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Exodus

Published 11th November 2022

Meta

Do I know what the bloody hell is happening with Twitter right now? No. I have absolutely no idea. A quality I share with Elon Musk, at least.

Nonetheless, even if talk of life rafts is a little overblown, I’d rather be overblown than risk losing a whole network of people who might actually be interested in what I have to say over here. So, while it’s not properly set up yet, and won’t be launched for a month or so, you can sign up for the brand new Dirty Feed newsletter here:

A few notes, then.

  • This will probably be monthly to start with. We’ll see how it goes. I’m certainly not intending to fill your inbox every week.
  • Rather than including the actual articles in the newsletter, it’ll mainly just be links to stuff here, with a short introduction each month. Think how Tom Scott does his newsletter. I don’t really want to change how this site works entirely; I just want it to be easier for people to be notified of articles here.
  • I’m not planning on much stuff unique to the newsletter at first, but that might change later on. We’ll see.
  • It will include a short “elsewhere on the net” section linking to a few other things I enjoyed that month. I can’t make it the focus of the newsletter – I don’t have time – but I think it’d be a nice thing to do for creators and readers alike.
  • This newsletter is completely separate to the per-post email subscriptions I launched a couple of months ago. Those will email you immediately when I update the site; the newsletter will be a more curated monthly thing. If you’re not sure which you want, I’d suggest the newsletter. (If really you want to hear from me more than once a month, you know.)

As for this place: yes indeed, we’re perilously close to pretend blogging at the moment. I’m busy with a major project outside Dirty Feed, but I’ll hope to get back to things around here before the end of the month.

After all, can you cope without knowing the location OB dates for Series 3 of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em for much longer? Well, can you?

they’re good blogs Brent

Published 11th October 2022

Internet / Meta

Last year, software developer Brent Simmons wrote something which stayed with me. It’s short, so hopefully he won’t mind me quoting all of it.

“This blog is almost 22 years old, and in all that time I’ve been solid about posting regularly — until this recent dry spell.

I skipped the summer. Last post was in June. There was just one that month, and just one in May.

I have an explanation: while my health and physical circumstances are unchanged and, happily, fine, I have not felt the drive to write here that I always felt.

I never, in all these years, had to push myself. I’d get an idea and I would be compelled to write it up and publish it. It was always that simple.

But I haven’t felt that way in many months, and I’m not sure I will again.

Maybe this is temporary, and there will be hundreds more posts to come.

But I kind of think not, because there’s a bigger issue: I expect and hope that eventually I will no longer be a public person — no blog, no Twitter, no public online presence at all.

I have no plan. I’m feeling my way to that destination, which is years off, surely, and I just hope to manage it gracefully. (I don’t know of any role models with this.)

Anyway. In case I don’t write here again — in case these are the last words of this blog — thank you. I loved writing here, and you are why.”

Since then, Brent has stayed true to his word, and really has become less of a public person. He’s made just one more blog post since then, and seems to have deleted nearly all of his tweets too.

[Read more →]

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Yet More Crap to Clog Up Your Inbox

Published 15th September 2022

Meta

a) One of the aims when I relaunched Dirty Feed earlier this year was to give people more ways to keep up with what this site is up to, without relying on RSS or Twitter.

b) It takes me bloody ages to get around to anything.

c) Twitter has been so utterly atrocious this week that it has finally spurred me into action.

d) This site’s subscribe page now has a form where you can enter your e-mail address, and get posts from here sent directly to your inbox. (Or just follow if you’re already logged into WordPress.com.)

e) Because I really want to make it easy for you to do this, so I can stop relying on Twitter so much, you can just do the same here:

f) Your address will not be used by any site other than dirtyfeed.org and wordpress.com, or used for any other purpose other than to email you site updates for Dirty Feed, or any other sites you specifically sign up for.

g) For those of you who would rather have a more curated newsletter-style thing, I’m aiming to start one of those in the next few months.

h) If you’re one of the very few people who already get email updates from me, without me bothering to make it easy for you to sign up to them: congratulations, you’re great. I hope this makes up for this pointless email you’ve just received.

i) That is all.

Mind the Gap

Published 12th September 2022

Meta

On Thursday September the 8th, at 12:09pm, I tweeted the following.

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.

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Party of One

Published 20th July 2022

Life / Meta

It was in a field aged 18 when I finally realised just how boring I was.

