I’ve been uploading things to YouTube for a few years now. Hardly a heavy user, mind you, and I was never eagerly chasing views: it was mainly just a place to store small bits of video easily that I didn’t especially want to pay the hosting costs for.
This was was the case tonight, where I had recorded a fun bit of video I wanted to share with the world. So I go to the YouTube upload page, and was greeted with this. Pay special attention to the right-hand column:
Yesterday, I bought the domain name for my upcoming internet radio show: 80track.fm. There’s only a holding page there at the moment, though TV pres geeks should recognise the font used for the logo. (For more, check out this post by Dave Jeffery.) There will be plenty of time for more about the actual show, however – let’s talk about simply buying the actual domain itself.
As it’s a radio show, I decided to go for a .fm domain; domain hacks make me feel a bit dirty, but I just couldn’t resist it. My usual domain registrar doesn’t deal with .fm domains, so I decided to go with the official domain registrar. OK, so the website looks like it was designed in 1485, but no matter. So I got to work filling in all my details, and was told my fax number was required. I got a vaguely amusing Tumblr post out of this, typed in “none” in the Fax field, filled in the rest, and awaited a confirmation email. Ah look, there we go…
I often ponder what my ideal job would be. Perhaps it would be working in TX for BBC One in the 90s, at TV Centre. Or working in BBC VT in the 80s, at TV Centre. Or being a BBC cameraman in the 70s, at TV Centre.
You may have spotted a subtle link between all those jobs. Sadly, I will never enter TV Centre – as it stands now, anyway – as a professional rather than a telly nerd. So a telly nerd I remained, as I walked into the reception of TV Centre in January, to take part in one of the last BBC Tours of the building. I won’t try to detail everything that went on in the tour, but I thought a few observations may be of interest.
This may be the most pointless thing I have ever done. But also one of the most enjoyable. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the final image of each episode of The Brittas Empire, or: Chris Barrie teaching the world how to pull silly faces. Image-heavy page under the cut.
Every so often, a DVD release gives you a lovely surprise. Sometimes, that surprise may be quickly skipped, with most people not even noticing it.
Take, for instance, Blackadder II – and specifically, the opening title music:
Delightfully, the DVD menu of The Complete Blackadder has a clean, extended version used for the main menu of the Blackadder II disc, giving you a good 15 seconds or so extra. Anyone want to have a listen? Of course you do.
Download Blackadder II: Extended Theme (1.7MB MP3, 0:52)
AWESOME EXTRA ELECTRIC GUITAR NONSENSE. Somebody, somewhere, went to the effort of tracking down Howard Goodall’s original recording, rather than just lazily ripping it from one of the episodes. Whoever you are: I love you.
(Incidentally, the Blackadder Remastered boxset does not have the extended version of the theme – just a slightly awkward looped version, with sound effects clearly indicating it was ripped from the episode Beer. One of many, many sloppy things about that boxset, but don’t get me started on that one.)
So, my question: anyone got any other examples of extended versions of music only showing up in the DVD menus of film or television releases?
Robert’s Web. Safely one of the worst television programmes I have ever seen. Not that that’s my main point here, but I’ll take any chance I can get to slag off that wretched show. No, my point here is to do with the show’s Twitter account.
Let’s ignore the fact that the last tweet there is advertising the third show of the series, despite there being four episodes – a sure sign the team had given up by the last one. More importantly: there’s no goodbye message. No “thanks for watching, hope you enjoyed it”. Nowt. Zilch. Abandoned. Production office wound up, nobody there to even tweet a farewell.
Which altogether gives the impression that the account meant nothing to the makers of the show than what they could get out of it. Nobody could spare a minute to even pretend they gave a fuck, and post a goodbye. There is little more transparent than an account just abandoned like that. They never really engaged; it was all a front to try and whip up interest, then abandoned when the show failed.
In comparison, when the online game Glitch had to wind up, their Twitter feed was full of updates, proper goodbyes and fun stuff. The absolute right way to go about ending a project. Engaging with your audience to the last, not running away with your tail between your legs. It was obvious that the people running that site cared about their audience.
