Becoming a photographer in his teens, Kubrick joined Look magazine as an apprentice photographer in 1946. Later becoming a staff photographer for the magazine, nothing I could say about the photos themselves could do them justice – or, indeed, to the exhibition itself. You can get an idea from blog posts such as these, but to really get a feel for the work, you need to see his photo sets in series rather than as isolated frames. Photographs of Mickey the Shoeshine Boy take on far more resonance when viewed as a series of images in context, as they tell a story – pointing towards Kubrick’s future as a filmmaker.

To link his photography work to his filmmaking, five televisions were dotted around the exhibition, all playing different excerpts of Kubrick’s 1955 film Killer’s Kiss, and inviting comparisons with his photography work. Except I found it difficult to concentrate on that bit. Because of the five televisions, three of them were playing the material in the wrong aspect ratio. A 4:3 (or 1.33:1) image, stretched to 16:9 on a widescreen telly.

That’s right. An exhibition on one of the finest filmmakers of all time, who took endless care in the composition of each and every shot, thought it was OK to display one of his films with the picture stretched to hell. An exhibition which encouraged you to pay attention to the composition of his shots. Of a director which saw fit to send out letters like these to projectionists.

It’s such a shame. The exhibition was one of the best I have ever been to. Each photo was endlessly fascinating, everything was put into context, the presentation of the photos themselves was delightful – even the layout of the exhibition hall itself was pleasing. But when it came to presenting the moving image, they took no more care than the average ineptly set up family telly.

When an exhibition dedicated to Stanley Kubrick of all people can’t get things like this right, I feel like throwing my hands in the air and giving up.

And so, with the surprising success of the opening episode, welcome to the second Dirty Feed podcast. This time, I take a look at Bodysnatcher – an unmade episode from the very first series of Red Dwarf…

Download Podcast #2: Bodysnatcher (23MB MP3, 11:45)
(Subscribe using RSS / iTunes)

As ever, I’d love to have your feedback below. Hopefully they’re interesting in their own right, but these podcasts are also warm-ups for some longer, half-hour shows later in the year – so any suggestions are pathetically gratefully received.

DISCLAIMER: I do know someone who worked on the DVD release mentioned here. Seeing as I spent an entire year slagging off Back To Earth though, I think you can be confident that my opinions about Red Dwarf are honest.

JingleSamplers.com

As there really is much great stuff over there, I thought the following would be a a fitting end to this series of posts:

And that great song leaves me with a question – just what was it about 70s pop culture which made them constantly mention the year? I keep seeing it with material from that decade. Even the Carry On films were doing it with this poster for Carry On Behind – “…with the ’76 touch”. Why?

#1: Don’t leave your phone on the Piccadilly Line.

#2: Failing that, make sure you’ve got a recent backup/sync of the thing, not one from six months ago.

#3: Make sure you’ve got some kind of lock on your phone – PIN, anything. I took PIN protection off because I was sick of having to type it in each time – and whilst I changed all my passwords as soon as I realised, it was an uncomfortable morning when I realised that random strangers had access to photos of my penis.

#4: Do a daily, or at least weekly, backup. As opposed to a yearly backup, which is what I appeared to deem appropriate.

#5: When you damage your laptop by slipping up on ice and smashing it into the pavement, back up all your data immediately, rather than just thinking “I should back up all my data immediately”.

#6: Finally: when you’re getting out your backup drive to retrieve your data, DON’T DROP IT ON THE FLOOR SO IT DOESN’T WORK ANY MORE.

As it turned out, I ended up being precisely the luckiest bastard in the universe. Despite the multitude of sins I committed above – no proper backups, no PIN protection, being a clumsy loon – as of today, I have everything back. I filled in a lost property form, some kind person miraculously gave my phone in to the TFL lost property office, and I collected it today. Meanwhile, one of my kind work colleagues managed to scrape every last bit of data from the dodgy hard drive, by plugging it into an enclosure and dragging it out via USB. (Useful tip.) I went from having nothing, to having everything back, in a single morning. And it would have been quite ironic for me to have lost the everything but the final MP3 of this, considering how much I worry about TV companies losing archive material.

Backups are never fun. There is ALWAYS something more interesting you could be doing. It doesn’t matter: if you haven’t got one sorted yet, accept that you’re going to spend £50 on a hard drive and a boring hour of your time this weekend. (At least one hard drive – I’m now keeping two backups.)

Because there is absolutely no guarantee you’ll be as lucky as me when the day comes. And that is very much a when.

Because there clearly aren’t enough of them in the world, here’s the first in a new venture on Dirty Feed – a podcast. This episode, I use Victor Lewis-Smith’s 90s series TV Offal as an excuse to play a one minute long jingle from a radio station in Denver:

Download Podcast #1: TV Offal (22MB MP3, 12:00)
(Subscribe using RSS / iTunes)

These will be published WHENEVER I CAN BE BOTHERED, and are deliberately starting off pretty short. Feedback more than welcome – I’ve been involved in G&T’s Dwarfcasts for over five years now, but this is the first time I’ve done one myself.