It was a party. One of those all-day parties that teenagers are supposed to have a great time at. Moreover, it was an all-night party too. My friend was pretty cool. His family owned a farm, so we could pitch tents in one of the fields and sleep over. I don’t know how much sex happened in those tents. I wasn’t invited to those. I do know there was some fingering going on. I wasn’t invited to that, either.

It was an odd mix of people at those parties. I had the fortune – or perhaps misfortune – to fall in with a vaguely cool crowd, without being remotely cool myself. This could make things fun. It could also mean you spent a long time looking around you, feeling vaguely inadequate. As for who was there: it was a real mix. There were nice people there, there were utter dicks, there were nice people pretending to be utter dicks, and there were utter dicks pretending to be nice. I’m sure everyone has grown up and is lovely now.1

But at this party, I was particularly at a loss. There were just too many people. Sometimes these parties were smaller affairs, but with this one, everyone had managed to show up. Including loads of people I’d never met before. I worked best in small groups; put me with too many people, and I used to freeze up entirely.

Not to matter. I’d managed to find myself part of a circle, with the nerd group. The computer guys. Surely I could be happy here? The party’s host admonished us; we should stop being sad and go and talk to other people, rather than take the easy way out. I don’t think we listened. It was scary out there.

Except I had a problem. What had felt like a safe group turned out to be anything but. They all knew far more about computer stuff than I did. I very rapidly came to the conclusion that I had nothing to say to these people. I mean, literally: nothing. What possible thing could I actually say? They knew far more than I did about any given topic that might have cropped up. I had sod all to offer.

I have rarely felt more alone than at that moment. If I had nothing to say to the computer nerd gang, I had even less to say to everyone else. I suddenly became acutely aware of how utterly boring I was. I knew nothing, I had no interesting ideas, I couldn’t even talk about stuff I liked with any kind of wit.

I felt… empty.

*   *   *

I get the idea that looking back, I’m supposed to say that I wasn’t really that boring after all. That everyone is pretending to be interesting at 18 – or 28, or 38 – and that nobody else at that party was more interesting than I was.

There’s an element of truth to that, sure. There was no doubt a lot of posturing from others going on. But I don’t think my appraisal of myself was completely off the mark either. When I was 18, I really didn’t have very much of interest to say. More to the point, there were very definitely loads of people at that party who were more engaging than I was.2 And I really did know jack shit about computers compared to others there, my supposed area of interest. If I was harsh on myself at the time, I wasn’t entirely incorrect either.

Am I better now, over two decades on? Yes, better. But not perfect. Sometimes, the spectre of that party will suddenly make itself very obvious indeed. And I’ve dealt with that in various different ways over the years. Certainly, the shortcut of just saying something shocking is something I’ve dragged out rather too often in the past. Sometimes, it was actually funny and worth it. Sometimes, it was… not. A few particular memories of when it was not aren’t stories I’m going to bring out in polite company, Or indeed any company.

But even without resorting to that, I can struggle my way through nowadays better than any other time in my life. I’m not brilliant. But I manage. Just.

*   *   *

I sometimes think I post too much here on Dirty Feed. This didn’t use to be the case; there have been times when I’ve struggled to find the time or energy for this place. But not any more. And over the past few years, even when I’ve tried to take a break, I’ve spectacularly failed to do so.

Most obviously, this happened at the start of 2021, where I wanted to put the site on hiatus and do something else for a bit… and then didn’t. But even last month, I tried to take a smaller break, and just couldn’t manage it. I was back posting here just two weeks later.

There are lots of reasons why I find it hard to step away from here, both good and bad. But one big reason is that I eventually figured out how to write in a way that some people find interesting. Certainly not to all people, or even to most people. I’m interesting to a vanishingly small number, really. But that number is still enough to make me happy.

Because while I manage to write things that people find interesting here, I can battle those demons of when I was 18… and the least interesting person who ever lived. And if I squint, maybe it can feel like I won.

Just briefly.

  1. I am not sure of this at all. ↩

  2. What’s the difference between being interesting, and pretending to be interesting? Not that much, especially when you’re 18. ↩

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A Quiet Season

Published 5th June 2022

Meta / Videogames

For various reasons, I feel I need to take a bit of a break here on Dirty Feed. No, not a six month break. But I do want a bit of a rest from the endless posting. Partly because I’m a little burnt out with my job and need to clear my head, and partly because I want to spend some time researching and writing some more in-depth pieces than I’ve published on here of late.

