Dirty Feed

Tangents.

Published 31st August 2022

Working in the pop culture mines can be hard.

Take this article on the 1990 Lucasfilm Games release Loom, written by one of my favourite writers, Jimmy Maher. As part of the background to the piece, however, he has to write about a different game:

“Lucasfilm Games’s one adventure of 1989 was a similarly middling effort. A joint design by Gilbert, Falstein, and Fox, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure — an Action Game was also made — marked the first time since Labyrinth that the games division had been entrusted with one of George Lucas’s cinematic properties. They don’t seem to have been all that excited at the prospect. The game dutifully walks you through the plot you’ve already watched unfold on the silver screen, without ever taking flight as a creative work in its own right.”

Maher is quickly picked up on this characterisation of the Indiana Jones game in the comments by Jason Dyer:

“I’m going to have to disagree with you here:

The game dutifully walks you through the plot you’ve already watched unfold on the silver screen, without ever taking flight as a creative work in its own right.

There is a *lot* of branching. There is so much branching I actually have a hard time thinking of a “classic-style” adventure game with more branching. (Fate of Atlantis, which is admittedly a better game, does a big branch into 3 routes at the beginning, but doesn’t really have any plot-driven branches in the middle.)

For example, you can play the scene entering the castle exactly like the movie (Indy punching the butler out) but it is quite possible to talk your way in. If you do so, it makes other things either.

If you recall the scene where they get the grail book from Berlin: it’s possible to not even lose the book and be able to skip the Berlin scene entirely.

There are quite a few endings as well; things don’t have to go anything like the movie.”

Maher takes the point gracefully:

“Hmm… maybe I just tried to do what Indy did in the movie, found it generally worked, and didn’t explore further. This in itself is of course another problematic aspect of adapting a linear story to an adventure game, but it seems I may have underestimated the game’s flexibility.”

The conversation then goes on to discuss plenty of the different scenarios and solutions the game offers, which is well worth reading in its own right, but I won’t quote any more from it here. My point here is not to dwell on the fact that Maher misjudged the game. Rather my point is to show how easy it was for him to accidentally do so.

Because Maher’s article wasn’t about Indiana Jones. He was specifically talking about Loom. But in order to do so, he had to give a bit of background. So he gave something a reasonable poke, thought he had the measure of it, and ended up misjudging it.

Now, if that happens with the main subject of your article, that’s on you. If the mistake had been about Loom itself, it would have been far less forgivable. But here, Maher runs into the problem we all do when writing about pop culture online. Which is, of course, the same problem that everybody has when researching anything.

Because there is a sheer combinational problem with research. It is unreasonable to expect that in order for someone to write about Loom, they also have to have deeply researched Indiana Jones, and learn about all the different routes through the game. Maher did the most anybody could expect here: he played the game, and formed an opinion based on that. You can’t expect anybody to do more, when you are trying to publish to some kind of regular, sensible schedule.

Sometimes, with tangents, you need to take a slight leap of faith. And sometimes, that leap will be misjudged. If you misjudge the central topic of your article, that’s on you. If you misjudge a tangent, you might feel a bit silly… but it’s an error which is virtually impossible to avoid completely.

Of course, there are ways to try and avoid the worst of these. Getting people you trust to proofread your work is of course one. But there is a limit to how much you can expect others to do when they’re not part of a strict, paid editorial structure. When you’re striking out on your own, such things are inevitable.

So have pity on your local pop culture writer, when we inevitably fall into these mistakes. We try our best, or at least those of us worth reading do. And please, correct us if you see something wrong. We can’t know everything.

And any decent writer will accept a correction with good grace.

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writing

In Search of the Golden Brain

Published 28th August 2022

TV Comedy

I’ve never been very good at being a comedy geek. I think I’m supposed to have lain under my bedcovers at night, listening to obscure radio comedy. I never did that. I was also supposed to be addicted to double bills of Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show on BBC2 in the 90s. I never did that, either.

