Last year, my pal Duncan Newmarch was Stuck in the 80s. Guess what? He’s still there. What trouble is he causing this time?
You’ll have to listen to find out, but I will reveal that it ends with a car chase.
People in the UK may wish to peruse this little refresher on New York radio station Z-100 before listening:
I’ve written before about vivid TV memories of mine that nobody else seems to remember. Here’s another one.
It’s The Big Breakfast, during the Rick Adams era. So this must have been in ’96 or ’97, when I was aged 15 or 16. (This is important for reasons which will soon become apparent.) It’s coming up to the end of the news, and the silly “and finally” item. What will we get? A duck on a skateboard? A dog on a skateboard? Any kind of animal on a skateboard, in fact?
Erm, no. My eyes widen, as we cut to footage of… a topless car wash. The details escape me. But it’s a car wash, and the girls are topless. Soapy boobs and everything. If I recall, they were pressed up against the windows at one point, as we looked on from inside the car. But one thing was for sure: this really, really shouldn’t be being broadcast at this time of morning while kids are watching. This wasn’t the non-sexual nudity you occasionally got on Holiday. This was rude.
Rick Adams confirms my thoughts. As we cut back to the house, he’s standing in front of the television on which the newsreader appears, trying to block it from view. “It’s a family flippin’ show!”, he screeches. I blink, unable to quite comprehend what I’ve just seen. I’m 15 or so, and have just seen unexpected boobies. OK, so it’s not exactly how I’d choose to see unexpected boobies when I was 15, but I’d take what I could get.
And like that, it was over. I didn’t record it. And nobody I’ve ever mentioned it to remembers this thrilling piece of television. But I definitely, definitely didn’t imagine it. There were boobs. Definitely actual naked boobs. There were no bikinis, I promise.
Which leaves me wondering… just how did that item get approved for broadcast? Was it someone’s last day at ITN?
After nearly four decades, what is there new to say about the pilot of Cheers – widely regarded as one of the best television pilots ever made?
We can tick through the Standard Series Facts™ pretty quickly. Sam Malone was originally going to be an NFL player, until Ted Danson was cast. John Ratzenberger originally auditioned for the part of Norm. Before they decided on a bar in Boston, the initial idea was for a show set in a hotel. And you probably know what George Wendt is actually drinking at the bar, right?
If we dig a little deeper, however, we come across the strange tale of Mrs. Littlefield. A character scripted, cast, and shot for the pilot… but cut before air. Well, mostly cut, anyway.
Let’s find out a little about her from Sam Simon, writer and producer on Cheers1:
“There was another regular that was cut out of the pilot, did you know that? Boston is a very racist town, and there was an old woman in a wheelchair, whose name I don’t remember. I think you can see her in the pilot, in the first episode, I should say, because it wasn’t a pilot.2 They wanted to do the reality of Boston a little bit, and the racism of the town is certainly a valid topic for comment.”
Sam Simon, Television Academy Interview (49:24 – 50:05)
Then there’s this reader question on Ken Levine’s blog, another writer and producer on Cheers3:
“In Sam Simon’s amazing Emmy TV Legends interview, he talks about a character that was cut out of the Cheers pilot: A racist woman in a wheelchair. She was supposed to be a regular character, but apparently the Charles Bros/Burrows agreed that her harshness didn’t gel with the rest of the show.
Do you know anything about this?
Yes. The character was named Mrs. Littlefield. She was an opinionated old broad from the D.A.R.4 She was in the pilot and the decision to drop the character was made after it was filmed. Politics just didn’t fit with the mix. So they cut out her part, but there are a few shots here and there where she is still in the background. Just look for a sweet white-haired little old lady who used to have lines.
Since several back-up scripts were in the works before the pilot was filmed, we also had to go back and write her out of those episodes as well.
Again, it was a case of an actor being let go not because they gave a bad performance or did anything wrong. It’s just that the character didn’t mesh with the others.”
Ken Levine, Friday Questions (3rd January 2014)
Sure enough, if we go looking for her, we can indeed see Mrs. Littlefield in her wheelchair throughout the pilot:
All of which is fascinating. But what nobody has done – at least as far as I can tell – is examine the original script of the pilot, and written about what Mrs. Littlefield actually said. But surely that script wouldn’t be readily available online…
Oh, hello. Final Draft, dated 16th April 1982. And it contains all of Mrs. Littlefield’s dialogue, every single line of which was edited out of the final episode.
Let’s take a look, shall we?
Among a million and one other things ↩
You may note that I’m ignoring Sam Simon here, and refer to the first episode as the pilot throughout this article. I don’t know exactly why he doesn’t class it as a pilot; the episode was shot a few months before the rest of Season 1, as detailed here. Many other people who worked on the show refer to it as the pilot, so I’m going to follow their lead. ↩
Among two million and one other things. ↩
For a sitcom, Blackadder Goes Forth has inspired a great deal of scholarly debate over the years. In particular, the series’ portrayal of Field Marshal Haig as a callous murderer has become massively controversial. Is this simply devastatingly effective and truthful satire, or a fundamental misrepresentation of history which everyone has taken as fact?
It’s certainly an interesting question. So in true Dirty Feed spirit, let’s ignore all of that and investigate the show’s set design in painstaking and pointless detail instead.
One specific set, in fact. Because in my recent rewatch of the show, a few things struck me about Melchett’s office, back at British HQ. I am now going to share my findings with you, because you are special and you deserve it.
