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A Ginger Magician

Published 5th September 2026

Internet / TV Comedy

I always love reading people’s obscure TV memories. Here’s one posted to Bluesky recently by Jeff Billington; unlike some people who are convinced their memories are always correct, he willingly admits it might be bollocks.

“Something I insist happened but may have dreamt:

BBC2, mid 90s, snooker, Steve Davis playing, match is overrunning.

Between frames, host states that scheduled Red Dwarf will be shown after the match.

Return to commentator (Ted Lowe?) who says ‘…from the Red Dwarf to the Ginger Magician…’

The question is: can I – and a gang of fellow investigators – prove whether this happened or not, from the comfort of our own living room? Let’s find out.

STEP #1: Ray Newman draws the post to my attention.

STEP #2: Eddie Robson points out that if this happened, it must have been with a repeat, as to his knowledge no first-run episode of Red Dwarf was delayed by snooker. (Which is a very reasonable supposition – I’ve hung around Dwarf fandom long enough to know it would be a well-known incident if so.)

STEP #3: Justin Lewis suggests a date: 9th February 1997. This was the night of the Masters final, followed by Red Dwarf VII, where each new episode on Friday had a Sunday repeat. BBC Genome lists that repeat time as 10:30pm, as per the Radio Times, although the overrunning snooker would have pushed that later.

STEP #4: Eddie Robson also points out that Steve Davis was actually in the final, matching Jeff Billington’s memory.

STEP #5: I finally get involved, and find the whole of the 1997 final is sitting on YouTube. I initially suggest Part Two as a starting point…

STEP #6: …but Justin Lewis notes that Part Two is from the afternoon coverage, not the evening, and suggests that Part Five would be most likely.

STEP #7: I presume at that point we were all desperately scanning the videos, trying to find the moment. I know I was. It therefore seems appropriate that Jeff Billington himself found it first. It is indeed in Part Five; to be exact, at 11:40.

I’m even going to break my rule, and embed a video here which was uploaded in the wrong aspect ratio:

DAVID VINE: Well as promised, we’re staying with this gripping Masters final right to the very end. Those of you waiting for the Red Dwarf, well he’ll be following this final.
DENNIS TAYLOR: Well, from a Red Dwarf to a Ginger Magician here at the table…

So it was Dennis Taylor, not Ted Lowe, but otherwise, Jeff’s memory was pretty much spot on. And while you can make fun of David Vine’s “the” Red Dwarf, hey, there was precedent.

Total time from Jeff’s post to the solution: three hours and five minutes. And if we only count when people truly started poking at it, 37 minutes.

Which just leads me to contemplate: we complain, correctly, about how dreadful the world can be in 2026, in both large ways and small. But sometimes it’s worth sitting back and thinking that for years, researching this would have been virtually impossible. But with a combination of social media, YouTube, and BBC Genome, a long-standing mystery was cracked in less then an hour.

Modern life isn’t always rubbish.

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Compliance.

Published 8th May 2026

Internet / Other TV

In my day job, working in linear television, I have to deal quite a lot with compliance. On occasion, I even have had to issue my own official content warnings for various TV programmes.

It can, on occasion, be an exasperating experience. Of course, viewers need warning about certain kinds of content. But when a continuity announcement spends more time warning the viewer about potentially offensive content than setting up the actual programme, it can be a little annoying.

At times, I perhaps feel like “legacy” media needs to get with the times. Just a little.

*   *   *

Tonight, I posted a short Bluesky thread about Confessions of a Driving Instructor. As part of that thread, I posted an image of Lynda Bellingham with her left tit out.

Bluesky immediately labelled this as “explicit sexual images”. I am not exaggerating here. That is literally and actually the exact phrase they used. The BBC gets endlessly criticised for compliance culture… and yet Bluesky thinks an errant nipple is an “explicit sexual image”.

I have nothing to say, except: perhaps people should stop leaping on the BBC for every single damn silly thing, and consider what happens online. Just occasionally.

Brevity.

Published 6th May 2026

Internet

Sometimes it feels like the whole internet is a calculated exercise in talking at cross-purposes. Take for instance this post on Bluesky, by author Tom Cox:

“No other word has done more damage to the craft of writing in recent years than “content”. Even if you’re using the word “content” ironically, or as a cute little joke, don’t. When someone calls writing “content” they’re pissing on someone’s hard work & passion. “Content” is Technosatan’s henchword.”

