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The Spelling Machine

Published 22nd June 2020

Other TV

Earlier this year, I wrote about how I traced down an early childhood TV memory. It seems to be quite the year for it, because blow me down, somebody’s helped me track down another one. And today’s story involves a certain Paul Daniels.

Not his famous Halloween stunt from 1987, which I have precisely zero memory of, and almost certainly never saw. (That’s the kind of thing which makes you feel cheated of a really good TV memory. Luckily, I fully remember Ghostwatch, five years later.) No, my memory of Paul Daniels is rather more low-key.

Although, like many of my early TV memories, it involves an explosion.

*   *   *

It’s around 1990, and I’m about nine years old. Could be a couple of years earlier or later. Paul Daniels is doing a card trick on the telly, as he is wont to do. But this is a slightly unusual card trick. Some kind of strange machine is spitting out cards at Paul. What is he doing – guessing which cards will come out? I can’t quite remember.

But something wrong. The machine keeps spitting out cards faster and faster. Paul is concerned, and tries to stop it. But it’s to no avail. The machine explodes, leaving Paul with a cartoon-like blackened face. He looks straight to camera, with a look of resignation, and throws the remaining cards away. End of routine.

I’m intrigued… and mildly disturbed. Electric things going wrong are already a slight fascination with me. I remember nothing of the rest of the show, but this one moment is seared into my memory. And I never saw it again.

*   *   *

Well, until now.

This is one of those memories where I made a few half-hearted searches over the years, but never made any serious effort. (There is a lot of Paul Daniels on YouTube.) I occasionally mentioned it, but had kind of resigned myself to never seeing it again.

Until I idly mentioned all this on Twitter… and hello, Timothy Roger Talbot came up with the goods. Here it is, from the very opening of the episode:

There are clearly many things I didn’t remember, or remembered wrongly – I’d even forgotten about the fundamental conceit of a “spelling machine”. But it came flooding back as soon as I watched it; this is definitely the programme in question. I got a Proustian rush when the cards came flying manically out of the machine, and when Daniels blows the flames out; images I couldn’t quite dredge from my head until now, but were clearly buried deep within my skull.

As for the routine itself, I’m the world’s worst person at figuring out magic tricks. From my exceedingly untrained eye, presumably the following is happening:

  • The cards Paul puts in the machine at the top are nothing to do with the rest of the trick, and are never seen again.
  • The dial at the front is pure misdirection, and also does nothing.
  • The pure power of suggestion gets the required words out of the audience member. The obvious rhyme for bow is “cow”, and the obvious rhyme for mouse is “house”.

It’s a fun piece of television, and certainly the kind of thing you don’t get much of on BBC One any more, unfortunately. Though let me extremely clear: the reason this particular routine stuck in my head is because it was something electrical which exploded, which I found faintly unnerving.

So, the final question: when exactly was this broadcast, and how old was I? The video says the show is from 1988, and luckily, BBC Genome made it very easy to track down the exact episode, as luckily it specifically mentions the spelling machine. Unfortunately, The Paul Daniels Show routinely got a repeat on BBC2 – which is, incidentally, where the video above comes from. So I either saw it on its original BBC1 showing on the 30th January 1988, or the BBC2 repeat on the 11th August 1988. Both these showings are earlier than I thought; I would have been aged 6 on the first showing, and 7 on the repeat. I’m slightly amazed that the memory still lingers.

I’m not going to end this post with “now that’s magic”, because I simply have too much respect for you.

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“You’re in my way.”

Published 21st June 2020

Meta / TV Drama

Thanks to The Hollywood Reporter, for reminding me that back on the 18th June, it was the 30th anniversary of the Next Generation episode “The Best of Both Worlds”.

“From 1987 to 1989, the voyages of Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D struggled to be anything more than a passable background watch in its creatively-turbulent first and second seasons. (Season two’s “The Measure of a Man” and “Q Who?” being the lone must-watch exceptions.)”

I mean, everyone’s allowed an opinion, even if it is one of the most tedious Trek opinions I’ve seen for quite a while. I’m just going to vaguely point in the direction of “The Big Goodbye”, “11001001”, “Heart of Glory”, “Elementary Dear Data”, “A Matter of Honour”, and “The Emissary”, and fold my arms in annoyance.