So let’s take a trip through each episode – in order of recording date, rather than broadcast.
I’ll tell you one thing. There’s something about having scarring from my lungs from a severe case of pneumonia three years ago that – for some reason – makes me very, very, very keen to stay at home at the moment.
Which means I have to find something to do. And as preparation for a house move happening at some point in the next century, I have a load of boxes which need condensing down and packing up. And in these boxes are a huge variety of artefacts stretching right back to my schooldays.
Including rather too many magazines I created in my youth.
So, while other people are creating amazing pieces of art to keep us all entertained during a crisis, I’m taking photos of some of my old shit and putting them on Twitter. If this sounds like something you might be interested in, here is a list of all my daily threads. I’ll keep adding links to this post each day.
Now, if this doesn’t help us all get through this crisis, what will?
Whenever I watch Look Around You, I’m almost more amazed by the music than anything else.
Don’t get me wrong. The idea that I could write anything like Look Around You is thoroughly ridiculous. But I at least feel I understand it, and a little of how it works. Gelg’s musical talent is magical and mysterious to me. My brain can’t even begin to comprehend it.
Sadly, despite the odd suggestion from Serafinowicz over the years, there has never been a Look Around You album released. (You’d think Warp would have been an obvious home.) But that doesn’t mean that – scattered across the internet – there aren’t ways of hearing lovely, clean, extended versions of some of Gelg’s finest.
So in lieu of that album – which I still hope will happen at some point – let’s see what we can scrape together.
Today, we’re going to go down a particularly odd rabbit hole, even for this site. On the plus side: here is a 15 year old mystery, definitively solved.
So let us take a trip to my favourite comedy of the 2000s, Look Around You. Specifically, the DVD commentary on the first episode of Series 2, Music. But hey, Peter Serafinowicz, was Music really meant to be your first episode?
SERAFINOWICZ: This wasn’t meant to be our first episode, was it?
POPPER: No, and a lot of people on the net sussed that as well, didn’t they?
SERAFINOWICZ: Yeah. I don’t know, we…
POPPER: We were going to start with Sport.
SERAFINOWICZ: We were going to start with Sport, but… yeah, we changed it, didn’t we? Maybe it was a bit of a mistake to start with this one, cos it’s such a different one…
POPPER: I wonder if we should have started with the next one, Health. Medibot.1
SERAFINOWICZ: Yeah, probably.
Discussion about transmission orders is like catnip to me. I am the person who wrote this particular monstrosity, after all. And personally speaking, I think Serafinowicz is correct here. I love Music, but – Live Final aside – it’s definitely the most format-breaking of the episodes. It feels weird to break your format when you haven’t even established it yet.2
MED-I-BOT! ↩
Having Sport go out first would also make sense for another reason – it contains the “Thanks ants / Thants” joke. That version of the joke going out in the third episode always felt a bit strange, being a straightforward replication of the famous Series 1 moment – the show had already moved past it. ↩
Roses are red
Violets sprout
OK, stand by
Opt out, opt out
What memories do you have watching TV as a kid, of programmes that you’ve never managed to track down since?
I wrote about one of mine last year, but I have so many others. One particularly vivid one is Trev and Simon on Going Live!, and their feature “The Bottomless Bin”. As I recall, it was essentially Trev and Simon dicking around with a wheelie bin, and pulling unpleasant stuff out of it. One fateful week, they tried to go on an expedition to find the actual bottom of The Bottomless Bin… so they lowered a camera down into it. Cue the TV picture breaking up, the Going Live! breakdown slide being cut to air, audio of chaos in the studio… and one very confused me, sitting in front of the television, trying to figure out whether the show had actually fallen off air or not.
Come to think of it, maybe The Bottomless Bin is responsible for my career working in TV presentation. If any of you have a recording of this sketch, I will love you forever if you send me a copy. These memories tend to be so much more satisfying when you actually track down what the hell it is you actually watched.1
However, I do have a tale of a distant television memory which I did manage to figure out. Let me share it with you.
My favourite ever example of this is podcast Jaffa Cakes for Proust finally finding out about the comedy show Nuts, which is a tale of intrigue that I can never hope to match. ↩
I try to keep housekeeping posts at a minimum here on Dirty Feed, but I feel the need to mark this one, as I’ve written a lot about it in the past. As of the 25th January, I’m no longer part of Ganymede & Titan. I know, I know, I don’t know why the media aren’t parked out on my doorstep either.
This has a few implications for Dirty Feed. Firstly and most immediately, I can suddenly spend rather more time working on silly articles for this place, which is a positive thing. More on that shortly.
Secondly, over the next few months, a few selected articles I wrote over on Ganymede & Titan might be republished here, slightly rewritten and improved. Don’t worry, there won’t be a deluge of reheated Dwarf nonsense – there would be no point moving the site’s bread-and-butter posts over to here. But some of the better stuff probably deserves a new home somewhere under my control. And I’d like the opportunity to improve a few of them too.
Thirdly, it would be complete madness for me to leave G&T, and then immediately start writing brand new Dwarf stuff over here. But once I’ve had a year or so’s break from that kind of thing, there are a few things about old Red Dwarf that I’d like to finish off here. In particular, my series of articles looking at the show’s sets has been abandoned halfway through; I’d like to bring that to some kind of conclusion. So for those of you who enjoy my Red Dwarf writing, it’s not disappearing entirely. It is going into hibernation for a bit, though.
Fourthly, I am definitely going to write something about Come Back Mrs Noah, purely to be annoying.