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A Specialist

Published 8th August 2026

TV Comedy

My recent four-part analysis of Mary was one of the hardest things I’ve ever written for Dirty Feed. When I’m writing stupid shit about The Young Ones, I have a base level of knowledge about the show in my head. With Mary, I was writing virtually from scratch, and that’s before you even get into disentangling fact and fiction surrounding the show.

But truth be told, I could have easily written ten articles about poor, maligned Mary. There’s simply so much to say about it, and a huge amount of contemporary newspaper reporting. I wrote a version of the first article which was almost twice as long, with twice as many review quotes. But I did want at least some readers to get to the end of the article without giving up.

Which means there’s shitloads of stuff I left out of those pieces. So let’s take one more trip back to the blog Tune in Tonight!, which has this to say about the whole notion of variety:

“If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know there’s been a whole month dedicated to variety shows, a genre that peaked in the 1960s, and died a hard, ugly, unlamented death by the early 80s. Variety shows existed for one purpose–to prove that the star (or stars, if you were Donny and Marie Osmond) was multi-talented. They weren’t just actors, they were great singers! They could dance! They could do slapstick comedy! They could grimace their way through scripted banter with a guest star they never met until three minutes before taping began!

The trouble was, of course, that they couldn’t do all those things. Sometimes it was so apparent they couldn’t do all those things that it made watching the show an endurance test, a challenge to see how much secondhand embarrassment one could take before switching over to a soothing, more entertaining test pattern. Mary Tyler Moore actually comes pretty close, but it still doesn’t save 1978’s Mary, which lasted a regrettable three episodes, from the stink of desperation.”

Which I think might be one of the most cynical things I’ve ever read. I do understand that it’s an over-exaggeration to make the point; I’m just not sure I agree with the point. I’m not being deliberately difficult, but I think the point of variety was to entertain people, wasn’t it? Which it managed, for decades. But there is something here about the way television was heading, for good or for ill.

Let’s take a look at one example in particular. Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night (Harper, 2017) by Jason Zinoman, has some material about Letterman’s appearances in Mary, including a routine dissecting a magic trick which I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else. But the anecdote about his guest appearance on Mork & Mindy is, if anything, even more interesting:

“If Mary taught him that he couldn’t sing or dance, his cameo role on Mork & Mindy was a lesson in the dangers of acting. Letterman was cast as an obnoxious motivational speaker who kept telling his followers to sit down and shut up, and bragged about his Rolls-Royce. The casting agent probably thought that Letterman’s stage persona would make him a natural for this superior jerk. But in a villain role that required him to commit, he looked as uncomfortable as he did in a chorus line.

In an era of entertainers who did a little bit of everything—singing, dancing, and a few jokes — Letterman was a specialist. And while his early experiences were failures, they helped him understand his limitations. Wil Shriner, a fellow stand-up comic and friend, recalled how miserable he was on the drive to the studio to shoot Mork & Mindy. On the way home, Letterman said, ‘I will never do that again.’”

This was the episode “Mork Goes Erk”, broadcast on ABC on the 8th February 1979. Letterman is only in one scene, half of which I’ve embedded below.1

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  1. If you want the other half, buy the DVD. You can get every single episode for under £30 now. ↩

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There’s Something About “Mary”, Part Four

Published 4th August 2026

TV Comedy

Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four

Last time, I asked a simple question: Why is it that Mary attracts so much negative comment today, with people falling over themselves to slag it off, when I’ve rather enjoyed what I’ve seen of it so far? Do I simply have terrible taste in television?

That is a distinct possibility. But I also think there’s a few deeper things going on here.

Vince Keenan, in this piece about Mary, makes a very good point about modern attitudes towards the show. He correctly notes that recent documentary Being Mary Tyler Moore does not cover Mary.. and also that it was far from a surprise that it goes absolutely nowhere near it. Why?

“…because the Mary/The Mary Tyler Moore Hour debacle is perceived not only as a failure, but the wrong kind of failure. One seen as a dead end. But every show business narrative needs the right kind of failure, an early misstep that opens doors and creates second acts.”