“The episode also doesn’t get much credit for how satisfying it wraps up that storyline for Riker. By radically accepting that an extra rank pip on his collar doesn’t determine his status or worth, Riker makes the very emotionally-honest realization that lets him have an arc even though he’s staying put on the Enterprise bridge. (Piller’s script argues that one doesn’t need to move on or change jobs to evolve personally within their profession. Ironically, Piller would stay on the series as well, before leaving to help oversee Star Trek spinoffs Deep Space Nine and Voyager. The former wouldn’t exist without the storyline established by “Best of Both Worlds”, either.)”

How is that ironic? It’s literally the exact opposite. It would be ironic if Piller had written about how you can evolve personally within the same role, and then left the series anyway, but he didn’t.

OK, whatever, I’m bored with picking apart this article. The reason why I’m pleased to be reminded of this little anniversary is because it lets me be massively self-indulgent, yet again. Back in 2018, I wrote a little piece on here called “6 Times Your Favourite TV Shows Jumped the Shark”. A pisstake of clickbait journalism and the entire concept of jumping the shark itself, I have to admit it’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever written.

It was, however, not originally “6 Times”. In the first draft, it was 10. I’m sure you can already hear the joke wearing thin from here; halfway through the article, the idea just died. So acting on advice from someone used to script-editing comedy or something, I kicked four of the sections out the door. Those excised sections were on Blackadder II (“Bells”), Frasier (“The Ski Lodge”), Happy Days (Season 3, when they changed the theme tune), and… Star Trek: The Next Generation. Guess the episode?

And while the article was fifty times better with these sections deleted, I always had a soft spot for that last little section. My favourite parts of the article were the bits where I was teetering on the line between a bad-faith argument, and something that might be, sort of, valid. I think the below definitely manages that.

So, on the 30th anniversary of that famous episode, here’s a deleted scene from an old Dirty Feed article. I told you it was self-indulgent.

*   *   *

Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Best of Both Worlds

Locutus of Borg

The third season of TNG is often seen as the moment where the show really came into its own. And it’s true: once Michael Piller came on board, the show took enormous strides in almost every single area. Showpiece episodes like Yesterday’s Enterprise and Sins of the Father are the best remembered, but I’m especially fond of shows like The Offspring – quiet, character-based shows that are the lifeblood of the series.

And then, at the end of the season, the show blows it all away.

It’s difficult to count the number of things the Borgfest Best of Both Worlds gets wrong. There’s Borg expert Lieutenant Commander Shelby, forced into the show purely so Riker can worry about his career. Written by Piller, this pathetically reflected his own worries about whether to move on from the show or stay for a fourth season; possibly the most indulgent thing ever written for the whole of Star Trek. This perhaps wouldn’t matter so much if it worked in-universe, but the whole point of TNG was to show that Starfleet officers had moved beyond petty conflict. The famous “You’re in my way” speech is a betrayal of everything Gene Roddenberry stood for.

But I could deal with that, if the resulting show was entertaining. Sadly, it isn’t. The reason Q Who was so scary is that the Borg acted as one hive mind: relentless, unstoppable. To have Picard assimilated, and act as a Queen Bee figure for our crew to talk to kills off everything which is unique about the Borg. It reduces them to stock villans, indistinguishable from the Romulans except for a few tubes sticking out here and there. You can betray Roddenberry’s future, or destroy a great villain: but in doing both, the series doomed itself.

Season 4 started with a perfunctory resolution to the absurd cliffhanger, and then followed it up with the ludicrously self-indulgent Family, a show with no science fiction elements whatsoever, and thus not even remotely within TNG’s remit. I stopped watching, and I can’t imagine I was alone.

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Strange Things Which Have Happened to Me on the Internet Part #23898372

Published 20th June 2020

Internet

Right now, I’m vaguely thinking of the next redesign of Dirty Feed. (I always get antsy after three years or so.) Don’t expect it until at least 2021; I’m the kind of arsehole who has to start from scratch, rather than using an existing theme. This kind of control freakery is very useful when directing television channels, and very not useful when trying to get anything else achieved.

But all this got me thinking of something very weird which happened to me, well over a decade now. None of this is still online; we have to rely on the Wayback Machine for this one.

Firstly, here’s Red Dwarf fansite Ganymede & Titan from 2007, which I designed:

Ganymede and Titan design from 2007

And here’s somebody’s personal website from 2007, which I had absolutely nothing to do with:

filecore.net design from 2007, looking pretty much identical

There’s just some kind of link here that I can’t quite put my finger on. And just in case you think this might just be some kind of bizarre coincidence, a quick poke around Kayak the Planet reveals a reference to http://www.filecore.net/css/gandt.css. Very good, well done.

