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An Evening at Television Centre, Part Two

Published 16th April 2023

TV Comedy

The problem with writing this site is that I seem to go off on endless tangents, rather than writing what I’m supposed to be writing about.

Oh well, here we go again. On the 14th November 1997, a brand new series of The Fast Show started airing on BBC2. That first episode featured the debut of a new Paul Whitehouse character Archie, the pub bore. This first sketch is fairly normal; they get progressively odder.

Now, hidden away on the final disc of The Ultimate Fast Show Collection DVD, is a behind-the-scenes feature on Series 3 by yer man Rhys Thomas. And as part of this feature, we see a little snatch of this sketch being recorded:

At the end of that clip, you can see them setting up for the Chess sketch in Episode 6, which looks like it was recorded directly after.1 But the bit I want to concentrate on is the following bit of amusingness:

PAUL WHITEHOUSE: Coogan’s in tonight. What do you reckon we go round and do him?
MARK WILLIAMS: And then who’s left over? Then we go and do Shooting Stars!
PAUL WHITEHOUSE: Come on Lamarr, come on. You greaseball throwback…

Coogan was indeed in that night; but Whitehouse doesn’t mean he’s in the Fast Show audience. These two Archie sketches were shot on the 5th September 1997… the same night as an audience recording for I’m Alan Partridge. Specifically, Series 1 Episode 3, “Watership Alan”. Yeah, the one with Chris Morris. This episode was broadcast on the 17th November 1997, just three days after Series 3 of The Fast Show debuted.

As for Shooting Stars? The very first episode of Series 3 was recorded this night too, and broadcast on the 26th November 1997 This is the episode featuring Mariella Frostrup, Antony Worrall Thompson, Leo Sayer, and Tania Bryer. I find the latter particularly amusing, as back at the start of 1997, she had appeared in the “Science” episode of Brass Eye, warning us of the dangers of mutant clouds. I wonder if she was tempted to pop round to TC1 and lamp Morris one.

Regardless: The Fast Show, I’m Alan Partridge and Shooting Stars, recording at TV Centre in the same evening. And all broadcast in the same month too.

If I may permit myself a note of melancholy that I don’t usually indulge in here on Dirty Feed: I think we’ve lost something, guys.

  1. There appears to be an invisible edit 24 seconds in; the chessboard magically appears on the table. ↩

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Ersatz Gaming

Published 15th April 2023

Internet / Videogames

I’m going through a bit of an odd phase at the moment with games, of pretty much any description. I realised it late last year, when I found myself stuck on the final level of Portal, despite beating it years ago. I also found myself stuck in the Forest Temple in Ocarina of Time, despite beating that years ago too.1 I have so much going on in my life at the moment that Switch Sports Golf is about all I can manage. Figuring out puzzles is entirely beyond me. My head is too full.

But I still need that hit of seeing a puzzle solved, even if I have to get someone else to do it for me. So one constant joy over the past year has been Jason Dyer and his All the Adventures project, described as: “I play and blog about every adventure game ever made in (nearly) chronological order.” This is clearly an utterly ridiculous thing to attempt. Fantastic.

I tend to dip into Jason’s extensive archive on a fairly random basis, rather than reading everything from the beginning. And recently, a set of connected games by mostly the same author2 has been keeping me company. These are very unusual – a set of first-person adventure games made between 1980-82, for the TRS-80. No overhead view or text adventures here. The closest thing I’ve seen in my world of the BBC Micro is Acornsoft Maze, but the similarity is really very superficial. It’s a whole different type of game.

The games in the series, linked to Jason’s write-ups, are:

Now, I’ve never touched a real TRS-80. I did spend a little time emulating one a while back, just for fun, but didn’t end doing that much with it. I didn’t really need to. Articles like these scratch every single itch I have for a bit of adventuring, without actually having to put the work in to map mazes and suchlike. (Something I was invariably terrible at anyway.) I was never, ever going to find the time to play these games, but reading Jason it is almost as much fun.

You might think this kind of thing would be ideal to do on YouTube instead, and I suppose for many, it would be. I think doing it as a blog does have some real advantages, though. It really does allow Jason to go into detail regarding how the puzzles are constructed, which a Let’s Play would find difficult to encapsulate, and a more general review would probably skip over. It’s this construction detail which I find so immensely pleasing about these pieces, and by the end of the final game in the series, you really do feel like you’ve learnt something tangible about how games work, rather than just being taken on a pleasure ride through nothing.

These articles are the gold standard for writing online, as far as I’m concerned. What better thing is there to write about than something obscure and under-appreciated, and actually analysing it properly? In a world where so many write about the same boring thing over and over again, stuff like this is an utter joy.

It’s something anyone writing shit on the internet can aspire to. There’s a whole world of stuff out there. Find the bits that haven’t been poked enough yet. And poke ’em.

  1. Incidentally, in the most cliched thing I will ever admit to on this site, years ago I ended up getting stuck on the Water Temple in Ocarina, and never got past it. Bah. ↩

  2. The first three are by William F. Denman, Jr. and Frank Corr, Jr. The final one is by William Denman only, although it reuses some graphics by Frank Corr. ↩

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Chanel 9: Unplugged

Published 12th April 2023

TV Comedy

Just occasionally, it seems the comedy historian gods are smiling down at me.