I’ve never really had a problem with the word, because for me it has useful connotations that it doesn’t for others: as a technical term originating from 2000s discussions on web standards, where you’re distinguishing between CSS (visual design) and HTML (content). I just can’t bring myself to have visceral disgust for something that in my world, is rooted in something which helped people: something that made the web far more accessible to a much wider group of individuals.1

To me, the word just doesn’t have an automatic tinge of soulless corporate management-speak. I identify it as a technical term first. Yet I get it: a word which I associate with something helpful, is used these days by many in a fashion which is unhelpful. That’s so many internet arguments in a nutshell; different groups of people approaching a topic from different angles, and being grumpy that not everyone experienced it in exactly the same way.

So when I read this piece by Jeffrey Zeldman2, I am aware that this is probably just another pesky example of talking – thinking? – at cross-purposes. And yet something about it really did give me pause.

“What’s rare — what’s difficult — is knowing when you’ve said enough. Cutting the sentence that’s technically correct but doesn’t earn its place. Trusting the reader. Trusting the idea. Trusting the white space to do work.

Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement. When everything around you is excessive by default, choosing fewer words takes courage. It says: I thought about this. I edited. I respected your time more than I needed to show my work.”

I really don’t think this is wrong, per se. But I see a lot of advice for writers which focuses on brevity. It has a long and storied history. But I rarely see anybody giving the other side: that it can be incredibly easy to not quite write enough, and to not give your reader vital context.

It’s a problem I’ve run into constantly here on Dirty Feed, and with good reason: my knowledge of television is often deep rather than wide, which is the exact opposite of most people. So when I’m writing about some old show which I love, I’m often quite far into the weeds, because for me that’s where the interesting stuff is. If you know as much about the programme I’m writing about as I do, then you’ll join me with no problem. If you don’t, then you’re going to struggle.

But crucially: with the right bit of context at the beginning, I can sometimes drag more people along for the ride. I never used to have to do this when I wrote about Red Dwarf for Ganymede & Titan; when writing specifically for a fan audience, it’s just far less of a problem. But it gave me bad habits when trying to write about things here, and it took many years to get rid of them. It took a whole decade of writing Dirty Feed before I even started to get better at this.

Even now, I run into problems, on articles which you really would think were plenty long enough already. Take, for instance, this epic five-part series on The Young Ones and its infamous flash frames. In total, those pieces amount to over 15k words; surely I said everything I needed to say on the subject?

But I don’t think so. I think it’s missing a whole part, in fact. A part which gives some proper context to the history of flash frames when it comes to television in general, and comedy in particular. A part which talks about whether flash frames actually do influence audiences in any way, or whether that’s a load of old hooey. When I first published those pieces, one person in particular chastised me a little for not talking about that latter point; I was a bit grumpy at the time, but I think they were right.

15k words, and there needed to be more. I needed to pull back just a little and give more context for a wider audience, and I abjectly failed to do so. If I had, maybe those pieces might have been really successful, not just successful by the standards of this site.3

Brevity can be important. But it’s equally as easy to simply not write enough.

  1. It amuses me that many people who dislike the word “content” are the same people who get riled up about people not using alt text on Bluesky, given this context of accessibility. ↩

  2. Ironically, someone who was heavily involved in work on those web standards from twenty years ago, though this is an entirely different topic. ↩

  3. I may try to rectify this in an eBook of those pieces one day, if I can find the time. But even as I ponder this, I think about how vital some of the videos are in those pieces, and blanch at trying to adapt it for text. This is one huge reason why I’ve always struggled with putting together a book of my work here: I write for the internet, and everything the medium offers. ↩

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Letterbollocks

Published 28th April 2026

Film / Internet

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.

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  1. 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. ↩

A Piece of PIAS

Published 15th March 2026

Computing / Internet / Videogames

I don’t let the old Acorn/RISC OS fanboy in me out very much any more. At least, not in polite company. But I have to admit, when reading a blog post recently from somebody around my age1, which was complaining about how unsafe they felt buying computers from the US due to the Trump administration, a little voice popped into my head, unbidden.

“YOU HAD THE CHANCE TO BUY BRITISH IN THE 90S AND YOU DIDN’T, IT’S TOO LATE NOW!”

Ahem. Slightly unfair, of course – Acorn’s machines had plenty of US involvement, not least with partners like VLSI – but I still think there’s a reasonable point there when it comes to the software stack. And anyway, being slightly unfair is the whole point of being a fanboy.

