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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?

Tonight’s Special Guest Star: Adolf Hitler as Himself

Published 20th March 2022

TV Comedy

It is perhaps a mark of the kind of show Red Dwarf is that an episode can start with having Lister climb into a living photo featuring Adolf Hitler, beat him up, nick his briefcase, and accidentally foil an assassination attempt.

Nevertheless, ten minutes into “Timeslides” (12/12/89) that is exactly what has happened, leading to Rimmer’s memorable line: “You can’t just stick one on the leader of the Third Reich.” But we’re not here to talk about the actual comedy in the episode. That would be ludicrous.

No, we’re here to talk about this prop newspaper:

News Chronicle newspaper: headline Hitler Escapes Bomb Attack at Nuremberg

In grand time travel story tradition, this is the shot that tells us that what Lister did is real. His leap into the living photograph had actual, lasting repercussions for the universe; it didn’t exist in its own little bubble. It’s the revelation that powers the whole rest of the episode.

It’s also the kind of shot which makes me think: hang on, did they make that newspaper front page from scratch, or is it based around a real one? Of course it made me think that. I have form.

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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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Leisure World International

Published 13th March 2022

TV Comedy

Red Dwarf‘s “Back to Reality” (RX: 5-6/12/91), befitting its story, has something of a dual nature. In many ways, it’s a bold, unusual episode, pushing Red Dwarf to places it had never been before. In other ways, it’s just the natural conclusion to themes which had been present in the show from the very beginning. It’s not like one of the best sitcom episodes of the 90s sprung out of the television without warning.

Nevertheless, perhaps more than any other episode of Red Dwarf, it absolutely commits to its central idea. Seven minutes in, our crew are dead, and thrown into their nightmare. And one thing which makes it feel unlike any other episode is how few of the usual standing sets it uses. Just Starbug. The rest of our familiar, friendly haunts are nowhere to be seen.

Which presents the show with an interesting production problem. At the end of the series1, Production Designer Mel Bibby suddenly has to pull out a brand new bunch of sets, just for a single episode. From scratch.

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  1. Yes, “Back to Reality” was not only transmitted last, but recorded last too. ↩

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I Want Names, I Want Places, I Want Dates

Published 20th February 2022

TV Comedy

Sometimes, when you hear what has become a well-worn anecdote about a TV show, you wonder whether it’s actually true or not. Other times, you have absolutely no doubt that it’s true. You just want to know more.

Red Dwarf has a great many of these tales. And something I’ve wondered for many years concerns the electricians’ strike which meant that the original recordings for Series 1 had to be abandoned. This has been told in many forms for years; for example, in the “Launching Red Dwarf” documentary on the Series 1 DVD in 2002, commissioner Peter Ridsdale-Scott had this to say:

“The worries were legion. First of all, we had the strike, which meant that every single episode of Red Dwarf of that first series went into production, into rehearsal, and never went into the studio. All six of them. So we’d spent all the money, and the BBC said ‘Well, sorry about this, it’s been very good and we’re sure it would have been a success, but that’s it’. And Paul [Jackson] and I said ‘Oh no. We may have spent the money, but we must remount this production, we must get it on.’ And we persuaded them, and it was put on.”

The same story is told on the official Red Dwarf site1:

“On the second day of rehearsals, an electrician’s strike began at the BBC which effectively put a stop to any production. Unperturbed, the crew completed rehearsals for the first episode and moved on to the second, optimistic that they could fit the The End shoot onto the end of the other existing episode slots.

Except one by one, the episode recordings were called off as the strike persisted. The entire season, rehearsed and ready, was left for six months – past the originally intended dates for broadcast – before being remounted.”

All of which is great, and frankly a damn sight more than we get to hear about most sitcoms. But I’m greedy, and I want more. There’s one particular aspect about all this which has never quite been nailed down over the years. And that is: what were the exact dates of the abandoned Red Dwarf recordings for Series 1?

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  1. Select the ‘Production’ section. ↩

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DJs Leave Radio Fab

Published 8th February 2022

TV Comedy

JOHNNY BEERGUT: They’re sacked!
SMASHIE & NICEY: We resign!

