On Thursday September the 8th, at 12:09pm, I tweeted the following.
Current mood. pic.twitter.com/YGlsBelKiW
— John Hoare (@mumoss) September 8, 2022
31 minutes after this tweet, BBC One broke into Bargain Hunt, to report on concerns about the Queen’s health. Around 15 minutes later, I finally learnt about the story, from people DMing me on Twitter. I had no idea about it. I was calmly sitting at home, well away from my job working on a certain popular national television channel.
And yet, doesn’t it look like I was trying to drop a huge hint about the upcoming news? I wasn’t. I was scanning through various Red Dwarf episodes for potential articles, and saw the opportunity for one of my silly “Current Mood” gags, which I’ve been doing for years.
That’s all.
* * *
Yes, there is a lesson here on the danger of conspiracy theories. But that’s a boring point. The problem with all this is that it actually hits far closer to home.
Because anybody who misread my tweet above isn’t actually doing something particularly unreasonable. They know that I work on a certain TV channel. They know that a royal obituary is one of the most stressful parts of working on that certain TV channel. And half an hour before news of the Queen’s health breaks into Bargain Hunt on BBC One, I post an alarming image from Red Dwarf which indicates I am in distress. Of course I’m hinting that I knew something, and there was something big coming. Except I didn’t, and I wasn’t.
But the problem is: on Dirty Feed, I attempt to make these links all the time, when talking about television. I’m leaping back, 30, 40, 50 years – sometimes more – and trying to figure out exactly what happened. This involves taking disparate facts, and trying to draw links between them. But as the above proves, sometimes things which look like they’re obviously linked, are in fact complete coincidence.
Let’s be clear: things like this happen in my job all the time. People often leap to conclusions about something that happened on TV which I was involved with. Sometimes, they can be entirely wrong… and it’s about a subject I can’t even remotely talk about, for confidentiality reasons. It’s infuriating.
And then I might go home, start writing, and do exactly the same about a TV show from 30 years ago.
So, what’s the solution to this? There isn’t one, really. When you’re trying to reach into the past, making your way through faulty paperwork and faultier memories, being forced to leap between gaps is inevitable. And it’s inevitable that I will get things wrong.
The only thing I can do is try and be as open about my procedures as possible. I really try not to write this site from a God’s-eye view, where I state what “definitely” happened in these situations, when we can’t be sure. The best I can do is try to make good guesses, clearly label speculation, and have as many facts to hand as possible. And most importantly, show my workings so the reader can come to a different conclusion if they want.
For instance, take the following paragraph from this piece on some unbroadcast Fry & Laurie sketches:
“Therefore, I would suggest that there is a high probability this unbroadcast sketch was shot on the 17th December 1988, with an outside chance that it was shot the week before on the 10th. It almost certainly wasn’t shot later; there’s no evidence that Radio Times photographer Don Smith was present at the final four sessions of the series.”
I hope you can all figure out what the words “probability”, “chance”, and “almost” are doing in that paragraph. And if that makes my writing woolly and annoying, it’s better than the alternative.
When leaping across gaps on here, I fully invite you all to come up with alternatives. Together, we might inch our way towards some kind of truth. I sure can’t do it by myself.