Give it a listen! Or: don’t.

With thanks to David Barras, Bigdave, Robin Blamires, jlehmann, jonno, Sean Martin, and mjb1124 on JingleMad for help and audio.

“Q: Why should I listen to your radio station?

After all, I have an iPod with more than 10,000 tunes that collectively form the soundtrack of my life. I have more music on my computer. I can listen to endless computer-generated combinations – better mix, better variety – that can surprise me and amuse me between now and whenever I lose my interest, my sanity, my life. My iPod can do all that; my computer can do it too.

So why should I listen to your radio station?

After all, I can listen to online stations that programme the music I like (70s retro … electronica … ambient), and many of these play without interruption, without call-letters, without commercials, without an intervening human presence.

So why should I listen to our radio station in this brave new world of choice and lifestyle-customisation and narrowcasting?

And yet listen I do. I need radio.”

Give the whole thing a read. It sums up most of my thoughts about what radio should be doing… and why so many stations leave me cold.

Over on the Twitter support site: What are Promoted Tweets?

“A Promoted Tweet will appear in a user’s timeline only if the Tweet is likely to be interesting and relevant to that user.”

Meanwhile, back on my account:

Exactly how is a tweet “likely to be interesting and relevant” to me, if an account has annoyed me enough to make me block them? What bigger indication could I give that, in fact, I am extremely unlikely to find the tweet interesting and relevant?

If you’re going to shove ads into my timeline, fine. But at least be honest about it.

Let’s swiftly move past some of the questionable things in that article – a “comedy sitcom”, eh? – and get to the key section:

“In non-studio comedy series you can do strange, subtle, unusual things – think The Office, Peep Show, The Thick of It, Flight of the Conchords. In studio sitcoms, you have to make the people in the room laugh – out loud, and preferably as often as possible.”

So hey there, all you potential new audience sitcom writers: don’t try and do strange, subtle, or unusual things. That would be madness. After all, One Foot in the Grave, Father Ted, or The Young Ones were never strange. Dad’s Army, Ever Decreasing Circles, or Steptoe and Son were never subtle. And The Brittas Empire, Absolutely Fabulous, or Red Dwarf were never unusual.

Forget that The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin was deeply unnerving in its intricate depiction of a man going through a nervous breakdown. Don’t worry your pretty little head that 2point4 children masqueraded as a normal family sitcom, but was stranger than it appeared. And Yes Minister never made subtle points taking apart the entirety of British politics – that’s clearly your imagination. And none of these programmes made an audience laugh, obviously.

I have complained that audience sitcom has lacked ambition recently when it comes to the production. It has been quite reasonably been pointed out that sometimes this is simply due to generally lower programme budgets these days. But this is far worse: this is an official BBC talent contest which is limiting ideas of what audience sitcom can do – to a new generation of writers. It’s fair enough to, say, give useful guidance as to what is possible production-wise. But why is non-audience sitcom allowed to do strange things, but audience sitcom suddenly not? At what point did audience sitcom lose the right to do them? At what point was it denied the right to subtlety, for crying out loud?

Sometimes, me whinging about random people on the internet is just that – whinging about random people on the internet, who are of little importance in the grand scheme of things. But the paragraph quoted above is everything that’s wrong with people’s attitudes towards audience sitcom… from a place which controls a large percentage of the comedy budget in the UK.

Worrying, isn’t it?

• Episode 1 Set Report by Ian Symes
• Episode 2 Set Report by John Hoare
• Episode 3 Set Report by Jonathan Capps
• Episode 4 Set Report by Danny Stephenson
• Episode 5 Set Report by Kris Carter
• Episode 6 Set Report by Jonathan Capps

Writing these set reports really was new territory for the site. With Back To Earth not being shot with an audience, or even screened for one, we’d happily publish any spoiler which came our way. At these recordings, Doug Naylor specifically asking for no spoilers to be published online – and we had to tread a fine line between respecting the wishes of the production team, whilst still maintaining our independence as a fansite… to say nothing of still trying to write something people would find interesting. It was an impossible task to please everybody, but hopefully we pleased as many people as possible.

One of the reasons that this felt like uncharted – and distinctly choppy – waters, is the perfect storm of circumstances. An audience sitcom, with an emphasis on plots, an established online fanbase, the now widespread use of the internet, and a production team which feels very strongly about spoilers – these aren’t usual circumstances for show. Nobody ever cared about extensive My Family spoilers being leaked online.

As for the show itself, there’s a week of pickup scenes to be shot next week, then post-production, and then the show is coming to Dave in the autumn. The general reaction of pretty much everyone is that it’s the best the show has been since Red Dwarf VI. That, however, still covers a wide range of responses…