The internet is not short of praise for Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse’s Smashie and Nicey: The End of an Era (TX: 4/4/94). This is not surprising, given that it’s their masterwork. What the internet is short of, mind, is going through End of an Era with a fine toothcomb, and picking out bits of obscure production detail.

Hello there. After our relaunch, let’s get back to business as usual, right?

So take a look at the newspaper at the beginning of End of an Era, announcing the resignation of Smashie and Nicey in a highly amusing manner.1

Now, clearly they wouldn’t have written an entire edition of a newspaper just for this sequence. So our question for today: what real newspaper did the production team use as a basis for the prop?

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  1. Incidentally, I also enjoy the Hippies take on this joke: HIPPIES IN POINTLESS, STUPID PROTEST AT OBSCURE SANDPAPER EXHIBITION. ↩

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A Brief Investigation into Recording Dates for Are You Being Served?

Published 13th January 2022

TV Comedy

At the end of last year, we talked a little about how some sitcoms were shot far closer to transmission than I ever expected. But sometimes, such stories just seem a little too unbelievable. Take Are You Being Served? – or, specifically, Wikipedia’s episode guide for the show. If you scan your eyes down that list until you reach Series 5, you will come across something rather odd.

Apparently, every single episode of Series 5 was recorded the day before it aired. For example, “Mrs Slocombe Expects”, shown on the 25th February 1977, was recorded on the 24th February 1977. This continues right up until the last episode of Series 5, “It Pays to Advertise”; this was shown on the 8th April 1977, and was apparently recorded on the 7th April 1977.

Something smells fishy. Being recorded close to transmission is one thing. The entire series being shot the day before TX is quite another. So let’s take a sneaky look at the paperwork for that first episode of the series, “Mrs Slocombe Expects”.

Paperwork for episode Mrs Slocombe Expects - all relevant information transcribed in main body text

Through that haze of atrocious reproduction, we can just about read the recording date for the episode: 18th February 1977. Actually very close to transmission – exactly a week before, in fact – but certainly not the previous day.

And the same holds true for the rest of the series. “The Old Order Changes” was recorded on the 11th March for transmission on the 18th March, “Goodbye Mr. Grainger” was recorded on the 25th March for transmission on the 1st April, and “It Pays to Advertise” was recorded on the 1st April for transmission on the 8th April. And while I’m missing information on two of the episodes, it’s not too difficult to work out from all this that “A Change is as Good as a Rest” was almost certainly recorded on the 25th February for transmission on the 4th March, and “Founder’s Day” was recorded on the 4th March for transmission on the 11th March.

As to how somebody updated Wikipedia with this particular piece of incorrect information, who knows. It could perhaps be a simple confusion between “a day” and “a week”. But despite it triggering my Spidey-sense, this kind of misinformation is all too easily believable to some, because it’s so damn specific. There’s no actual need to quote the recording dates in the first place; if somebody has bothered to do so, it’s extremely easy to just assume that they are the real deal. Indeed, this “fact” about some episodes of the show being recorded the day before TX has been quoted to me at least twice before.

It ain’t true. And to be fair, given past experience, Wikipedia will probably be corrected by somebody within an hour of me posting this.1

  1. I’ve been asked before why I don’t fix things on Wikipedia myself. Without going into too many details, I struggle a little with Wikipedia’s guidelines on various things. Not to the point where I want to do some massive rant about them… but I’m not going to get involved myself. Sorry, Wikipedians, but my work is best done here. ↩

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81 Take 2

Published 12th January 2022

TV Comedy

For 2022, I saw the New Year in right. Yes, I watched some comedy from exactly 40 years ago. Why, what did you think I was up to?

So thanks to Ian Greaves, here is 81 Take 2, a sketch show produced by Sean Hardie which was originally broadcast on BBC1 on 31st December 1981 at 11:20pm. Described by the Radio Times at the time as “guaranteed unrepeatable”, that is in fact exactly what it was.

I’m not about to do a lengthy, in-depth review of the programme. It fully deserves one, of course, but not today. Suffice to say that the Not the Nine O’Clock News and A Kick Up the Eighties DNA is supremely apparent. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, and it’s worth watching for the The Hee Bee Gee Bees segment alone.1

I do, however, want to draw your attention to the final segment at 27:43, after the fake end, where we join “Caesars Palace in Las Vegas”… and a certain Dicky Dynasty. Where Rik Mayall gives a quite astonishing performance. It’s by far the best part of the whole programme.

