Dirty Feed

The Product.

Published 7th August 2024

Robin Rendle, “Chase the product, not the data”:

“Here’s the painful truth: a lotta folks point at the data because they can’t see the product. They don’t use it, they don’t have feelings about it. They don’t sit there and obsess over the details like what happens when you click X or whether something should live on this page or that. And there’s no real incentive for them to do so! In many organizations it doesn’t matter if the product gets better, so long as the weird garbage kaleidoscope that we call “data” gets better.”

I’ve worked on many different linear TV channels over the years. So this isn’t about any channel in particular.

But you could can nearly always tell when somebody working on a channel doesn’t actually watch the output, or care about it, and merely concerns themselves with the data. The lack of soul is brutally apparent in the resulting piece of television. Sometimes, it’s not even about a lack of soul. Sometimes the result is just wildly inept, and doesn’t make sense.

Linear television needs more people who actually care about linear television working on it.

“It’s Just So Crypto-Fascist!”

Published 6th August 2024

Children's TV / TV Comedy

Where were you when Napalm Death appeared on Children’s BBC?

For me, the answer was… not watching Napalm Death on Children’s BBC. Music show What’s That Noise? was not a favourite of mine. Perhaps I detected the vague whiff of education, and I’d already had enough of that by that point in the afternoon. At 4:35pm on the 10th October 1989 I was probably watching Sooty and Count Duckula on the other side. Or on my computer. Or eating tea. Anything, in fact, than watching BBC1.

Oh well, my loss. See how great Craig Charles is here. “This is music for young lovers, step aside Kylie Minogue!”

The question is: what has the above moment got to do with Red Dwarf, beyond the involvement of Craig?

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The Dave Nice Video Show, Part Seven: “Well Nationwide Did!”

Published 22nd July 2024

TV Comedy

Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four • Part Five • Part Six • Part Seven

Welcome to the final part of my series of articles looking at stock footage in Smashie and Nicey: the End of an Era. Something which was meant to only be a single piece, then two, and eventually ballooned to seven. Yet again, why nobody ever wrote about this before became clear as soon as I started the damn thing.

So let’s stagger gasping and sweaty across the finish line. This is a grab bag of all the remaining bits of stock footage in the show, mostly from the second half. And surely the climax of this series of articles is the best time to highlight a few of my CRITICAL RESEARCH FAILURES.

Such as:

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The Dave Nice Video Show, Part Six: “Boys, I Believe You Like Swearwords”

Published 16th July 2024

TV Comedy

Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four • Part Five • Part Six • Part Seven

Last time in our look at stock footage in End of an Era, we hung around in the nice clean-cut world of Top of the Pops. Today, Smashie and Nicey throw themselves headlong into… “PUNK!”

This sequence uses only two clips of existing footage… but they just happen to be two of the most interesting clips in the entire show. One of them is extremely well-known. The other, rather less so.

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smashie and nicey, the dave nice video show, tx date investigations

Badge of Honour

Published 14th July 2024

Animation / Internet

When it comes to anecdotes, it’s always best to poke them with a sharp stick occasionally. That goes double for anecdotes about Walt Disney. No, I promise you: he wasn’t cryogenically frozen upon his death. He really wasn’t. Promise.

A less well-known story surrounds Walt’s political persuasions. By 1964, he was most certainly an avowed Republican. Neal Gabler, in his biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Random House, 2006) tells us the following:¹

“…none of his honours may have been greater than the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award the nation can bestow. Walt received it from President Lyndon Johnson at the White House during the 1964 presidential campaign – Walt wore a Goldwater button under his lapel – and it was a measure of his status that among his fellow honorees that day were the poets T.S. Eliot and Carl Sandberg, the novelist John Steinbeck, the urban historian Lewis Mumford, the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, the artist Willem de Kooning, the composer Aaron Copland, the columnist Walter Lippmann, the journalist Edward R. Murrow, and Helen Keller. Walt Disney was in the pantheon.”

Hang on, hang on. Back up from that list of names a minute. What was that?