He goes on to suggest that the “right” kind of failure with Mary Tyler Moore was her disastrous 1966 stage musical Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and her subsequent middling films, which ended up leading to her renaissance on television. I think Vince is exactly right that this is why Being Mary Tyler Moore didn’t cover Mary: because it essentially lead to nothing, at least when it came to Mary herself.

But I think we can take this a step further. Because Mary is the “wrong” kind of failure, it also means that people find the show difficult to judge on its own merits. Something that was pulled after three weeks because it didn’t get the ratings is just “obviously” a poor show. The juggernaut of received opinion rolls on, the narrative takes over, and before you know it, nobody’s really analysing the show properly, they’re just trading insults about it.

Vince himself doesn’t seem immune to this: in a paragraph explaining why he thinks the show is bad, he simply states “Moore opens with Loudon Wainwright III’s ‘Dead Skunk.'”1 As though this is a self-evidently terrible thing, with no justification needed. Now I personally think the segment is hilarious, but that’s a judgement call; what I find interesting is that multiple people who have looked back at Mary just don’t seem to understand the gag. For the avoidance of doubt: America’s Sweetheart™ opened a show by singing about a dead skunk, instead of about something nice. The inappropriateness was the joke.

All this already seems to have put up a barrier when it comes to how to interpreting Mary. But it’s compounded by something else: numerous people who worked on the show have often had negative things to say about it. Vince quotes Swoozie Kurtz calling Mary’s dancing “bossa-nova-meets-yeast-infection”, which is extremely amusing, albeit unfair. But the most obvious and famous criticism comes from Michael Keaton and David Letterman, and particularly with Letterman’s agony at doing the dance numbers.

Vince goes on to mention the following segment from Letterman which aired on the 28th April 2015, featuring Keaton as guest.

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  1. Vince doesn’t identify this show as unaired, but he does correctly state that it’s an incomplete edit, which is more than many people bother to do. ↩

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Extra Credit

Published 21st July 2026

Other TV

In a world where television isn’t always all I want it to be, it’s delightful when something feels 100% entirely right.

So it was on Sunday night, where the BBC broadcast its closing montage for the World Cup. BBC Sport always do these wonderfully – I have a soft spot for the one made for the 2016 Rio Olympics, and yes, the music there was the obvious choice – but I fancy this is one of the very best they’ve ever done. Every time I watch it, I spot something new.

When the planes appear at 29 seconds and the lyrics kick in, I get goosebumps.

But here’s the thing I truly love about these montages: those credits. Endless names thrown onto the screen. Well-known faces, or the very definition of a backroom boy or girl. Each of them important, each of them making the output just that little bit better.

When the BBC is currently asking “What has the BBC ever done for me?”, those credits are a reminder that in order to do those things, it takes people. It doesn’t all happen automatically, and you can’t do it with just a couple of harried producers in a room. To make tournaments like this happen to the quality which audiences expect takes not just a team, but teams of teams.

Which is as it should be. The thing which makes television worthwhile is because it is people speaking to other people. It’s the entire point of the endeavour.

Anything else is meaningless.

“One of the Rudest Images Ever Shown on British Television”

Published 20th July 2026

Other TV

It’s weird, the things you remember from when you were a teenager.

For instance, I used to devour TV reviews published in newspapers, whether I watched the shows in question or not. There are so many which stuck in my head, which I’ve never been able to trace again. I recall a particularly mean-spirited review of the final episode of Cheers, where some misery guts said that they couldn’t think of anything worse than being in a pub “where everybody knows your name”. Not even I would write something like that, and I hate everybody and everything.

Then there was the review of Hale & Pace, where someone bitterly complained that because the duo laughed during one sketch and the production didn’t bother to re-record it, this showed a dreadful lack of professionalism. I really wish I could find this one in particular, so I could teach the writer what comedy is.

But there’s one review which I have managed to track down. Unfortunately, it’s fairly obvious why this one stuck in my head as a teenager. It was about an episode of Timewatch, which apparently contained an extremely rude piece of footage indeed. This review turned out to be easy to find, thanks to good old Newspapers.com.