So whatever, my site design was ripped off, by someone best described as a “forum acquaintance”. That’s far from unusual. I didn’t even really care that much; the design was good enough for what it was, but far from my finest work. It’s certainly not worth bleating about 13 years after the fact.

Except for one other thing.

Scroll down on Kayak the Planet, to the About Me section, and you get the following:

About me
The space for the megalomania to emerge.

Late-twenties. Geek. Grey eyes. Dark hair. Bad skin. No glasses. No fashion sense. But passionate about kayaking and the interweb. Speaks fluent English, passable Finnish and atrocious German.

Oh, recently married too. Can now be considered as owning flat and wife. No car. Excellent public transport except on the way home.

I recently decided to set up my own company to try and make my living as a full-time freelance proofreader and editor. At some point I might even achieve this goal. Until then, I’m mainly just sitting around wanking.

Now, let’s take a trip to ofla.info in 2007 – nothing to do with Ganymede & Titan, but my own personal site from the time:

About me

25. Geek. Brown eyes. Brown hair. Bad skin. Glasses. No fashion sense. But passionate about good telly and the interweb.

I recently left my job at makro in order to try and make my living as a full-time freelance web designer. At some point I might even achieve this goal. Until then, I’m mainly just sitting around wanking.

So this guy not only ripped off my website design for G&T. He then went to my own, entirely separate personal site, and ripped off my “about me” section. My personal description of myself: cut, pasted, and lightly adapted. Wanking gag and all.

Brrrrrrrr.

The Young Ones Music Guide: Series One

Published 16th June 2020

Music / TV Comedy

Madness on the set of The Young Ones

STANDARD YOUNG ONES MUSIC FACT™: Did you know that the reason there’s a band performing in nearly every episode of The Young Ones is so the programme could claim to be a variety show instead of a sitcom, and get a higher budget?

Yes, I did. Right, now that’s out of the way, let’s move on, shall we?

While working on a different project recently, I found myself in need of a complete list of music used in The Young Ones. Sadly, nobody had already written this. After some research, it soon became clear why nobody had already written this.1 Of all the things I’ve done for this site, this has been one of the most difficult and complicated. The Young Ones has a lot of music in it, and a fair amount of it is obscure, sometimes absurdly so.

Not that I was starting entirely from scratch; I do own a copy of the official paperwork listing the music used in each episode. While this was of enormous help, the paperwork is also incomplete, and occasionally incorrect. Luckily, with a combination of that, my own ears, and an army of helpful people on Twitter, I’ve been able to identify the vast majority of the tracks used in the show. This includes chart music, library tracks, and specially written material by Peter Brewis.

There are a still few instances where I’ve unfortunately drawn a blank. These missing tracks are listed like this, along with an audio clip. So if anybody can identify any of these pieces, let me know in the comments, or drop me a line elsewhere. I will love you forever.

Let’s get going. This article covers Series 1; Series 2 will be dealt with separately, because I feel a responsibility not to over-excite you.

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  1. No, Wikipedia, a list of band performances in each episode does not count. ↩

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A Short Tale from Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Published 1st June 2020

Videogames

Last night, I was bumbling around on Animal Crossing, as usual. Just doing a little night-time fishing, you know the drill. The clock strikes midnight. Well, actually, the clock played the NBC chimes at midnight, because I am a twat.

Immediately, I see something glowing in the distance. Hang on, what’s going on? I grab my net, and swing.

Catching a firefly

Oh. That’s weird, I’ve never seen them before.1 And suddenly, they’re everywhere. From no fireflies, to being surrounded by them.

A light goes off in my head. Let’s check Critterpedia…

Firefly on Critterpedia

Sure enough, you can only catch them in June. And because we’re now past midnight, and technically it’s June 1st, that immediately means they spring up out of nowhere, ready to catch.

Which I think is… not a great way to go about things.

I mean, look. I’m not a complete imbecile. I get how computers work. But this is surely waaaaaay too artificial. For an insect which is only available in June to suddenly appear seconds after it’s technically June is just weird, and brings me out of the reality of the game entirely. If I can see the numbers crunching in your simulated world, the chances are you should have done a better job at hiding them.

