For anybody who reads this1, it will not have escaped your attention that Dirty Feed has been pretty quiet over the last couple of months. Quieter than it’s been for nearly a decade, in fact.
The reasons for this are numerous. I have a brand new job which is taking up a lot of my mental energy. I’m currently learning how to drive, which is taking up even more of my mental energy. And yes, OK, I’m also in the middle of a really fucking difficult piece of writing, and it’s not going very well. My brain has rebelled and is sulking.
But I need to write somehow, even if it isn’t here. So recently I’ve been spending a lot of time reviewing films on Letterboxd, with my favourite recently being this piece on The Three Caballeros. It really is lovely to write about something other than TV comedy for a change, stretching muscles I keep forgetting I have.
The other joy of Letterboxd is that writing there is almost the exact opposite of Dirty Feed. Here, my pieces have got so complicated over the past couple of years that writing the necessary introduction and context has become an absolute pain. (Getting across the context for The Mary Tyler Moore Show for a UK audience is hard enough, let alone her obscure variety shows which never even made it across the pond.) With Letterboxd, the context is already there on the main page for each film, before I even start. It means I can concentrate on writing the good bit, rather than the bit I dutifully have to write in order for anybody to understand the good bit.
It is an utter delight.
* * *
Well mainly, anyway.
Recently, I watched the notorious 1977 public information film Apaches, described by Letterboxed as follows:
Six children leave home to play in the farm. Only one will come home alive.
On an English farm, six reckless children play at being a fierce band of Apache warriors, unaware of the many dangers to which they are exposed. (Public information short film produced on behalf of the British Government to warn children living in rural areas about the risks of playing near farm machinery.)
Or should I say: that’s how Letterboxd used to describe it. Because Apaches has been unceremoniously removed from the site, along with every single review written for it, including my own. The reason? The underlying database Letterboxd uses, TMDB, recently reclassified Apaches from a movie to a TV show.
Disentangling all this is a minefield. Is a PIF closer to film, or TV? The problem is that they are neither, and both. I will say that in a world where Letterboxd allows a TV show like The Other Bennet Sister on its platform – something TMDB also thinks is a TV show, by the way, so there isn’t even any consistency applied here – the decision becomes faintly ridiculous. It would be one thing to be very strict about only allowing true films on the platform; it’s quite another to let obvious half-hour TV shows on, and then get rid of something like Apaches.2
Something else perverse: due to the removal of Apaches, the list of Edgar Wright’s 1000 Favourite Movies is now… 999 films long. Sigh.
All of which means that my review of Apaches on Letterboxd has been rudely yanked offline, along with every single other review of it hosted by the site – and without Letterboxd even informing me. Which is incredibly annoying. On the plus side, Letterboxd do give you a way of exporting all your reviews – including deleted ones. So I thought I might as well republish it here.
“Watched as a companion piece to The Long Good Friday, which John Mackenzie also directed, it’s perhaps difficult for this [Apaches] to live up its nasty reputation. But that isn’t fair. I’m coming to it as an adult fully prepared; that’s a very different proposition to being exposed to it as a kid with no warning. And it’s still plenty nasty enough; Sharon’s cry of pain from the poisoning in many ways is the least explicit death, and yet the most unpleasant.
It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t a public information film from my childhood; not only was I slightly too young, but I didn’t grow up in the kind of rural area where this PIF was worth showing. This gives watching it for me now a slightly odd air; in many ways, this isn’t something I should even be able to see. It was meant as a piece of ephemera doing a particular job; it was never intended to be watched by an adult in 2026. Of course, I watch plenty of things out-of-time; my entire Letterboxd account is a testament to that. But this is an extreme example.
This kind of ephemera is also the kind of thing which helped build solid careers. PIFs, adverts, music videos, certain kinds of television; of course they haven’t completely disappeared, but in 2026 the ability to do something truly interesting with them has been vastly reduced. Bread-and-butter jobs where you can still do something magical like Apaches are few and far between.
I think that’s a shame. Others might point to YouTube and the camera on your phone, and say that opportunities are greater than ever. For some things, yes. But I still think we’re missing some fundamental things which we used to have, and now have far less of. Not least: a budget, along with training.”
As you can see, my review tries to touch on something wider than the PIF itself. Another reason why I was irritated that it was deleted. It’s not really that far off becoming a full Dirty Feed post in its own right, and could easily have been with a little more context added.
The moral of all this? Simply that for years, I made a point of publishing all my writing here on Dirty Feed, where I had full control of it, and nobody else could delete it or alter it. And what happens when I wander away from that idea? I almost immediately get burnt, and have my writing yanked offline, with no warning, for an extremely poor reason.
So if you ever thought I was obsessed about that kind of thing for no reason, there’s your proof as to why it matters. Keep control of your own work kids, especially if you’re doing it for fun and not being paid for it. And meanwhile, I’m going to have to have a think about how to preserve my reviews on Letterboxd.
Because as much as I love that damn site… I don’t quite trust it any more.
With thanks to @variousvarieties on Bluesky.
I’m not linking to this piece on social media, so that means: people who subscribe to my RSS feed, people with email subscriptions, and people who manually visit the site occasionally to see if I’ve written anything. Hello. I love you all. ↩
And if you think the site is just getting rid of PIFs, then that’s not true: my reviews of Lonely Water and Building Sites Bite remain online. ↩