Back in January, I wrote about the Chanel 9 sketches in The Fast Show, and how the degraded picture effect on the sketches was generated. In a pleasing piece of serendipity, the BBC have just uploaded every episode of The Fast Show to iPlayer, making it look like I’m writing about something vaguely of the zeitgeist for a change.1

There are a few strange things about these iPlayer uploads, though. In particular, Episode 1.4 seems to be an early edit, completely different to the DVD release! In the first minute of the programme, we have:

  • Unmixed sound on the initial “Ed Winchester” sketch,
  • A click track and no visuals instead of the opening montage of the title sequence, and
  • No cast member credits during the Kenny Valentine number.

A full list of the differences between the version released on DVD, and this incomplete version on iPlayer, I shall leave as an exercise for the reader.2 But I do want to talk about one major difference later on in the programme. And here is where our smiling comedy gods come in.

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  1. Look, a show which is only 30 years old counts as part of the zeitgeist around here. ↩

  2. I really can’t be arsed. ↩

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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.

  1. 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. ↩

  2. Partly because the web has got more complicated, of course, but it’s not just that. ↩

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The Unexamined Sitcom Is Not Worth Watching

Published 3rd April 2023

TV Comedy

Sometimes, a sitcom mystery you’ve wondered about for years suddenly gets resolved. And for Dirty Feed, this one is the motherlode. After all, with the pilot episode of Fawlty Towers, you’re talking about something as close as you can get to a sacred text around here.

Strap yourself in. This is a good one. Let’s start from the beginning.

One of the most important things to understand production-wise about the pilot of Fawlty Towers – usually known these days as “A Touch of Class” – is that it really was a genuine pilot, made eight months before the rest of the series. The majority of the studio scenes in the episode were shot in front of an audience on the 23rd December 1974, for eventual broadcast on BBC2 on the 19th September 1975. In comparison, the rest of Series 1 was shot in August/September 1975, less than two months before transmission.

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I Asked ChatGPT To Write Dirty Feed, the Results Will Not Amaze You

Published 29th March 2023

Computing / Internet / Meta

It’s odd how quickly some cliches can be formed. For instance, that thing where journalists report on AI, by using an opening few paragraphs written by AI. I’m not saying it’s a terrible approach per se. But after seeing it a few times, I most certainly don’t need to see it any more.

So I’m deliberately not doing that here. But I did think it might be vaguely amusing to see what ChatGPT would make of the prompt: “Write an article suitable for dirtyfeed.org.” If you don’t think this would be amusing, then please click away now.

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Bernard Manning Newsflash

Published 28th March 2023

TV Comedy

What do you think was the crowning achievement of Spitting Image?

Perhaps you’re of the opinion that teaching the country who was actually in the cabinet was its lasting cultural legacy. Or possibly you want to point to the stunning end to Series 1, and “Every Bomb You Make”. Maybe you want to stick your neck out and say “The Chicken Song”, although the B-side is really where it’s at, man.

But no, you’re all wrong. In fact, the best ever thing Spitting Image ever did is the following, broadcast on the 19th January 1986.

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More Trouble Aboard the Red Dwarf

Published 27th March 2023

TV Comedy

For obvious reasons, ephemera surrounding the first series of Red Dwarf is like gold dust. Of course material is going to survive once the show had an established fanbase; things from when the show was just a slightly odd new sitcom on BBC2 are a whole other thing.

One of these pieces of ephemera has become widely known about and distributed: an off-air trail for the first episode “The End” made it onto the Series 1 Red Dwarf DVD release in 2002. That trail was uploaded to YouTube in 2015, including the surrounding content which couldn’t be cleared for DVD; this variant was broadcast on the 13th February 1988, just two days before the episode aired.1

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  1. There’s also this version of the trail, broadcast on the 8th February, the week before the episode aired. That’s the earliest transmission of a variant of this trail I know of. ↩

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Spitting Image on Kellyvision

Published 26th March 2023

TV Comedy

Sometimes, someone tells you something on Twitter which strikes fear into any honest, fact-loving, archivist soul. When I posted this piece, tracing Chris Barrie’s appearances on Spitting Image in late-1987, I put bloody loads of research into it. I was confident I was correct, job done.

Until Gareth Joy mentioned the following to me on Twitter:

Kellyvision was a 1988 Tyne Tees series hosted by Chris Kelly, going behind-the-scenes of various TV programmes. Now, I’d most certainly heard of the show; an episode where they go behind-the-scenes on Knightmare is famous among that fan community. But I had no idea about the Spitting Image episode. If I had, I certainly would have investigated it before, I don’t know, publishing a huge article giving an exact timeline of how the show was made, or something.

Better late than never. Let’s take a look. This episode of Kellyvision was broadcast on the 20th July 1988, and is titled “The World of Spitting Image”. It’s worth taking the time to watch it in full; it’s a wonderful piece of television, and we don’t often do making-of programmes quite like this any more, at least on broadcast TV.

So: when was this episode of Kellyvision shot? And which episode of Spitting Image is it actually looking at?

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“Instead of Murdering Him”

Published 22nd March 2023

TV Comedy

Take a look at the below scene from the pilot of Fawlty Towers, recorded in Studio 8 at Television Centre on the 23rd December 1974, and broadcast on the 19th September 1975.

I always think the knocking of the tray, expertly executed by Cleese and Booth, doesn’t get nearly enough of an audience reaction. Come on, it should get roars. But slagging off TV Centre audiences from 1974 isn’t our topic for today.

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