So, let’s pop over to Blathers to donate this specimen. Hello Blathers, look what your programmers have given me. Programmers who I am unaccountably thinking about for some reason, despite the fact I shouldn’t be. What’s the point of giving Blathers amusing character dialogue to make him feel real, if I keep picturing date algorithms in my head?

My solution? An easy way to disguise it would simply be for the fireflies to appear in the evening on the 1st June, 19 hours later, rather than immediately past midnight. Just treat midnight to 5am as an extension of May. That way, the fireflies aren’t going to suddenly appear in the middle of the night while you’re playing; they’ll appear naturally during the evening instead. And surely Animal Crossing should be doing its best to appear natural, rather than just a bunch of numbers throwing insects at you.

Still, never mind. Let’s relax with some fishing. Hmmm, not seen that fish before…

Catching a hammerhead shark

Oh fuck off.

  1. In New Horizons. Yes, I remember them from previous Animal Crossing games. ↩

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A Few Musings About the Young Ones Pilot

Published 26th May 2020

TV Comedy

Right now, I’m working on a piece for Dirty Feed which might be deemed Actually Useful™ – at least, for certain definitions of the word “useful”. A complete guide to every single piece of music heard in The Young Ones, right down to the most obscure library tracks which aren’t even mentioned in the paperwork.

But there’s something bugging me about the music used at the start of the very first episode, Demolition. Something deeply obscure, even for someone writing, say, a complete guide to every piece of music heard in The Young Ones. So rather than derailing that particular piece right at the beginning, let’s get all this nonsense out the way now.

Demolition, as I’m sure most people reading this will know, wasn’t just the first episode of The Young Ones. It was a pilot, in the true sense of the word – shot months before the rest of the series, in the hope of getting a commission. But the version which was finally broadcast in late 1982 isn’t the original edit of that pilot. A moment’s thought proves that it couldn’t be – the episode as we know it contains the regular title sequence for the series, which includes clips from episodes which simply hadn’t been made yet. I’ve been wondering what the original opening titles were for Demolition for nearly 20 years now.

Perhaps there is an echo of them left in the episode as transmitted, however. An echo that was staring me in the face for years, but I never even noticed until it was pointed out to me. The title card for the episode is highly unusual; nothing else like it appears anywhere else in the series. The gang, mildly awkwardly pasted into the windows of the original house:

Demolition title card

It looks like part of a title sequence, but it’s difficult to imagine this was created anew for the final broadcast version; it sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the episodes. Whether the entire pilot title sequence was just that shot with music over it as a placeholder, or something far more involved, is the kind of question which keeps me up at night.

We do have one other piece of information about that original pilot edit. A certain Peter Brewis used to have an unused version of the theme on his website, as originally used in the pilot. Sadly, his website has long since been deleted, but luckily someonee kept a copy and uploaded it to YouTube. And it’s fucking brilliant. (Visuals mocked up by the uploader, of course.)

I mean, who knows how it would have worked in the episodes as broadcast – it’s bloody long – but it’s lovely to hear for its own sake.

Which leads us – finally – to the oddity. Listen closely to the start of Demolition, as the strains of the broadcast title music start skipping, and then fade away:

[mejsaudio src=”https://dirtyfeed.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/s1e1-opening.wav” volume=”false”]

The Young Ones, Demolition Opening

Nine seconds into that clip, just before the DJ starts speaking, there’s a snatch of a different version of the title music. It doesn’t sound like the broadcast version. It doesn’t sound like Cliff’s original version. It doesn’t even sound like the pilot version, as heard in the video above.

So… presumably, there was yet another version of the song, used for the original opening titles of Demolition? And once the opening title music was changed for the series, the new version was just pasted over the top… leaving that tiny fraction of the original version from the first pilot edit, to confuse us all decades later. Why else would it be there?

Yes, I am keeping myself busy during lockdown, why do you ask?

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“Feeling Poorly Again, Are You?”

Published 2nd May 2020

Life / TV Comedy

My dad died when I was 13. Which is a rotten age to lose your dad.

Not that there is any brilliant time, of course. If he’d died when I was 18, I’d say it screwed me up for university.1 If he’d died when I was two, I’d be upset I never got to know him at all. Still, at 13, I was just starting to have the occasional adult conversation with him. There was the vague sense of the beginning of the relationship we could have had, where I really got to know him. To have him snatched away right on the cusp of that moment makes the sense of loss all the more terrible.