Jay Rayner, The Observer, 20th June 1999:

“About 10 minutes into tonight’s1 edition of Timewatch: Letting the Genie Out of the Bottle (BBC2, 9.40pm), a history of the pornography industry, there is a loving shot of pigs snuffling happily in their sties. If ever you doubted that Scandinavian attitudes to sexual relations are really any different to our own, the pig shot will sort you out. In 1933 Denmark became the first country in the world to legalise bestiality ‘as long as the animal wasn’t harmed’.

There are many – probably including a few pigs – who will find the connection being made here between the mainstream pornography industry and bestiality disturbing. Nevertheless, the connection exists. It is, after all, hardly surprising that the country which was minded to legalise bestiality back in the Thirties was also going to be the first to legalise hardcore pornography in 1969. In Scandinavia sex before marriage had been a part of the culture since pre-Christian times. Were they really now going to get their knickers in a twist over photographs of people having sex when they’d all been getting their knickers off for years?

As one of the commentators in this extraordinary film explains, the Danish parliament, reacting to the prevalent attitudes in Danish society, saw a distinction between what was a crime and what was a sin. You might not fancy your neighbours pig, but did that mean you should criminalise your neighbour for wanting to have carnal knowledge of it? You might not want to look at pornography yourself, but was it a crime for your neighbour to do so in private? Whether the legislators envisaged the worldwide industry that pornography has become is another question. Watching this edition of Timewatch you can’t help but feel that there was something oddly innocent about all that shagging back in the Sixties. Incidentally, this programme probably includes one of the rudest images ever shown on British television. Mind you, you’ll need a video of it and a pause button to find it.”

No doubt I would have loved to have seen this episode of Timewatch back in 1999, but suddenly feigning an interest in Timewatch as a teenager the week they do an episode about porn would have been extremely suspicious. Almost as suspicious as being interested in the serious dramatic reckonings of Baywatch. I never managed to record that either.

So what that rudest image actually was, I never had any idea. At least until now, when I finally got a chance to watch the damn thing, and scoured it for hidden filth.

The sequence in question is of a printing press, churning out hardcore magazines. Parts of the footage are censored, as they were clearly too obscene to let pass on the Beeb. But one photograph in those magazines, for whatever reason, was allowed to air intact.

So I can exclusively reveal: the image Jay Rayner is talking about is of two ladies who have just received a facial, and are grinning inanely about it.

Never let it be said I don’t answer the real TV mysteries around here.

  1. Broadcast on the 26th June 1999. ↩

There’s Something About “Mary”, Part Three

Published 25th June 2026

TV Comedy

Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four

Previously, we talked about the history of Mary Tyler Moore’s 1978 variety series Mary, and analysed a half-finished episode hanging around online which was never transmitted. You would think that the story surrounding this show is already complicated enough, and it couldn’t get any more confusing.

Allow me to dissuade you of that notion.

There is one more video of material which originated from Mary on YouTube. This one is named “‘Mary’ Episode (unaired?) – 1978”. I won’t keep you in suspense; comparing the contents of this video with what was billed in contemporary newspapers, I can confirm that it was indeed unaired.1

Unlike the previous unaired episode, this isn’t an unedited studio tape, but looks to be – mainly – completed. (I’ll be coming back to the “mainly” qualifier.) And more than that: unlike the other unaired material, we can actually come up with the date when this episode was supposed to have been broadcast: the 15th October 1978. A show which was supposed to air fourth in the run, and then was cancelled before transmission.

We don’t have to rely on guesswork when it comes to this. Plenty of contemporary newspaper coverage proves it beyond doubt. For instance, Cecil Smith reported the following in The Los Angeles Times on the 16th October:

“I wonder if CBS didn’t blow the whistle too early on “Mary,” which the network cancelled late last week. […] The show you didn’t see Sunday night was one of the brightest hours of the year. […]

I had dropped by the set of “Mary” to watch the show last month. At the time, they were working on their ninth show—they did 11. Unlike some of my colleagues, I was not too taken with the opening show on “Mary” — I thought it rather self-conscious and self-serving, despite the Ed Asner Dancers. They found another show for me to see – the Oct. 15 edition.

There were wonderful things in it. Mary revisited the set of the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, the newsroom of WJZ-TV in Minneapolis, where, as Mary Richards, she became a national institution. It seems the “atmosphere” – the extras who worked in the background while Mary, Lou, Murray and Ted occupied center stage – had never been told the series had ended. They were still at their desks, covered with cobwebs.