Still, I should dial this rather unpleasant part of me back to something useful. So let’s travel a little further back in time to my BBC Master days. Specifically the release Play It Again Sam 6.

Play It Again Sam 6 advert

Play It Again Sam 6 advert, from the January 1989 issue of Acorn User

Play It Again Sam was that magic thing: a win for both company and consumer. Take four old games Superior Software had the rights to, package them up with minimal effort, charge the same amount as a single game would, and watch the money flow in. Crucially, if you already had two of the games, the releases were still a bargain. The 8-bit incarnation ended up running for 18 installments between and 1987 and 19932, and sometimes there was even a brand new game included.

So given that value for money, along with loving my BBC Master more than life itself, I owned every single release, yes? In fact, no. I think Play It Again Sam 6 was the only one I owned. And while I had a “healthy” collection of pirate games – including some games which appeared on various Play It Again Sam releases – I certainly didn’t own every game featured on them, legally or otherwise. Nowhere near.

I think maybe this is something that’s easy for us to forget as adults. (Or at least, the kind of adults who read this site.) Recently, I’ve been on a bit of a Jayne Mansfield kick, and have been tracking down as many films of hers as I can reasonably watch. This means obvious fare like The Girl Can’t Help It, through to less obvious films like The Challenge, and onto true obscurities like The Fat Spy.3 This has involved ordering some truly odd DVD releases. As my friend Darrell said: “When you’re onto the Spanish bootleg DVDs you know you’re in deep.”

But as a kid, I didn’t have the resources to do this kind of collecting. And no matter how much I might love any given thing, the very idea of owning every single release of something was just incomprehensible.4 Not only would I never own every single Play It Again Sam compilation, but of course I would never own every single Play It Again Sam compilation.

After all, I was never going to own every single Donald Duck VHS release either. I’d just wear out the single one I had.

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  1. Deliberately left unlinked, I ain’t interested in a fight. ↩

  2. Plenty of websites claim that Play It Again Sam 18 was released in 1992, but I don’t believe this is the case. The issue is blurred by the fact that Superior essentially stopped advertising its 8-bit range in the Acorn magazines the start of 1993; but until then, the latest compliation they were pushing was 17. Given that, the 1993 date feels most likely.

    There was also a Play It Again Sam 19 released in 1997, released by ProAction, but this is distinct from the original Superior Software compilations, in my opinion. ↩

  3. The Fat Spy currently holds the record for the worst film I have ever seen. ↩

  4. The closest I ever came was Blue Peter annuals, and a) you could get them cheaply at boot sales, and b) that was as much pushed by my parents as much as anything else. ↩

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,

Here’s the Thing:

Published 27th February 2026

Computing / Internet

Seth Godin, “Freelancer empathy”:

“When phone cameras got good enough, portrait photographers scolded people who took their own headshots.

And when the Mac got pretty good at typesetting, professional designers pointed out that people who can’t tell a font from a typeface and don’t care about kerning should avoid it.

Professional translators bring humanity and insight to transforming writing from one language to another, but many people continue to use Google Translate…

Here’s the thing: the translators take their own headshots. Web designers often use translation software. And life coaches build their own websites with Squarespace and put their own selfies on Linkedin. We all make our own decisions, and most of the time, we use tech to do it ourselves.”

Greg Storey has an issue with the above – not the message, but the writing itself:

“What happens when a prolific author integrates AI into their work so much that it turns up wholesale in their writing? Seth Godin – said prolific author – recently posted an argument for hiring freelancers instead of using technology on his blog. While I agree with his message I paused when I began the fourth paragraph which starts with a telltale sign of AI writing.

Here’s the thing: nobody writes like this, only the robots. Now, I’m sure there are folks out there who do but it is now so prevalent that it stands out like a statement on a back of a consumer product: Made by AI.”

In other words: using the phrase “Here’s the thing:” makes your product look like the output of AI.

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Add Real Value

Published 23rd September 2025

Internet

I received an email the other day. It was sent to my Substack email address, and was titled “last post thoughts”. It read as follows:

“hi John,

gotta say, enjoyed the last post. the mix of archive nitpicking and
personal notes was kinda brilliant and felt very real.
I dont have a formal pitch, just curious.

would you ever profile a relevant expert in a future piece?

if yes, id love to point you toward someone who’d fit the tone and add
real value. fwiw, cheers — [name removed]”1

I mean, you might think I’m oversuspicious. But I detect just a smidge of AI writing in the above post, I don’t know about you.