It’s not a hard and fast rule, obviously. I’ve seen excellent Twitter accounts run by TV people, and I’ve seen awful ones run by web companies. But it happens enough to spot a pattern, and it’s not a pleasant one when it comes to television shows.
Which makes me sad. Telly can benefit hugely from social media, done right. Done wrong, it exposes some rather uncomfortable truths.
I have posted this on Twitter. I have posted this on Tumblr. But I will not rest until I have forced as many people as possible to watch this.
Stay right to the very end for the best bit.
As regular readers of this site will know, I have lots of little obsessions – and one of the more obscure ones is the leaflets that used to be handed out to the audience at sitcom recordings. I’ve already detailed such little leaflets for episodes of The Brittas Empire and Every Silver Lining, but sadly these just doesn’t seem to be made any more – I have certainly never been given any since I started attending audience recordings in 1999.
Up until last year, that is. Imagine my delight when I went to see the first episode of the new Yes, Prime Minister series recorded, and a good old-fashioned leaflet was waiting on each audience member’s chair. Whether this was a holdover from the series’s roots as a stage production, or simply because Gareth Gwenlan and Jonathan Lynn like doing things the old way, it was a lovely little souvenir to take home to remember the recording.
Anyone care for a scan?
Lovely stuff. I wish every sitcom recording still did this. I’m still on the lookout for more of these, by the way – if you have any hidden away in drawers, why not hunt them out and scan them in?
I take great – if possibly misguided – pride in being pretty much the same person now as I always was. Me when I was nine and when I’m 31 are rather too close to being the same person. When people tell me they used to love certain TV shows and then grew out of them, it always puzzles me – with the odd exception, if I loved a show when I was younger, I still love it now. Sure, my tastes have widened since I was younger – I used to dislike Press Gang for fuck’s sake – but very, very rarely have they shrunk. I’m the same person – why would I suddenly decide I disliked something?
Yet, there is one exception to recognising myself as the same person, one piece of history which I look back on with absolute horror: my old blog, which I ran around 2004-2005. It makes bizarre reading now in one sense, in that a lot of what I say is ideally suited these days to Twitter but feels a bit batshit insane on a blog – but hey, it’s still recognisably the same person.
Then, occasionally, there are posts like this one. Yes, that would be me giving personal details about exactly how badly my job was going on the internet, to anyone who cared to drop by, almost LIVE AS IT HAPPENED. There are a few more if you root round for long enough.
Now, I happen to utterly love my current job – and I’m far enough removed from my life working at makro not to worry about linking to that piece now. But even if I didn’t love my job, I wouldn’t even vaguely contemplate complaining about it on the internet these days. What the hell was I thinking? Why, in the name of holy fuck did I think that that was a good idea in any way whatsoever? Did I think the internet was my own little private place where nobody but me and a few close friends hung out?
Reading this stuff makes me feel completely distanced to myself. I just don’t recognise the mindset that made me put that kind of thing online. For someone who still makes the same excited noises as they did when they were nine, it’s an incredibly odd feeling.
It is a truism that fandom has hugely changed over the last twenty years. My favourite example of this is Red Dwarf Series 1: it was only released on VHS in 1993, five years after broadcast. Before then, it was only passed around as grotty nth-generation off-airs. Meanwhile, Red Dwarf X was released on DVD a week-and-a-half after the final episode – and on iTunes throughout the run.
Another thing changed from that time is public domain software libraries. Gone are the days where you could order floppy disc upon floppy disc full of fascinating stuff, and have to wait excitedly for it to arrive. I distinctly remember wanting to order nearly every disc from that BBC Micro public domain library; I could only afford a handful. Now, everything is just a click away.
Out of the whiz-bang demos and, erm, mouse drivers, one disc in particular I did manage to order sticks in the memory. That was BBC PD Disc #165 (formerly a Mad Rabbit PD disc), Red Dwarf Documents – “Answers to ‘Frequently asked’ questions about Red Dwarf, a complete episode guide and other text files of interest to the Red Dwarf fan.” (Proper Red Dwarf fans will realise that the disc number should clearly have been #169.)