So rather than leave you with an obnoxious and self-serving list of my own favourite articles on here as a holding pattern, instead I thought I’d link to a few other sites putting out some consistently good work. In particular: those writing about videogame history.

*   *   *

The Digital Antiquarian by Jimmy Maher
Some websites, like mine, simply post exactly what the writer feels like writing about at any given moment. Others are rather more ambitious. The Digital Antiquarian purports to be nothing less than “an historical chronicle of interactive entertainment”, in order. Of course, as I’m sure Jimmy Maher would be the first to admit, this historical chronicle is filtered through his own personal biases and interests. You won’t find much on consoles here, for instance, while every single game Infocom ever published gets its own article. This is very much not a problem.

The best place to start with the site isn’t on the front page: it’s the table of contents. You can either scroll down and pick the pieces which look interesting, or start right at the very beginning. One of my personal favourites is “What’s the Matter with Covert Action?”, about a game which I had never even heard of before I read the article, let alone played. You need precisely zero familiarity with the game in order to fully appreciate the argument the piece makes. And Jimmy’s writing really does go out of its way to avoid the boring, obvious arguments.

I love The Digital Antiquarian so much that I support Jimmy’s Patreon. If you have the means and enjoy the site, it might be worth doing the same.

All the Adventures by Jason Dyer
If the ambition of The Digital Antiquarian is startling, then the project All the Adventures is thoroughly ridiculous. Jason Dyer has promised nothing less than to “play and blog about every adventure game ever made in (nearly) chronological order”. There are hundreds of posts on the site already, and he’s only up to 1982. This might take a while.

Again, I highly suggest that you start on the chronological list of games rather than the front page, and see whether you want to skip around, or just start at the beginning. I especially loved his investigation into Time Zone – a famous, formidable, daunting game which I was never, ever, ever going to play… but sure loved reading someone else doing the hard work instead.

Revs on the BBC Micro by Mark Moxon
My last suggestion is a little different from the others. For a start, it’s far more technical – perhaps impenetrably so for many. But blame the old BBC Micro user in me, I find it utterly irresistible.1

The Beeb got a surprising amount of highly innovative games, considering its reputation among some people; Elite, Exile, and Aviator, to name but three. Some of those games are even covered elsewhere on the site I’m linking to here. But I was particularly taken by Mark Moxon’s articles about Revs, an extremely early racing sim. Mark’s work actually involves a complete documentation of the source code of the game, which I’m sure is fascinating for those people it’s aimed at, but for me it’s the articles which make the whole thing accessible to the lay person, albeit the technically-minded lay person.

My favourite piece on the whole site is this examination of the custom screen mode in Revs, which is the kind of thing I had a vague kind of idea about, but not how complex it actually was. It’s such a delight to find out brand new things about something decades old. While some people sit there pretending to write, it’s people like Mark who are calmly getting shit done.

*   *   *

I’ve only scratched the surface here of the fun stuff going on in retro gaming right now. There’s the Video Game History Foundation, who recently published this search for an important female pioneer in gaming. There’s The Genesis Temple, which takes a particular look at the oft-forgotten European side of gaming. There’s also the superlative 50 Years of Text Games, with the quite astonishing tale behind Silverwolf. I really do mean utterly astonishing. And so on and so on, across what must be hundreds of sites. And I’ve not even started on all the various podcasts or YouTube.

There seems to me right now to be some extraordinary work going in terms of retro gaming, both in terms of analysis, and pure software preservation. There has been for years, of course, but I feel it more than ever right now. In fact, I might almost be tempted to use that dreaded phrase “golden age”. If you want to know all about the games of your childhood – or even the games of somebody else’s childhood – there’s a quite astonishing amount of material out there.

So there you go. Plenty to be getting on with away from here. I hope at least one of the sites above is new to you. As for this place, the fact that this post has been a struggle to write, when it’s literally just a few links bunged together, probably tells you all you need to know about how well my brain is working at the moment.

See you on the other side. Toodle-oo.

  1. Old time BBC Micro users will get the headine of this article, for instance. Yes, Yellow River Kingdom… ↩

Dear Diary

Published 13th May 2022

Internet / Meta

Some things I write would be better left unread, buried at the bottom of a drawer, thrown into the sea, and then blown up by an naval mine. This is one of them. If you’re really interested in my thoughts about where Dirty Feed might be going over the next year or so, by all means grab a cup of tea and settle down.