“Walt wore a Goldwater button under his lapel”

So Walt Disney received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat… and wore a campaign button for Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president, during the ceremony? This is very, very funny indeed.

But is it true?

Gabler sourced this particular piece of information from Remembering Walt (Hyperion, 1999), by Amy Boothe Green and Howard E. Greene. In it, there’s the following short quote from Charlie Ridgway, a publicist for the Disney theme parks for over three decades:

“The day Walt went to the White House to receive the Freedom Award from President Johnson, he wore his Goldwater button inside his lapel. Walt had been terribly antipolitical until George Murphy ran for the Senate. Being a friend of George, he supported him and that got him into politics again. From then on he was a rather avid Republican. Johnson did not take Walt’s political commentary with good grace at all.”

It’s a great story, but it also raises questions. For a start, if Walt wore the badge inside his lapel, how did Johnson even see it in the first place? Did Walt flash the badge at him? And if he didn’t flash the badge at him, why would he wear it in the first place? Just for his own amusement? For that matter, how did Ridgway know about any of this in the first place? Did he personally witness it?

It all feels a little too good to be true. Worryingly like an anecdote that people wish had happened, or something that Walt had joked about doing, but never actually did. There’s just not quite enough information in the above quote to truly trust it.

Luckily, somebody else has done the real work. Back in 2007, animation historian Michael Barrier did some research, and wrote this in-depth essay, which is essentially the final word on the whole affair. I won’t quote extensively from that piece; it’s worth reading for yourself. But, incredibly, while some of the details are still difficult to pin down, the story turns out to be pretty much true. Amazing.

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With thanks to Darrell Maclaine for digging out his copy. ↩

The Dave Nice Video Show, Part Five: “I’ve Just Eaten a Whole Packet of Toffos!”

Published 12th July 2024

TV Comedy

Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four • Part Five • Part Six • Part Seven

At last, something easy with this series of articles looking at stock footage in Smashie and Nicey: the End of an Era. Surely Top of the Pops has been endlessly watched and documented by now. I’ll fly through this, won’t I?

No? Oh well.

End of an Era features material from six different editions of Top of the Pops, from title sequences through to actual performances. All but the last two clips can be seen in the following:

Note that I have conveniently decided to stop that video just before the pair’s “celebration” of “black music”. “You would not believe the complaints that show got…” Or, indeed, websites.

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Summer Hiatus

Published 20th June 2024

“Some Cheap American Science Fiction Movie”

Published 20th June 2024

Film / TV Comedy

20 years ago this month, I interviewed John Pomphrey, the lighting director for the first six series of Red Dwarf. I was going to tidy that interview up and republish it here for its little anniversary, but for various reasons, I’m struggling to get round to it. Maybe that’s for the best. That interview should probably be left in its own time and place.

Rereading it though, there’s a few things in there which I don’t think have come up anywhere else. Not least, the following anecdote about a cheap film which ripped off Red Dwarf‘s sets:

“Some of it did appear in a movie, because me and Mel sat down and looked at it. We came across a cheap American video, a very cheap science thing, and Mel said ‘It’s the control room!’ Someone in America had copied it, and we spoke to Doug and Rob at the time, but there was nothing we could do about it, but it was absolutely identical. Same lighting; it was evident that somebody had got hold of a copy and thought ‘That’s good’ and built it, and it featured in some cheap American science fiction movie. We said “Who do you sue?” and you’d never track them down, you’d never sue them… so we just sat and looked at it. He said ‘Look at that! It’s the octagonal control room!’, and they were all standing round, and we said ‘Bloomin’ ‘eck!'”

This would have been the control room from Series III through to V:

Red Dwarf control room/drive room, with Cat, Lister and Rimmer

Red Dwarf control room/drive room, with Holly and skutters

It perhaps seems a little odd that John and Mel were so outraged at the rip. Mel Bibby has often gone on record as saying that his work on Red Dwarf was inspired by Alien; frankly, it’s difficult to overstate exactly how inspired it actually is. But I guess there’s “inspired by”, and “absolutely identical”.