Not that we need it, but there is proof. This email was sent by someone – or something – using an email address @podpitchplus.com. And what is PodPitch, exactly?

“Stop wasting time with one-off emails to podcasts. PodPitch is the first and only software that finds, writes, and sends pitches to podcast hosts from your actual email address. Whether or not you’re already pitching podcasts, PodPitch will make sure you get podcast bookings – guaranteed.”

Brilliant work, well done. I mean, I don’t run a podcast, sure, but maybe a “relevant expert” could be profiled in my newsletter, yeah?

Well, except that PodPitch couldn’t figure out August’s newsletter was the last one. But that’s a detail.

  1. Yes, I removed the name. Yes, I’m too nice. ↩

Rescued.

Published 22nd April 2025

Internet / Videogames

Jason Dyer’s All the Adventures project – “Wherein I play and blog about every adventure game ever made in (nearly) chronological order” – is undergoing a particularly amazing time at the moment. So far he’s covered 192 full games from 1982 alone – 32 of them since the start of this year – some of them very obscure indeed, and usually in multi-part articles. It brings into sharp focus those people who simply pretend to write blogs.

Jason doesn’t just limit himself to games which were published. For instance, take Time Warden by Simon Wadsworth, a game vaguely inspired by Doctor Who. Simon wrote about it on his own site:

“This was my second full adventure. I submitted it to Bug-Byte, as I had done with The Scepter, but it was never published. It was written using the same source code structure. I’d forgotten all about this game until sorting through a pile of old cassette tapes looking for my copy of The Scepter.

In this adventure you play the Time Warden. While you have been away on vacation and the Key of Time has been lost on the planet Syrius 5. You have 250 turns to recover the key before the end of the Universe.”

Luckily, Simon didn’t just talk about it on his site – he provided a download link to the game, which Jason used to write his post. Not that you can actually directly download it from Simon’s site any more… or, indeed, even read about it. The site went offline at some point in 2019. You can only access it now through the Wayback Machine.

Meaning that when Jason wrote about Time Warden, he’s writing about something rescued twice: firstly, an unpublished game scraped from an old cassette by its author… and then secondly, scraped from a defunct website through the Internet Archive.

Blogs are dead. Apart, of course, from all the amazing blogs out there.

What a Mistake-a to Make-a

Published 3rd February 2025

Internet / TV Comedy

The other day, I received an email with the subject line “YouTube removed your content”. Oh dear, what have I done now?

“It looks like [your video] didn’t follow our Community Guidelines. We removed it from YouTube.

We think your content violated our hate speech policy.”

What the fuck?

“Content that promotes hateful supremacism by alleging the superiority of a group over those with protected group status to justify violence, discrimination, segregation, or exclusion isn’t allowed on YouTube. We review educational, documentary, artistic, and scientific content on a case-by-case basis. Limited exceptions are made for content with sufficient and appropriate context.”

Right, OK. I instantly appealed, and ten minutes later, got back the following reply:

We reviewed [your video] again and confirmed it’s not allowed under our hate speech policy.

Your video won’t be put back on YouTube.

We understand this may be frustrating, but we’re committed to keeping YouTube a safe place for everyone.

Our goal is to help you succeed on YouTube. We encourage you to take a look at our Community Guidelines and keep them in mind when posting content in the future.

So what was this totally outrageous video on my account?

A clip from ‘Allo ‘Allo, “The Confusion of the Generals”, transmitted on 12th November 1988.

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Blog Questions Challenge

Published 2nd February 2025

Internet / Meta

I sometimes feel Dirty Feed is a weird mix of stuff. Obviously, a large part of my audience comes here for ridiculous minutiae about old television, particularly old comedy. Hello there. I like you.

But there’s also a strand of posts here – lessened over the years, perhaps, but definitely still there – which is about writing for the web in general. Some of this stuff occasionally gets quite widely-read if somebody grabs hold of it and links to it. For instance, this piece I published about the indie web actually did much better than any of the posts about TV I published in 2024. I don’t think the two audiences really have much crossover, which means I’m sure I disappoint a lot of archive TV fans when they see a brand new post on here, and it’s just me wanging on about websites rather than telly.

To which people I say: sorry, this is another of those posts. After seeing this post about blogging habits turn into a little chain letter, posted by people like Jeremy Keith, Luke Dorny and Greg Storey, I thought it might be fun to give it a go.

For those of you who couldn’t give a monkey’s tits about my writing process: don’t worry, there’ll be another post about 90s Granada comedy pilots before you know it.

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