Spitting Image book cover

But if there’s one cliche I did manage to follow, it was my love for that rare thing these days: the TV comedy tie-in book. Even in the 80s and 90s, it was more difficult to rewatch the comedy you loved than it is now; at the very least, it was far more expensive. Books were your way to stay in touch with your favourite show. And among a certain demographic at least, something like Bachelor Boys seems quoted almost as much as The Young Ones itself these days.¹

Less talked about perhaps, was the series of Spitting Image books released in the second half of the 80s. (Ownership of which got me a conversation with a girl in secondary school, which is more than most books did for me at the time.) And out of all of them, the very first from 1985, The Appallingly Disrespectful Spitting Image Book, is the one I have the fondest memories of. After all, how can you resist a book which includes this?

That Quincy joke is perfect.

Still, among all the hilarity, one aspect of the book intrigued me. Because along with all the parodies of everything under the sun, there was one part where I just couldn’t figure out whether it was a joke… or whether it was real.

Decades later, we can finally decipher it. But we need to take a little detour first.

[Read more →]

Who farted?, My nob’s bigger than Heathrow Airport, and That-cher. There you go, I think I’ve covered everything. ↩

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best of, spitting image

Remembering.

Published 17th August 2022

Internet

Every generation discovers the same thing. As you get older, you have to deal with more and more people you know getting ill, or dying. Over the last few years, I’ve very much started to experience this.

So it was the other day, when I learnt the sad news of the death of Phil Reed. Phil was someone I’d mostly lost contact with over the last few years, though we did share some DMs a few months back about the possibility of him moving over to the UK. (A melancholic conversation all in itself, now.) But in the late 2000s, we got to know each other quite well, initially through Red Dwarf fandom, and then a little more broadly. And when I mooted the idea for a site which eventually became Noise to Signal back in 2005, he was an obvious person to get involved.

I’ve written about Noise to Signal on here before. A group blog where a bunch of friends all talked about media stuff we loved (and occasionally hated), it never quite took off, despite being published for a total of four full years until the end of 2009. In the end, we were all talking about slightly different things, and the site never quite coalesced into something that truly worked.

But that wasn’t through a lack of effort from Phil Reed, who was one of the most prolific contributors to the site, writing far more than I ever did. Phil clearly viewed the site and his work on it with some fondness; the name of his own site, Noiseless Chatter, was partly a reference to the old Noise to Signal. (Warning: his last post on that site is him saying goodbye; don’t click on that link without being prepared for it.)

Which is one reason that I felt especially bad that in the aftermath of Phil’s death, Noise to Signal was actually offline. When the site closed back in 2009, I made a point of saying the archives would remain available, and indeed they did for many years. Unfortunately, I was right in the middle of changing web hosts for all my old, legacy sites, and it took rather longer than I was planning. The result: a large chunk of his work from the late noughties wasn’t available for people to read.

Luckily, I’ve managed to bodge Noise to Signal back online. It really didn’t seem like an appropriate time for any of Phil’s work to be unavailable. And the reason for that is obvious: when someone who is known for their writing dies, one way people like to remember them is by revisiting their old work. I suspect a great many of us have gone back and read some of Phil’s writing over the past week. Sure, you can coax the Wayback Machine into giving you a version of the site, but it’s inevitably a less smooth experience, and it’s also not as easy to access. I couldn’t bear the idea of people wanting to read some of Phil’s old work for the site, and not being able to do so.

Family and close friends have photos, or other, more intangible memories. But if you’ve just read someone from afar – like a great many of people did with Phil Reed’s work – your relationship with them might not be with a photo, or with a personal memory of them in real life. It might be with a slice of their brain that they put online, which you responded to… and don’t want to lose.

And all this goes beyond people wanting to read Phil’s work right now, and speaks to a wider kind of responsibility. I’ve spoken many times about how I think people should keep their own writing online, but as I’ve always admitted, that is surely a discussion you have to have in your own head. But if you’re the custodian of an archive of someone else’s work, as I have ended up being with Noise to Signal, then things surely get a lot more complex.