(“When I stepped on that set,” Mary told me later, “that was catch-in-the-throat time. There were tears.”)

In another marvellously funny sequence, she played Phyllis Marlowe, who had taken the place of her brother Philip, the private eye. The scene was choreographed hilariously to a narrator doing Raymond Chandler—it was beautiful parody down to the last elaborate metaphor.

And there was a number with Dick Shawn in which he languorously sang “Send in the Clowns” while a ballet of clowns came in and threw pies at him, tore his clothes off and generally did what clowns do.”

Yet again, this is an example of somebody who enjoyed Mary, despite most people treating it these days as something which was “obviously” terrible. And this is someone who hadn’t blindly loved the show – they disliked the first episode, and then were won round, albeit by (clearly flagged) unbroadcast material. I do realise I keep banging this drum, but it really is important to acknowledge that the way the show is usually talked about these days wasn’t a uniform opinion back in 1978, despite the poor audience figures.

Anyway, hopefully my main point is clear: every single sketch mentioned in Cecil Smith’s piece is in the video embedded at the top of this article. So case closed: this video really does contain the episode which was meant to air on the 15th October.

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  1. The Saturday Night Fever sketch contained within was mentioned by Mary Tyler Moore in pre-show interviews, and also briefly featured in CBS fall promos. While I still maintain that when discussing the sketch as a whole you need to flag it as unbroadcast, you can put together a credible argument that Mary must have been pleased with how it turned out. ↩

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There’s Something About “Mary”, Part Two

Published 17th June 2026

TV Comedy

Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four

Last time, I left you all with something of a poser. Clips from three episodes of Mary are sitting on YouTube in various forms. Are these the same three episodes which were broadcast back in 1978?

Certainly, most people seem to have either assumed that they are, or are simply uninterested in whether they are or not. Let’s take a look again at the YouTube video “Why Mary Tyler Moore’s 1978 “Mary” Bombed Big Time”:

The narration certainly leaves us in no doubt about what they think about poor Mary:

“From what I saw, there were two things which caused this programme to nosedive and crash so quickly. The writing was bad. At times, really bad.”

We then get a clip of Mary talking to the studio audience: “Let’s talk about Canada!”. Followed inevitably by a song about Canada. Neither works very well in clip form, I will admit, although I could make the best show in the world look bad by slagging it off and then throwing in a few clips out-of-context.

We are then told:

“So much of the comedy I saw felt forced, and simply wasn’t funny.”

Followed by part of an unidentified sketch featuring Mary, Swoosie, and Judith sitting on a sofa:

SWOOSIE KURTZ: Without another person.
JUDITH KAHAN: Just you.
SWOOSIE KURTZ: Solo.
JUDITH KAHAN: Uno.
SWOOSIE KURTZ: Solitary.
JUDITH KAHAN: Like mouldy cheese.

If anything, there is even less context given to this clip, so it’s simply impossible to judge it fairly. So let’s do the donkeywork ourselves. Where do these clips come from?

The answer: another video on YouTube, worryingly titled “‘Mary’ unknown episode 1978”.

The above video includes both the Canada material, and the sketch with Judith and Swoosie on the sofa, called “Not A Married Woman”. I think all the material comes across much better when watched in context. But that’s not really the point.

Because something else immediately becomes clear while watching this video: we’re not looking at a finished programme here. This is a studio tape, featuring raw footage of a studio audience session for the programme, including retakes. It also isn’t even complete – it ends halfway through a sketch. And needless to say, the completed programme isn’t available anywhere else online.

So our question is now slightly different: does this studio tape represent something which became a finished programme which transmitted on CBS in 1978?

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Electrocution Lessons

Published 11th June 2026

TV Comedy

The problem with finally getting round to watching loads of US sitcoms over the past year or so is that I immediately want to turn Dirty Feed into a fan site for each of them. Sadly, I have zero time to do this. In a parallel universe, somebody very rich is paying me to spend all my time writing stupid shit about All in the Family, rather than worry about World Cup weather delays.

