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Shame.

Published 17th April 2022

Internet

I’ve written many times in the past about how I think people should keep their website archives online. In fact I’ve talked about it to the point of obnoxiousness, and then far beyond that. About how old stuff can suddenly become found and loved, about the history of the web disappearing, about what remains of the public record, about accidentally destroying a web community, about losing memories… or simply about letting things live.

It’s all true. But today I want to talk about another reason I feel so strongly about this. A reason I haven’t really touched on before, but I think is one of the most important of all.

Take a look at this interview from 2013, with designer Frank Chimero. It’s actually worth reading in full; it touches on many interesting topics. For instance, I highly identify with this:

“I think I’m similar to a lot of other creative people in that I’m deeply uncomfortable with attention. It’s one of those things where if you gain any attention, you start to subconsciously — or maybe even consciously — make creative choices to have people stop paying attention to you. […]1

Attention creates expectations that feel like a saddle. And most horses buck the first time a saddle is put on them. It is a natural inclination. Maybe it’s immature behavior to want to shake off other people’s expectations? I don’t know. But, if I’m really honest about where I am creatively, that’s what I want to do — I just want to buck.”

This reminds me very much of when I decided I didn’t want to write about sitcoms for a while, because somebody mildly hinted that was all they enjoyed about my writing. It also reminds me that whenever this place gets attention for something beyond my usual audience – my Yes Minister piece last year, for instance – I feel a disconcerting mix of pleasure and uncomfortableness. Is my lack of a really popular article on Dirty Feed so far this year down to luck, people having less time for my nonsense as the world opens up again… or my choice?

But there’s another part of this interview which I can’t quite get on board with.

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  1. All the quotations in this article are edited a little to avoid the back-and-forth with the interviewers, which works brilliantly in the piece itself, but less well when quoting from it. I hope I’ve been fair with my edits, but it’s worth reading the full interview to capture the true flavour of the conversation. ↩

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Police I.Q. Shocker

Published 8th April 2022

TV Comedy

In a surprising move, today we’re going to take another look at The Young Ones. But this little tale is a good example of how researching old TV shows can lead you down an alley you never really expected.

Let’s join Mark Arden and Stephen Frost as a couple of gormless policemen in “Boring” (TX: 23/11/82).

As the picture dissolves into the newspaper headline, anyone who has been following my recent nonsense knows what’s coming next. What newspaper did they use as a basis for the prop, and what original story did the “Police I.Q. Shocker” headline replace?

The Guardian newspaper - lead headline Police I.Q. Shocker

Unlike our previous examples, this one is pretty straightforward. There’s no replaced or altered mastheads here. Not only is the paper an actual copy of The Guardian, but the correct date of the edition is visible, clear as a bell: August 3rd 1982.

Which means finding the original front page of the paper is easy:

Full front page of The Guardian Tuesday August 3rd 1982

The only story the production team changed was the middle one; everything else on the page is identical. The replaced story concerned Philip Williams, a soldier who turned up alive after six weeks, having been presumed dead fighting in the Falklands. In fact, now we know this, the line “was missing, presumed dead” is clearly visible in the broadcast episode, underneath the new headline.

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I Hope You’re Satisfied, Thatcher

Published 5th April 2022

TV Comedy

Some days, I like to lead you all carefully into another tale of a sitcom production oddity. Other days, I like to throw a load of recording dates at you, and leave you to fend for yourself.

Guess which one this is. Let’s take a look at when Series 2 of The Young Ones was actually made.

Episode RX TX
Sick 23-24/1/84 12/6/84
Cash 30-31/1/84 15/5/84
Nasty 6-7/2/84 29/5/84
Bambi 14-15/2/84 8/5/84
Time 19-20/4/84 5/6/84
Summer Holiday 24-25/4/84 19/6/84

Two of those dates are not like the others. What was a fairly standard weekly production schedule for the first four episodes, suddenly has a gap of two months, before the last two episodes “Time” and “Summer Holiday” were recorded. What gives?

Those of you familiar with the BBC strikes around this time will already have guessed the problem. Luckily, we have a contemporary report from The Times by David Hewson, which explicitly states what happened, and that it specifically affected The Young Ones:

“The BBC faces a great log jam of unfinished drama and light entertainment programmes as the strike by 700 sceneshifters enters its fourth week.

Its effects on broadcasts are minimal, but the strike could lead to a severe shortage of home-produced plays and shows if it continues.

Postponed programmes include the latest Shakespeare production Titus Andronicus, three plays of the month, a new series of The Young Ones, the Kenny Everett Television Show, and a Ronnie Corbett comedy Sorry.

The director of resources for BBC Television, Mr Michael Checkland, has written to all television staff giving a warning that the corporation will not contemplate a return to work under the old working arrangements demanded by the strikers.”

— The Times, “BBC drama delayed by scenery strike”, March 13th 1984

This particular strike is well-known by Top of the Pops aficionados, as it affected the on-screen look of the show, with a vastly reduced set. The strike’s effects on The Young Ones are far less known about – in fact, it’s not widely-known that the strike had any impact on the show at all. And why should it be? This isn’t a Top of the Pops situation – the show ended up being produced unscathed.

Well, more or less unscathed, anyway. Let’s prod a bit deeper.

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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?

Tonight’s Special Guest Star: Adolf Hitler as Himself

Published 20th March 2022

TV Comedy

It is perhaps a mark of the kind of show Red Dwarf is that an episode can start with having Lister climb into a living photo featuring Adolf Hitler, beat him up, nick his briefcase, and accidentally foil an assassination attempt.