There is, to be clear, no legal responsibility. But surely there has to be a question of a moral responsibility to keep a dead author’s work available for people to read and remember them by. And this is a particular issue for people like me and my friends, where we have done that weird thing: write for free on the internet. A commercial book can go out of print; that has its own issues, but is a different kind of problem. Closer, perhaps, is the idea of print fanzines in decades past: but there was surely no expectation for people to keep paper copies of an old author’s work, available to send out at all times.

With the web, keeping people’s memories of someone alive through their work is easier. To be sure, there are still costs and technical issues to consider, and I’m not thrilled with the idea that in 20 years, I might still have to spend time figuring out how to keep the archives of Noise to Signal online. But it’s far more possible to do so than it was in decades past. And the idea of letting someone’s work slip offline just doesn’t feel right, when that work is one of the ways that person lives on in people’s memories. And if that sounds overblown, well, I suspect that Phil of all people knew damn well the power that words could have on somebody.

So yes: every generation discovers the power of loss as they get older. But the brand new thing for my generation is being the custodian of public things which help people deal with that loss. It’s a responsibility that none of us signed up for… but is impossible to ignore.

After all, Noise to Signal contains the writing of more than one deceased person that people might like to remember.

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Join the Dots

Published 6th August 2022

TV Comedy

It’s odd how things in your life can suddenly connect, completely unexpectedly.

Take the Red Dwarf episode “Timeslides” (TX: 12/12/89), which I’ve already written about recently. Short version of the plot: Kryten finds some photographic developing fluid which has mutated, and it now makes photographs come to life. Interestingly, this is one of the few times the series actually uses the fact things have been sitting around on the ship for three million years, and odd things might happen during that time.

But before we get into the meat of the episode proper – Lister going back and changing his own history – we get a series of gags about the kind of things you could do with the concept of living photos. So as well as causing trouble at Rimmer’s brother’s wedding, or pondering what they could do with a set of naughty beach photographs, we get the following amusing idea.

What if Lister had sent some photos to be developed, and got someone’s skiing holiday snaps back by mistake?

The official Red Dwarf site offers the following amusing titbit about this scene:

“But even the writers aren’t infallible, as Timeslides clearly proved. As production on the episode began, the scene where Lister claims he got somebody’s skiing holiday picture back by mistake was discovered to have an error by none other than Craig. The skiers had scripted lines about how they got Lister’s rather scary birthday snaps – which would have been fine, except, at that point in time, the skiers would not have received them yet. The lines were summarily cut.”

Very good Craig, well done. But this is no longer my favourite fact about this scene.

* * *

Recently, I’ve been doing some research on the very first Spitting Image book, published in 1985. Not that it was new to me. It was a favourite of mine as a teenager in the 90s. I once lent a girl my copy of it in one of my last years at secondary school, who I then proceeded to fail to have sex with.¹

Now, I knew that Rob Grant and Doug Naylor wrote Red Dwarf; even back then, I was as interested in who wrote something as who starred in it.² I also vaguely knew that they had something to do with Spitting Image, and clocked their names mentioned in the book. These days, I know all about how Grant Naylor essentially waded in halfway through Series 1 of Spitting Image and saved the show, but I didn’t really know the details at the time.

Nor did I notice the following. One of the double page spreads in that first Spitting Image book is a parody of teen photo story magazines; specifically, My Guy. They did a bloody good job too; the layout is identical. Click/tap for a bigger version:

But hang on, what’s that silliness, happening right at the end of the strip?

Yes, the story falls apart, because… the wrong film came back from the chemist, and they got some skiing holiday snaps instead!

Which is fascinating for all kinds of reasons. Partly because of something else I posted about recently; about how easily some of Red Dwarf‘s supposedly science fiction ideas turn out not to be rooted in science fiction at all. It’s also interesting because it specifically marks the photo story parody as being at least partially the hand of Grant Naylor; none of the individual pages in the book have author credits.