So you’ll have to wait a few decades for my in-depth piece on why I’ve recently fallen in love with Married… with Children. Suffice to say that when you’re watching a show as measured and responsible as All in the Family, it’s a lovely contrast to also watch a programme which is simply interested as being irresponsible and gleefully unpleasant as possible.1

It’s also a show which is far better made and more thoughtful than it’s often given credit for. Take a look at the following clip from Season 5 episode “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy”, transmitted by Fox on the 18th November 1990. On the page, it’s a very standard gag: Bud gets an electric shock while mending the doorbell, because Kelly hasn’t turned off the electricity. Cue a Looney Tunes moment with a smoking Bud.

Now, there’s a very obvious way to shoot this scene if you’re making an audience sitcom: record the part with Bud going to fix the doorbell in front of the audience, and then play in a pre-recorded shot of him after being electrocuted. If the production was feeling brave, they could shoot his appearance after being electrocuted in front of the audience, with a recording break in-between to add the make-up and smoke effects to David Faustino.

Married… with Children does neither of these things. It decides the funniest thing is to do it all in one shot, in front of the audience. So that’s what they do. The result is a pure piece of stagecraft magic, and turns a standard gag on the page into something wonderful.

I wonder how many people were standing just outside the door, ready to do David’s hair, make-up, and to set off the smoke effects.2 Note also how brilliantly David rides the laugh when he reappears; one of the best things about Married… with Children is seeing him develop his comic timing over the first few years of the show. Christina Applegate’s corpsing is the icing on the cake.

This scene is everything I love about television. A production going out of its way to do something difficult; not to draw attention to itself, not to win awards, but just because it’s the funniest way to do something. A cut would hurt the rhythm of the scene – and at least subconsciously make it feel like cheat. And of course, doing it live in one take also vastly improves the studio audience reaction.

It’s a commitment to comedy which is stamped over every frame of Married… with Children. It is singularly interested in getting you to laugh as hard and as often as possible, and will do anything to get you there. And that’s why, no matter how unpleasant the show is being at any given moment, it’s also so goddamn lovable.

  1. This is not an idle comparison; both shows share a lineage, and not just in terms of being American videotaped audience sitcoms, a trend which started with All in the Family. No, there is an overt connection: co-creator of Married… with Children Michael G. Moye used to write for the Lear television factory, including All in the Family spin-off The Jeffersons. ↩

  2. It is notable that David never turns his back to the camera throughout the entire scene, so he was clearly already wearing the smoke mechanism from the beginning in order to save time. ↩

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A Chill in the Air

Published 29th May 2026

Music

“There comes a moment in every electronic music fan’s journey when they discover Patrick Cowley.”

Andrew Ryce, liner notes for Hard Ware (2025)

I’m trying to think of the first time I heard of Patrick Cowley. I highly suspect it was one of the typical routes: from his epic 15-minute remix of “I Feel Love”, created in 1978. It was designed for the clubs, so obviously I get a great deal of enjoyment from listening to it on the sofa while devouring a Kitkat.

Perhaps my favourite track of his is one of the most mainstream – in intent and production, if not in actual success – “Tech-No-Logical World”, from his 1982 album Mind Warp. Over 40 years later, the concerns expressed in it feel as familiar as ever. Perhaps even more so.

The above is the radio edit, but if you love it, I highly recommend the proper version.

Mind Warp was made while Patrick Cowley had HIV/AIDS; he died in November 1982. This presents the opportunity for critics to say he was a tragic genius, taken from us far too soon, and all those cliches which often seem to get in the way of celebrating the real person. The problem is… he really was a genius, and he really was taken from us far too soon. It is impossible to overstate how much of his creativity we were robbed of, even if he had survived just five more years.

Such statements feel absurdly mercenary, as though the only thing Cowley had to offer the world was more damn music to cram into our greedy ears. Of course there was far more to him, as the people who knew Cowley would no doubt point out. And yet to you and me in 2026, the uncomfortable truth is that’s exactly what it means. We will never know him; we only know what we can hear. When some people die, you know every last drop of creativity had been long squeezed out of them. With Cowley, it feels like he was only just getting started.