Nevertheless, ten minutes into “Timeslides” (12/12/89) that is exactly what has happened, leading to Rimmer’s memorable line: “You can’t just stick one on the leader of the Third Reich.” But we’re not here to talk about the actual comedy in the episode. That would be ludicrous.

No, we’re here to talk about this prop newspaper:

News Chronicle newspaper: headline Hitler Escapes Bomb Attack at Nuremberg

In grand time travel story tradition, this is the shot that tells us that what Lister did is real. His leap into the living photograph had actual, lasting repercussions for the universe; it didn’t exist in its own little bubble. It’s the revelation that powers the whole rest of the episode.

It’s also the kind of shot which makes me think: hang on, did they make that newspaper front page from scratch, or is it based around a real one? Of course it made me think that. I have form.

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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.

  1. Very odd. ↩

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Leisure World International

Published 13th March 2022

TV Comedy

Red Dwarf‘s “Back to Reality” (RX: 5-6/12/91), befitting its story, has something of a dual nature. In many ways, it’s a bold, unusual episode, pushing Red Dwarf to places it had never been before. In other ways, it’s just the natural conclusion to themes which had been present in the show from the very beginning. It’s not like one of the best sitcom episodes of the 90s sprung out of the television without warning.

Nevertheless, perhaps more than any other episode of Red Dwarf, it absolutely commits to its central idea. Seven minutes in, our crew are dead, and thrown into their nightmare. And one thing which makes it feel unlike any other episode is how few of the usual standing sets it uses. Just Starbug. The rest of our familiar, friendly haunts are nowhere to be seen.

Which presents the show with an interesting production problem. At the end of the series1, Production Designer Mel Bibby suddenly has to pull out a brand new bunch of sets, just for a single episode. From scratch.

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  1. Yes, “Back to Reality” was not only transmitted last, but recorded last too. ↩

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Corrections

Published 24th February 2022

Internet

Open Culture, “Revisit the Infamous Rolling Stones Free Festival at Altamont: The Ill-Fated Concert Took Place 50 Years Ago”, 9th December 2019:

“The stigma surrounding the Hells Angels greatly contributed the infamy, as news of their full involvement spread. Had accused killer Alan Passaro not been in a notoriously violent biker gang, Selvin believes, he would have been seen as a hero, since Hunter had rushed the stage with a gun after an earlier altercation with the gang. (Passaro was not charged.)”

Me, 21st February 2022, 5:41am:

Open Culture, “Revisit the Infamous Rolling Stones Free Festival at Altamont: The Ill-Fated Concert Took Place 50 Years Ago”, 21st February 2022, c. 5:55am:

“The stigma surrounding the Hells Angels greatly contributed the infamy, as news of their full involvement spread. Had accused killer Alan Passaro not been in a notoriously violent biker gang, Selvin believes, he would have been seen as a hero, since Hunter had rushed the stage with a gun after an earlier altercation with the gang. (Passaro was charged but not convicted.)”

*   *   *

So, y’know, the correction here is good. Slightly less good: no acknowledgement anywhere in the article that it’s had a whacking great error in it for over two years. (We’re not talking about a tiny mistake; reporting criminal proceedings correctly is kinda important.)

Oh, and I also didn’t get any kind of thank you for helping them correct the mistake. Not even a reply on Twitter, let alone in the article itself.

Let me make Dirty Feed’s editorial policy crystal clear on this one. If you spot an error on this site, please let me know. If the comments are open, you can use that; if they’re closed, grab me on Twitter or drop me an email. Not only will you get a thank you – because I think anyone who takes the time and trouble to help me make this site better deserves one – but I’ll put a note at the bottom of the article to tell the reader exactly what was corrected.

Silent corrections are death when it comes to trust with your readers. And not thanking the person who takes the time to help fix your crap is just rude.

I Want Names, I Want Places, I Want Dates

Published 20th February 2022

TV Comedy

Sometimes, when you hear what has become a well-worn anecdote about a TV show, you wonder whether it’s actually true or not. Other times, you have absolutely no doubt that it’s true. You just want to know more.

Red Dwarf has a great many of these tales. And something I’ve wondered for many years concerns the electricians’ strike which meant that the original recordings for Series 1 had to be abandoned. This has been told in many forms for years; for example, in the “Launching Red Dwarf” documentary on the Series 1 DVD in 2002, commissioner Peter Ridsdale-Scott had this to say:

“The worries were legion. First of all, we had the strike, which meant that every single episode of Red Dwarf of that first series went into production, into rehearsal, and never went into the studio. All six of them. So we’d spent all the money, and the BBC said ‘Well, sorry about this, it’s been very good and we’re sure it would have been a success, but that’s it’. And Paul [Jackson] and I said ‘Oh no. We may have spent the money, but we must remount this production, we must get it on.’ And we persuaded them, and it was put on.”

The same story is told on the official Red Dwarf site1:

“On the second day of rehearsals, an electrician’s strike began at the BBC which effectively put a stop to any production. Unperturbed, the crew completed rehearsals for the first episode and moved on to the second, optimistic that they could fit the The End shoot onto the end of the other existing episode slots.

Except one by one, the episode recordings were called off as the strike persisted. The entire season, rehearsed and ready, was left for six months – past the originally intended dates for broadcast – before being remounted.”

All of which is great, and frankly a damn sight more than we get to hear about most sitcoms. But I’m greedy, and I want more. There’s one particular aspect about all this which has never quite been nailed down over the years. And that is: what were the exact dates of the abandoned Red Dwarf recordings for Series 1?

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  1. Select the ‘Production’ section. ↩

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