But most of all, I love it because I’ve always loved that Spitting Image book. Like The Young Ones spinoff book Batchelor Boys, it was part of my comedy education growing up; a way of experiencing the show without the cost of endless blank tapes, or expensive commercial videos. Yet somehow, I’d never linked that skiing joke in the photo story to the Red Dwarf moment before, despite the knowledge that Grant Naylor worked on both shows. A brand new path suddenly opened up in my brain, connecting two things completely unexpectedly.

I find it utterly delightful.

Most of my teenage anecdotes end like this. I did once lend a girl a copy of Craig Charles’ The Log, in exchange for a feel of her breasts. This is the best thing that book ever achieved for anybody. ↩
If I’m honest, it still bemuses me today that everybody doesn’t think like this. ↩

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red dwarf, spitting image

Broken Dreams

Published 30th July 2022

TV Comedy

Discussing the influences and antecedents of Red Dwarf can be tricky. Do we look at the show in terms of its science fiction, or as a sitcom?

In terms of science fiction, albeit comic science fiction, Dark Star is the big one. The idea of having normal people rather than heroes, and in particular its portrayal of working class people in space, seems to have originated here for Grant Naylor. Alien also feeds into this, along with influencing many sets in the show, not to mention all the shenanigans in “Polymorph”. Holly clearly has his roots in HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey¹, and so does the first opening theme tune.

As for pure sitcom, there’s the classic “Steptoe and Son in space”, which is often thrown around as an early concept for the show. Porridge is also endlessly mentioned, in terms of the claustrophobic situation between characters which the show was trying to evoke. All of this is certainly true, but with the odd honourable exception, there’s typically very little analysis beyond mentioning a TV show or film, along with a one line description.

And then there’s Hancock’s Half Hour. A show which doesn’t immediately spring to mind when talking about Red Dwarf. Yet the episode “The Tycoon” (TX: 13/11/59) has a number of remarkable similarities to the Red Dwarf episode “Better Than Life” (TX: 13/9/88), broadcast nearly thirty years later. Moreover, I don’t just mean in terms of character work – the main plot beats of the episode are broadly identical, despite “Better Than Life” seemingly hanging off a science fiction idea which Hancock would find impossible to replicate.

Rather than vague hand-waving or simplistic single line reductions, let’s take a look at both episodes in detail, shall we?

[Read more →]

A fact made more obvious by looking at Red Dwarf‘s precursor “Dave Hollins: Space Cadet” in Radio 4’s Son of Cliché, featuring… Hab. ↩

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originally on G&T, red dwarf

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.

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

The Laughing Vulcan

Published 15th July 2022

Other TV

It’s funny how an anecdote can be mostly correct, and yet give entirely the wrong impression of an event.

So it is with this story from Cliff Bole, the most prolific director of Star Trek: The Next Generation, with a full 25 episodes to his name. Recently, I was reading this interview with Bole on the official Star Trek site. And something stood out to me as an obvious little mystery.

How much interaction did you have with Gene Roddenberry?

Initially, quite a bit. We met two or three times a week, creatively. He gave his input and, of course, I gave my input. I had quite a bit of Roddenberry, and with Rick and the rest of the group. Roddenberry was totally committed to it. I did one episode with a Spock-like character in it, and this character laughed. Roddenberry saw the dailies and said, “That was the biggest mistake you ever made.” I said, “Well, I was only following the script, because it was written.” Vulcans don’t laugh or smile, but it got by everybody. This laugh was kind of a broad laugh, but it was written. Anyway, we did a retake of it and it was fine, and it never happened again, I can assure you. But that was Roddenberry who picked it out.

All very interesting. Of course, Bole didn’t actually give us any of the useful information in order to identify the scene, like the name of the episode or anything. We’re forced to do the donkeywork for ourselves.

Luckily, it doesn’t end up being too difficult. Bole clearly says this happened at the beginning of his time on TNG: all we have to do is find which of his early episodes had a Vulcan in it. This turns out to be “Conspiracy” (TX: 9/5/88)¹, late in Season 1, and the third episode Bole directed.

