articulated before. Or maybe it’s just an excuse for a clip of a singing tomato.

November was a particularly stupid month, where I got confused and thought this site was Ganymede & Titan. Out of the four Red Dwarf pieces published this month, I finally managed to write two that I’d been banging on about on Twitter for ages: how more of the sets from Series 1 managed to last rather longer than you might think.

Victor Meldrew in You've Been Framed trail

December saw me determined to stop the site becoming a Red Dwarf fansite… by, erm, becoming a One Foot in the Grave fansite instead. First of all we looked at how the show faked a section of ITV output, and then I investigated all of David Renwick’s cameos in the show. Finally, the site reached a violent, bloody climax at the end of the year. Lovely.

* * *

Phew. So for a year where I intended to take a bit of a break and do other things, I ended up not only publishing more on the site than ever before, but also having a significantly bigger audience than any previous year too. In fact, the site had double the number of visitors than 2020, a fact I still find faintly extraordinary.

Double the visitors requires the double the gratitude. So thank you all so much for your likes, retweets, comments, or just quietly reading the site this year. I really do appreciate it so much. The comments section on the site has been particularly active and insightful, and has corrected and improved much of what I’ve written throughout the last 12 months.

As for this site in 2022… I’m in something of a bind. Every single time I say I’m going to do something specific on this site, I do nothing. And every time I say I’m going to do nothing and take a break, I end up writing shitloads. It is beginning to get faintly ridiculous.² My brain absolutely refuses to follow any kind of plan for this site whatsoever. In fact, it actively rebels against it.

So in 2022, I can only give you one promise: that something might or might not happen on this site at some point during the year. So you can look forward or not look forward to that at your leisure.

And you can’t say fairer than that, can you?

And still not found, incidentally. If anybody has any ideas… ↩
Still waiting for the Buffy fansites article I promised at the start of 2016? Me too. ↩

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end of year review

I Hate Doing Research, Part Two

Published 31st July 2021

Meta / TV Comedy

Gather round, hardcore comedy scholars. This isn’t one of those nice articles I write where everything is tied up with a neat bow at the end. Instead, it’s a cry for help into the void.

Let’s take a look at a few pictures from A Bit of Fry & Laurie on Getty Images. Firstly, Series 4:

This is from Episode 2 – the episode featuring Fiona Gillies and Kevin McNally. Getty suggests that this picture was taken on 22nd March 1994. A quick check I have of the paperwork for the show does indeed have this listed as the recording date. So far, so good.

Oddly, Getty doesn’t seem to have any pictures at all from Series 3. But if we look for Series 2, we have this:

Ah, The Rhodes Boysons. This one is a little more tricksy; the sketch was broadcast as part of Episode 5, but the paperwork I have here indicates it was actually shot during the first audience session for Series 2. That was on the 14th January 1990… and Getty agrees. We’re doing well, yes?

Too well, unfortunately. Things had to go wrong eventually. Finally, take a look at this brilliant photo from Series 1:

Comic actors Stephen Fry (left) and Hugh Laurie (on a television screen) on the set of a television show, December 17th 1988. (Photo by Don Smith/Radio Times/Getty Images)

This looks like it was taken from the sketch “Censored”, shown as part of Episode 1. Let’s take a look at a couple of screengrabs of the sketch in question.

At first glance, you’ll notice a few oddities. Both Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s hair looks different, the framing of Laurie on the TV screen is also different, and even the border round the TV set seems to have changed. Perhaps all this can be explained by the fact that the picture was almost certainly taken during rehearsal, rather than the shooting of the sketch itself. This was standard practice; take a look at this publicity photo from The Young Ones, for instance, and note Ryan’s attire.

There is still a problem with this picture, however. The paperwork I have here indicates that the sketch “Censored” was not only broadcast as part of the first episode of the show, but was actually shot as part of the first audience session, on the 10th December 1988. Why then, does Getty claim the picture was taken on the 17th December 1988, the date of the second audience session of the series?

You may choose from the following possibilities:

Getty has the wrong information, the production paperwork is correct, and this was shot on the 10th December 1988. After all, Getty has been known to be wrong before.
The production paperwork has the wrong information, Getty is correct, and this was shot on the 17th December 1988. After all, the production paperwork has been known to be wrong before.
Both Getty and the production paperwork are correct, and the “Censored” sketch was shot on the 10th, reshot on the 17th, and then they decided to use the original version shot on the 10th in the final show.
Both Getty and the production paperwork are correct, and this is a different sketch entirely, shot using the same setup of Fry on the stage and Laurie on the monitor, which they then decided to cut before broadcast.
Some random mix of the above.
Something else entirely.

Sometimes, things are just impossible to nail down, at least with the information we have available at the moment. Bung me a camera script for the 10th and 17th recordings of the show, and I’ll know for sure.

As things stand, my best guess is based on the following description of the picture on the Getty Images site:

“Comic actors Stephen Fry (left) and Hugh Laurie (on a television screen) on the set of a television show, December 17th 1988. (Photo by Don Smith/Radio Times/Getty Images)”

If you don’t even know what the TV show is called when writing the metadata, I’m willing to bet you might get the date wrong too. I’ll stick with the production paperwork date of the 10th for now.

But I’ll definitely lie awake worrying about it.

UPDATE (1/9/21): Well, now. I’m not sure we have an exact answer to this conundrum yet. But while browsing through the script book for Series 1 of A Bit of Fry & Laurie, I found the following unused sketch titled “Naked”, with an alarmingly familiar setup:

Stephen and Hugh are in a black limbo area. Hugh is on a monitor, Stephen is really there.

STEPHEN: I’m afraid that we’ve now got to ask you to do some work, and help us a bit, ladies and gentlemen. Use your imagination, as it were.
HUGH: That’s right. For the purposes of this next sketch, ladies and gentlemen, we want you all to imagine that we’re both naked.
STEPHEN: Yes. I’m sorry to have to ask this of you. Speaking for ourselves, Hugh and I really wanted to go the whole way, and actually be naked for this one but, unfortunately, we ran out of money.
HUGH: That’s right. The budget simply wouldn’t stretch that far, I’m afraid. Never mind.
STEPHEN: Now to help you build up the picture in your minds, I should tell you that the sketch is set in a church.
HUGH: That’s right. Stephen will be playing a Bishop.
STEPHEN: And Hugh will be playing the organ.
HUGH: The organist.
STEPHEN: What?
HUGH: I’ll be playing the organist.
STEPHEN: The organist. Yes. But you’ll be playing the organ as well?
HUGH: No. No. That’s the whole point. I play an organist who can’t play the organ.
STEPHEN: Oh God I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Of course. Have I ruined it?
HUGH: Yes, frankly.
STEPHEN: I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen.
HUGH: You’d better all stop imagining that we’re naked.
STEPHEN: Yes stop. Hold it. It’s all my fault. I’m sorry. Damn.

I would now remind you that one of the possibilities I mentioned in my original article was that the publicity photo on Getty is of a different sketch to “Censored” entirely. This suddenly seems an awful lot more likely.

So I propose the following. “Censored” was shot on the 10th and was broadcast, and “Naked” was shot on the 17th, is the sketch seen in the Getty picture, and eventually went unbroadcast. I have no proof, but this seems the most likely option at this point.

Someone send me every single camera script for A Bit of Fry & Laurie, and I’ll nail this bugger down for sure.

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fry & laurie, i hate doing research

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