If you’re not, then don’t worry: something fun about The Young Ones will be along before you know it.1

[Read more →]

  1. Seriously. An off-air of something from 1984 which has been lost for years popped through my letterbox the other day. ↩

Website Says No

Published 21st March 2022

Meta / TV Comedy

If I was really interested in getting hits here on Dirty Feed, I would write a long series of articles detailing every last edit made to the new iPlayer version of Little Britain.

Ostensibly, it’s exactly in this site’s ballpark. Edits made to old comedy shows? I’ve dabbled once or twice in that topic. It’s something that deeply interests me. Why they are made, who has the right to make them, what the end result on any given show is. With the edits made to Little Britain being part of the news agenda right now, I imagine I could write something which would end up being the most popular thing I’ve ever written on the site. It seems an obvious thing to do.

I ain’t touching this one with a bargepole.

Sure, in terms of subject matter, it’s absolutely the kind of thing Dirty Feed would cover. But in terms of everything else, it’s as far away from anything I want to publish as you can get. Over the last two years especially, I’ve aimed to make this site some kind of calm retreat from the nonsense you get elsewhere. In particular, I took pride in updating this site with free, fun stuff during the height of the pandemic. It just felt like the right thing to do.

Little Britain edits aren’t a calm retreat from anything. They’re shrill, and in the news. And if I wrote about them on here, I would get swarms of bad faith arguments of all persuasions battering this site something rotten. Even if I thought what I had to say about the topic was valuable, I 100% cannot face turning this site into something which will attract that kind of attention. The thousands of hits I would get would absolutely not be worth it.

This is also why I never wrote anything about the edits made to “The Germans” episode of Fawlty Towers either. I have a great number of opinions about that – probably enough to piss everybody off – but I think this website might be a bit more useful as place away from that kind of thing. If the only opinions you have about edits made to comedy consist of the squawking you get in some areas of the media or on Twitter, then this place isn’t really for you. And the people I might convert to the cause to look at things a bit deeper wouldn’t be worth sticking my head into the shitstorm. I’ll stick to Thin Blue Line edits, thanks.

So if you think a place which avoids that kind of thing is valuable, and you like anything I’ve written on here, then I’m grateful for anything you can do to spread the word about this site. Whether it’s on Twitter, Facebook, or rude messages daubed on bus shelter walls. It’s difficult to get noticed if you deliberately stay away from the heat… but I like to think that’s a worthwhile thing to do sometimes. And not just for my mental health. Talking about stuff other people aren’t talking about has its own rewards.

As for Little Britain… well, maybe I’ll write something about it in twenty years, when nobody cares any more. Anyone interested in the toned-down BBC One edits of Series 3 that most people have forgotten about?

Jump The Shark 2

Published 14th March 2022

Meta / TV Comedy

I write about Red Dwarf a lot on here. Far more than I ever actually intended to. I thought, after 17-odd years1 of talking about the show on Ganymede & Titan, that I might be kinda done with it. Turns out that there’s a particular strain of production nonsense that I still find interesting, and it can’t be kicked out of me.

But there is one aspect of the show that I don’t really talk about these days. One which probably deserves a bit of explanation. Let me quote a tweet I received yesterday; name stripped because this is about me, not them. In reply to my recent piece about the sets in “Back to Reality”:

“The last ever episode of Red Dwarf.

(Any episodes you may remember being made after this one are merely a product of your fevered imagination.)”

Now, did I find this tweet annoying? Yes, I did. But partly for a reason that this poor unfortunate person could never have known.

Because: after all those years in Red Dwarf fandom, I cannot over-emphasise how bored I am talking about when Red Dwarf stopped being good.

I mean, I have my opinions. God, I have my opinions. I could spray them all out to you right now, like so much fetid diarrhoea. But I talked about that shit for 17 years. It’s a topic which creeps in when you least expect it to. You could be having a lovely little chat about the mechanics of time travel in “Timeslides”, and suddenly somebody’s dislike of Series VII pops up in the conversation and ruins the whole thread.

I’m not exaggerating. It’d happen literally all the time. Sometimes, it would be me throwing the VII-bomb in, because I couldn’t fucking help myself.