Ah, yes, the notorious “Conspiracy”, where Picard and gang foil a parasitic invasion of Starfleet. It’s one of my favourite kinds of Star Trek, alongside episodes like DS9’s “Valiant” (TX: 6/5/98) and especially Voyager’s “Course: Oblivion” (TX: 3/3/99), where being doom-laden and unpleasant is a huge part of the point. Cue much discussion of packing head moulds with real meat and blowing them up.

But we’re interested in a different kind of transgression. “Conspiracy” features a Vulcan named Savar, played by Henry Darrow. At no point in the episode does he laugh, but that’s as expected: according to Bole, the moment was reshot due to Roddenberry’s objections. But remember: Bole does claim that the laughing moment was in the original script.

And here’s where we get lucky. Brilliantly, every single script for TNG is available online. And I really do mean script, not transcript. These are the actual drafts used for production, stage directions and all.

So, does a Vulcan laugh in the script for “Conspiracy”, or is it all a load of rubbish?²

[Read more →]

All TX dates in this article are of the first US broadcast. ↩
Excerpt reformatted for ease-of-reading here. ↩

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star trek

Tales From BBC North West’s Scene Dock

Published 10th July 2022

Children's TV / TV Comedy

Sometimes, if I put on my magenta-tinted spectacles, I think that the most fun I ever had with Red Dwarf was in 1994. That was the very first time I watched the series, and indeed the very first time the show had been repeated from the beginning at all. So I could blithely enjoy the show without being troubled by what other people thought of it… or specifically, what the writers thought of it.

So the fact that Rob Grant and Doug Naylor hated the grey sets by production designer Paul Montague in the first two series of Dwarf was unknown to me. I really liked them. I also liked the new sets from Series III onwards, by Mel Bibby. I just… liked Red Dwarf an awful lot. And Grant Naylor poking fun at the sets of their own show in Me² (TX: 21/3/88) entirely passed me by.

LISTER: But why are they painting the corridor the same colour it was before?
RIMMER: They’re changing it from Ocean Grey to Military Grey. Something that should’ve been done a long time ago.
LISTER: Looks exactly the same to me.
RIMMER: No. No, no, no. That’s the new Military Grey bit there, and that’s the dowdy, old, nasty Ocean Grey bit there. (beat) Or is it the other way around?

Truth be told, I still love those early Red Dwarf sets, and no amount of people who actually worked on the show slagging them off will change that. In particular, I think the endless permutations of the same basic sections did a really good job at selling the ship as something genuinely huge, and I don’t think this is acknowledged enough. I didn’t even mind the swing bin.

Ah, yes, the famous swing bin. Of all the elements made fun of with those first two series, this one is a perennial. You can see it in action during the very first episode, “The End” (TX: 15/2/88), in McIntyre’s funeral:

It is undeniable: McIntyre’s remains are blasted into space through the medium of a kitchen swing bin, built into a circular table-like object. The commentary on this scene in the 2007 DVD release The Bodysnatcher Collection is brutal:

DOUG NAYLOR: The idea of this is was that it’s supposed to be quite moving, wasn’t it?
ROB GRANT: Yeah, I liked this scene in the script, because it was tender, and a different tone.
DOUG NAYLOR: Yes, but obviously it’s not working as conceived? Now first of all…
ROB GRANT: The canister.
DOUG NAYLOR: The canister, and then the… kitchen bin.
ROB GRANT: Just fantastic! But he pressed that button good, that’s good button-pressing acting… I mean, what is that? It’s not even a good bin, is it?
DOUG NAYLOR: And because there’s nothing in the bottom of the kitchen bin, it just thuds to the bottom, and I think eventually they put tissues in so it didn’t make that terrible clanking noise.
ROB GRANT: Oh dear Lord.

The above scene did actually go out as part of the first episode. But our notorious swing bin also played a big part in what has become one of the most famous deleted scenes in the whole history of Red Dwarf. Shot during the original recording of the first episode, but cut from transmission, we see Lister trying to give a respectful send-off to the crew.