We know this for sure. Because for the past few years, previously unreleased material from Cowley has been making its way out there, by people carefully going through his archives. The most recent efforts here have been from Dark Entries Records, in the form of releases such as School Daze (2013), Muscle Up (2015), Candida Cosmica (2016), Afternooners (2017), Mechanical Fantasy Box (2019), Some Funkettes (2020), Malebox (2022), From Behind (2024), and Hard Ware (2025).

There are so many gems in the above releases; to drag the subject back to Cowley’s death seems almost obscene. And yet one track from the above albums stands out to me; “Ice Age”, from Hard Ware. Dark Entries Records themselves warn us about the track in the release notes for the album:

“Hard Ware closes with the chilling synth-hymn “Ice Age,” in which Loverde vocalist Peggy Gibbons sings of a coming frosty apocalypse. The story told in “Ice Age” mirrors the coming AIDS crisis and feels like a haunting premonition from Cowley.”

They aren’t kidding. “Ice Age” is beautiful, haunting… and probably not the kind of thing to listen to last thing at night. It’s also the only track on Hard Ware to have a co-writer credit; Paul Parker, vocalist on “Tech-No-Logical World”.

As a piece of music, and as the aforementioned haunting premonition, I find it stunning. The liner notes to Hard Ware state that “all songs recorded 1979-1981”; sadly, there is no more granularity than that, although given the timeline of the AIDS crisis, it would be extraordinary to find out the track was recorded before 1981.

And yet that’s not what really gets me about “Ice Age”. Assuming 1981 as the recording date, and the fact that it was finally released in 2025, that’s a full 44 year gap between its creation, and the wider public being able to hear it. In those years, HIV/AIDS has gone from a deadly epidemic that public health authorities struggled to understand and deal with, to a disease which – caught early, and with the correct treatment – is largely manageable and non-fatal in many parts of the world.

To listen to something like this, unheard for over four decades, is extraordinary. Like a song which just plopped through a time hole, unbidden. Things which are released gather detritus; they gain – and lose – context through being heard, experienced, and talked about. “Ice Age” never had that. You know a song is truly obscure when a search for the lyrics online brings up nothing.

The result is a direct missive from the early days of the AIDS crisis, with nothing to get in our way. Raw reportage, however poetically expressed. Regardless of the merits of the song – of which there are many – that alone makes it one of the most remarkable things I have ever heard.

There’s Something About “Mary”, Part One

Published 24th May 2026

TV Comedy

Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four

On the 24th September 1978, a brand new Mary Tyler Moore variety series premiered on CBS. Simply titled Mary1, there was a full season order in place; many reports at the time suggested at least 22 shows, with an option for two more.

After three shows aired, the show was pulled from the airwaves for good.

This article is partly the tale of what happened to poor Mary. But more importantly: it’s also about the pitfalls of judging a series nearly five decades later, when the detritus surrounding a show can be extremely difficult to interpret correctly.

*   *   *

There was an obvious format which Mary could have gone for: something akin to How to Survive the 70s from seven months earlier. Numerous guest stars, perhaps a different, fairly loose topic every week, job done. Instead, Mary seemed to go out of its way to make life difficult for itself.

Guest stars were mainly eschewed, aside from a brief appearance by Carl Reiner in the opening episode. Instead, they went for a repertory cast, some quite well known, others at the start of their career: James Hampton, Swoosie Kurtz, David Letterman, Michael Keaton, Judy Kahan, and – the most famous of the gang at the time – Dick Shawn. This, at least, had some precedence: surrounding Mary with a solid team was one of the things which made The Mary Tyler Moore Show such a success.

Mary herself described the series as the following at the time, which was widely quoted in the press:

“The show will be made up primarily of sketches which hopefully display wit and grown-up comedy. There will also be some music and dancing but most of the numbers will grown out of the preceding sketch. For instance, a disco sketch evolves into a disco number. It’s a new form for me and I just love it.”

Some clips from the first episode are on YouTube. Sadly, as it’s not the full show, it doesn’t really give a full sense of proceedings; oddly enough, it seems determined not to let us see much of the actual singing or dancing. But it does at least give some kind of idea of the kind of programme Mary was.

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  1. This is not Mary’s 1985 sitcom, also called Mary. ↩

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