And over the years, I’ve learnt that one of those things we really could have connected over was comedy. I have flashes of my dad’s love for it. There’s the time when I crept downstairs well past midnight, and found him watching Carry On Again Doctor. There was the revelation I learnt from my mother recently that he loved Python. (Being as technical as he was, would have adored the Blu-ray.) And then there was making Hitchhiker’s references in official documentation he wrote for the Medical Research Council:

But one moment stays with me more than any other. And on my recent full rewatch of Bottom, it came flooding back. Specifically: the episode Digger.

*   *   *

I distinctly remember sitting with my dad in the living room. I didn’t watch the whole episode, I don’t think. I just remember the last scene, with Richie and Eddie sitting in the ambulance, Richie having nearly died in his latest attempt to actually have sex with a lady. My dad turns to me, a grin on his face.

“Watch this.”

I watched, as Eddie reveals to Richie that he ended up having sex with the Viscountess2 instead. Richie takes this about as well as you would expect, and asks Eddie to hand him the defibrillator.

Richie electrocuting Eddie

My dad chortles away. I also laugh, but not just because of what was on the telly. I just liked that my dad had let me in on what felt like an adult joke.

*   *   *

Because this is me, I feel the need to track down the date of the above event. We definitely weren’t watching it on commercial video – for a start, Series 2 was released on VHS in 1995, the year after my dad died. I can’t guarantee he hadn’t recorded the original broadcast of the episode to watch later, but unlike me, I don’t think he watched the same things over and over again, so it seems unlikely that he would have kept it. And we obviously weren’t watching the original broadcast on the 1st October 1992; otherwise, how could he have known what was going to happen?

So a bit of work with Genome reveals that the day this happened was almost certainly Friday 5th November 1993, which is the very first repeat of the episode. I think my dad remembered that moment for a whole year, and on a whim decided to share it with me.3 A moment of extreme violence about sexual frustration. I was 12.

He died less than a year later. And the stuff I missed out on still makes me sad, nearly three decades on. A sense of a lost part of my adolescence, when I could have discovered comedy with him. Instead, I had to do it by myself. And whenever I watch that scene, it hits me all over again.

As though Bottom wasn’t melancholy enough.

  1. Luckily, I managed to do that all by myself. ↩

  2. Lady Natasha Letitia Sarah Jane Wellesley Obstromsky Ponsonsky Smythe Smythe Smythe Smythe Smythe Oblomov Boblomov Dob, third Viscountess of Moldavia, to be precise. ↩

  3. One other thing strikes me about all this, years down the line. My dad was born in 1928; that makes him 65 when we were watching this episode. That is… outside the target age range for a show like Bottom. The show is often compared to Hancock’s Half Hour; my dad almost certainly watched both of them when they were first broadcast. Which shows a certain omnivorous taste for comedy that is deeply pleasing to me. ↩

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One Foot in the Edit Suite

Published 27th April 2020

TV Comedy

I had a dream for Dirty Feed, you know. A dream to document every single edit made to pre-watershed showings of One Foot in the Grave on the UKTV network: specifically, Gold, Drama, and Yesterday. OK, it’s not a dream many people have, I admit. But it was mine. They’d been bugging me for bloody years.

So in 2018, I saw that Series 1 was coming up for yet another repeat run, and took my chance. And sure enough, the first two series were broadcast in quick succession. I patiently waited for Series 3. And waited. And waited. And waited. It never seemed to appear. Nor did the 1990 Christmas Special, Who’s Listening? Series 5 came up, bizarrely, and I diligently recorded it. But Series 3 and 4 never appeared.

Well, it’s two years later, and I’m bored of waiting for them. Moreover, my Series 5 recordings got lost when my Sky+ box decided to break just as the country went into lockdown.1 So instead of this sitting on my WordPress backend any longer, here’s what UKTV had edited out of the first two series of the show, as broadcast pre-watershed in 2018. If they ever get round to showing the rest of the episodes again, rather than The Green Green Grass on endless repeat for some reason, I’ll finish this little project.

Cut dialogue is indicated like this. Let’s get going.

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  1. Fucking piece of crap. ↩

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Duncan’s Still Stuck in the 80s

Published 20th April 2020

Radio

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:

Soapy Tits

Published 13th April 2020

Other TV

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?

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