Rimmer’s “What a guy. What a sportsman” is one of the great lost lines of Red Dwarf, as far as I’m concerned. Swing bin or no.

So, what happened to our notorious prop, after the first episode was completed? Well, it hung around in the Drive Room set for the rest of the series, sometimes used as a table whenever the need arose:

Waiting for God

Confidence & Paranoia

But once those first six episodes were over, that was it. Series 1 was recorded at the tail end of 1987; when Series 2 started recording in May 1988, not only was our famous swing bin prop nowhere to be seen, but the entire Drive Room set had been replaced, with something rather less… grey.

Series 1 Drive Room

Series 2 Drive Room

Surely our swing bin was never to be seen again?

[Read more →]

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best of, red dwarf, red dwarf sets

Rapped Knuckles All Round

Published 5th July 2022

TV Comedy

I don’t spend all my time trying to prove people wrong on here, you know. Sometimes there’s joy in being able to prove somebody right, too.

Take this little anecdote about Yes Minister in Paul Eddington’s autobiography:

“There were rapped knuckles all round on one occasion. We had finished the recording one night and were waiting for the tape to be checked before the audience could be released and we could all go home when someone doing the checking noticed a slight mistake in one of Nigel’s long speeches.

The poor man came back with it all to do again, took a deep breath and did it, perfectly. We got our clearance and shot off home. But what no one had noticed was that since Nigel recorded the speech the first time there had been intervening scenes with costume changes, and Nigel was wearing the wrong tie. It was a viewer who spotted the mistake when the episode was shown.

– So Far, So Good, Paul Eddington, p.168

Unfortunately, Eddington doesn’t go into such piddling little details such as which episode he’s actually talking about. We’ll have to do the work for ourselves. Or at least cheat by grumpily searching Google.

Sure enough, “yes minister” bloopers tie comes up with the following IMDB entry. Apparently, during the Series 1 episode “Big Brother” (TX: 17/3/80)¹, “Sir Humphrey’s tie changes several times during one scene with Jim Hacker.”

“Several times” is an exaggeration. In fact, it changes once, and then back again, as we can see in this clip:

Humphrey’s “Yes, quite so, Minister” is the funniest part of the whole episode.

Anyway, we can clearly see the tie change for Hawthorne’s mildly difficult speech, and then change back again, indicating the reshoot. From blue and burgundy, to burgundy with white spots:

Tie in original scene, blue and burgundy

Original shoot

Reshoot

And what’s more, the errant tie genuinely is the same one as that worn in the final scene, indicating the reshoot took place exactly as described by Eddington:

Reshoot

Final scene

And there you have it. Proof that Paul Eddington wasn’t talking bollocks. Why bother fact-checking actual ministers who run the country, when I can fact-check pretend ones instead?

In all seriousness, though: it really is just as pleasurable for an anecdote to slip neatly into place as fact, as it is to prove somebody wrong. Poking away at these things isn’t an exercise in self-importance. The truth about something, no matter how inconsequential, is always worth striving for.

Yes, I’m no fun at parties, what’s your point?

[Read more →]

Just out of interest, the episode was recorded on the 13th January 1980, a shade under two months before transmission. ↩

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yes minister

John’ll Fix It

Published 22nd June 2022

Other TV

You may wonder why I have spent some time recently watching videos of Jimmy Savile on YouTube. This is a very good question, and one that I am unable to fully answer. I guess this is what happens when I get fed up of new Star Trek and get desperate for something to watch.

Nonetheless, here is yer evil bastard himself, on BBC2’s Open to Question in the 80s, being interrogated by a bunch of high school kids. Warning: video contains Jimmy Savile.

If you don’t want to watch the above – which is perfectly understandable – the below hilarious video condenses it down to three minutes. And while it’s clearly made partially for comedy purposes, it does accurately represent much of the content and feeling of the full interview:

Anyway, our question for today: when exactly was this interview broadcast?

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