And anyone who knows anything about The Young Ones will recognise the character instantly. Nearly a year later in “Bomb”, broadcast on 30th November 1982, we get…

As has been pointed out by Mike Scott, amongst others: the whole programme, and the Dicky section in particular, really is a bit of a missing link when it comes to early 80s comedy. A programme which should have been clipped up and talked about endlessly, but really hasn’t.

It reminds me that there’s always something new to discover. No matter how much The Young Ones has been talked about over the years, the above has remained genuinely obscure for four decades now. Instead of going over the same old anecdotes, we should be digging up things like this.

*   *   *

In the spirit of the above then, here’s a brand new piece of information about 81 Take 2 which is relevant to this site’s interests. Because despite their absence in the credit roller, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor contributed a sketch to this programme. It isn’t their first broadcast TV material; for a start, they had contributed to Series 1 of A Kick Up the Eighties a few months previously. But it certainly counts as some of their very earliest.

Tracing exactly which material they wrote is slightly tricky. The paperwork for the programme doesn’t give the names of each sketch, but just lists the duration and its writer roughly in order. Moreover, some of the durations don’t 100% match… because of course they bloody don’t.

I think we can have a stab, though. Here’s the last few credits listed in the paperwork:

Andy Hamilton: Sketch: Dur 2.35
Simon Holder/Dudley Rogers: Oneliner: 12″
Colin Gilbert: Oneliner: Dur 23″
Donnie Kerr: Oneliner: Dur 12″
Donnie Kerr: Oneliner: Dur 15″
Peggy Evens: Oneliner: Dur 8″
Niall Clark: Quickie: Dur 25″
Philip Differ: Oneliner: Dur: 10″
Rob Grant/Doug Naylor: Sketch: Dur: 39″
Mike Radford: Oneliner: Dur: 10″
Ian Pattison: Quickie: Dur: 15″

The big Hamilton sketch at the top of that list is at 21:38 into the YouTube video, and is the Godfather parody. Skipping a few, I think the 25″ Clark quickie is at 25:43, and the lethal package sent to Mrs. Thatcher. We then have the 10″ one liner written by Differ… meaning that the Grant Naylor sketch is almost certainly the cricket scores sketch at 26:22. It lasts 34″ and not 39″, but I put that down to the usual inaccuracies you get with this kind of thing. Moreover, the sketch feels very Grant Naylor to me.

Happy 2022 everyone.

  1. It is tempting to complain that BBC One should be showing new comedy on New Year’s Eve now, and that a best of Have I Got News For You doesn’t quite cut it. Then I just thought I’d check what BBC One Scotland were up to, and noticed that they not only had a brand new episode of Scot Squad, and also had a brand new sketch show Queen of the New Year. ↩

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Another Very Important Article Examining the Contents of Victor Meldrew’s Kitchen Cabinets

Published 28th December 2021

TV Comedy

To write one article about One Foot in the Grave recording dates which hinges on the items in the Meldrews’ kitchen cabinets may be regarded as a misfortune. To write two looks like carelessness.

Oh well, here we go again.

Let’s take a look at “The Broken Reflection” (TX: 16/2/92). That’s the one where Victor’s brother Alfred shows up, and David Renwick decides to break our goddamn hearts… again. Alfred Meldrew is played brilliantly by Richard Pearson, and in Richard Webber’s excellent book The Complete One Foot in the Grave, the following rather alarming anecdote about the recording is told:

“For eagle-eyed viewers, the sudden appearance of a small bandage on one of Pearson’s fingers in the scene where he was opening a parcel on the Meldrews’ kitchen table was the result of an earlier accident. During the recording, Pearson used a knife to open the package. ‘It was too sharp, which was a little naughty because all knives are supposed to be blunt on set,’ admits Susan Belbin. Pearson sliced his finger and the extent of the bleeding left the director no alternative but to stop the recording. ‘I had to get him to hospital, so we left the rest of his scenes that night because he needed stitches.’ He returned the following week and completed his scenes, hence the bandage. ‘He was so good about it and I felt sorry for him. It was a bad cut.'”

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