Regardless of all that, question is: exactly which cheap science fiction movie ripped off the Red Dwarf control room above? John Pomphrey sadly couldn’t remember. Anyone have any ideas?

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The Ballad of SKP003375

Published 15th June 2024

Meta / TV Comedy

Warning: the following is for hardcore TV research nerds only.

The most complicated series of articles I’ve ever written here on Dirty Feed is probably last year’s five-part epic on The Young Ones and flash frames. It’s the kind of project which has you waking up in a cold sweat at night, screaming about /72 edits.

It’s also a project which I think turned out OK. Sure, I may not have got to the root of every single question to do with those damn flash frames, but I got closer than anybody has before, and that’s surely worth something. It certainly manages to be more accurate than most newspaper reports from the time.

Of those remaining questions, though, one of them really bugs me. It’s regarding these two flash frames from “Nasty”, first transmitted on the 29th May 1984:

Despite how much I poked at them, and how much other people poked at them for me, I never managed to figure out the original source for these frames. I mean, I tried. I really, really tried. I even ended up looking through programmes about sodding pottery that the BBC broadcast in the early 80s. No luck. What programme did those two shots originate from?

The only clue we have is the following sentence in the paperwork for “Nasty”:

Flash frame of tap dripping from K065402 transferred to H25992, and Potter’s Wheel from SKP003375 transferred to H25992.

There are three spools, aka tapes, mentioned in that sentence. H25992 is the spool which all the flash frames in the series was compiled onto, before they were scattered across the various episodes. But K065402 and SKP003375, the original source of the frames, seemed impossible to track down. No current BBC database – at least any that I know if – seems to recognise those tape numbers. Which is a bizarre state of affairs in itself. Nor did anybody seem to know what those spool prefixes actually meant.

I came up with all kinds of theories, mind. Did “K” stand for TK, or Telecine? Is SKP “Scotland Telecine”? Was I, in fact, going completely mad?

Such thoughts eventually faded. I finally finished the series of articles, made a half-hearted promise that I’d investigate more next year, and that was that. Meanwhile, this year’s long project is an investigation into all the stock footage used in Smashie and Nicey: the End of an Era. And my latest post is on material of lovely young ladies walking down the street, used as part of the sequence on Radio Fab’s DJ handover.

And one of the sources of those lovely young ladies is listed as the following in the paperwork:

Kings Road Stock.
7 secs
SKP2304
BBC

And suddenly, something clicked into place. This was footage taken from an actual stock library, rather than a finished programme. And it had the number SKP2304. The potter’s wheel footage from “Nasty” had the number SKP003375. The “SK” in “SKP” surely stands for “Stock”, and that potter’s wheel footage surely came from a stock library too. It’s quite possible it had never been broadcast before The Young Ones used it.

Of course, questions remain. I say it’s possible it had “never have been broadcast before”, but the emphasis is on “possible”; just because The Young Ones took it from a stock library, its ultimate origin may still have been from a broadcast programme. My only point is that it’s not guaranteed to have done so. And the “K” prefix for the dripping tap material is still up for debate.

I might figure this out in 30 years, you know.

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smashie and nicey, the young ones

The Dave Nice Video Show, Part Four: “Lovely Bouncy Bristols”

Published 15th June 2024

TV Comedy

Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four • Part Five • Part Six • Part Seven

There comes a time in every project like this where you run into a problem. There’s always some damn piece of the puzzle which you can’t quite put together. The bit which makes you question why you even bothered writing this nonsense in the first place, when you could do something relaxing like snowboarding. Or BASE jumping.

With End of an Era, the sticking point isn’t really surprising, if you give it more than a moment’s consideration. It’s the section featuring the handover between Smashie and Nicey, in the early days of Radio Fab:

This sequence contains 22 intermingled stock footage shots, from no less than four different sources. Two of those sources are easily identified. The other two are not. Frankly, the whole thing has been driving me slightly loopy.

No matter. Let’s start with what we know first.

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