Not that this is a purely VII thing. I also took part in podcasts about quite a few series that I didn’t really like very much. Don’t get me wrong; some of those podcasts were very good indeed, albeit not because of me. But I sometimes found making them a stressful experience; I wrote this in 2017 which captures some of my frustration. It’s not always much fun to be part of something like that, only to end up whining like hell. You get sick of the sound of your own voice.

To be clear, this isn’t a jab at fandom per se, Red Dwarf or otherwise. There is a nasty habit some people have of focusing on all the bad things about fandom, and ignoring the good. I have zero time for that point of view. Fandom of all kinds has been responsible for so many amazing things. I’ve especially warmed to fanfic and fanart for certain TV shows over the last few years, which I incorrectly turned up my nose at for ages.

But when I write about Red Dwarf now, it’s with a very specific aim. It’s about taking the bits of the show I love, and seeing what makes them tick. I really want to try and avoid all the old boring conversations about which episodes of the show are any good; I’ve done them to death. Nor am I interested in having any kind of opinion about the episodes I’m not that keen on. I’m reclaiming my love for the show by avoiding the stuff I’m bored with, and forging ahead with brand new actual facts. There’s always something new to discover.

So if anybody wonders why I don’t get into those discussions… there you are. Fandom can be great, but it can also leave scars. Consider the articles I write on here my laser removal treatment.

  1. Very odd. ↩

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All the News That’s Fit to YouTube

Published 9th February 2022

Life / Meta / TV Presentation

Content warning: sexual assault, but no graphic details.

Yesterday’s article about Smashie and Nicey: The End of an Era brought up a problem that I have to contend with every so often. And that problem is: how to deal when a real, horrible thing suddenly intrudes on the silly kind of nonsense I usually write about on here. In yesterday’s case, what was supposed to be a shaggy dog story finding out how a production team adapted a newspaper, turned into a story about a 21-year-old woman being brutally stabbed to death by her husband.

When writing the piece, I had to figure out how to tackle that. Did it make the article inappropriate to publish? Did it at the very least require a warning? In the end, I decided no to both. The story is shocking, but was also ultimately quite short, with no gruesome detail beyond mentioning “multiple stab wounds”. Being over-sensitive can be just as awkward as not considering things enough. I decided to let it stand as it was, and while the piece does actually end as a joke, it’s a joke that acknowledges the awkwardness and hopefully puts everybody on the same page. A joke with a point.

But it did remind me of another issue I had a few years back. It’s something I never wrote about at the time; there is no way of discussing the actual case in question, for reasons that will become apparent. But a conversation on Twitter reminded me of it, and I think it’s an interesting thing to discuss in terms of the problems you can easily run into with examining old telly. So let’s try to examine it… without actually linking to the video in question.

Because this is a case of jigsaw identification.

The video I wanted to write about was a news bulletin. It was a news bulletin with something particularly interesting about its production, which is why I wanted to write about it; the actual news stories were mostly irrelevant to my point. But throughout the bulletin, there was a story about a woman who had been abducted, and then rescued. There was plenty of information given about the abduction: the woman’s name, place names, and the details of how it ended. It’s very, very easy to research what happened with this story after this news bulletin aired.

And when you do that, the woman’s name – so prominent in the bulletin – disappears. And it disappears for a very obvious reason: because she was raped during her abduction. This fact isn’t mentioned during the news broadcast – as much as anything else, it’s too soon for that information to come to light. But once it did, and the rape itself is reported, the woman’s name is entirely excised.

When I found all this out at the time, I was horrified that I’d managed to piece this together. These days, perhaps I’m a little less shocked; given that part of what I do on here is to drag out obscure things, I guess it’s not a surprise that I’d accidentally touch on stuff like this. But it’s a reminder of how easy jigsaw identification is, and you don’t have to be a journalist writing about current criminal cases to mean you have to be careful about it. You can run into these issues even just writing stupid things about old TV.

It’s also a reminder that we’re really not supposed to be able to see that bulletin, here in 2022. It was meant to be watched at that particular moment in time. I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been uploaded; far from it, in fact. But the intent with that piece of reporting was not that any random person would be able to see it in 2022.

There are historic videos and articles like these everywhere online. They’re not intentionally doing anything untoward. But you can piece together all kinds of things using them that you really shouldn’t be able to. I’m not sure there’s an easy solution; any potential “fix” could create a problem ten times worse.

But it’s why, even when writing about old telly… you have to be aware of certain things you might not expect to have to deal with.