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Dinner is Served

Published 5th June 2012

TV Comedy

Filthy Rich & Catflap, end of Episode 3. Richie’s party has been a disaster. And, because it’s Filthy Rich & Catflap, the oven explodes, taking out a large section of the wall…

…and three figures, never seen before, peer through the hole.

Screengrab from end of Episode 3 of Filthy Rich and Catflap

(Video here.)

So, my question is: who are they? They peer into frame very deliberately, so they’re quite clearly supposed to be there.

  • Something from an earlier scene, which was then cut?
  • Next door neighbours?
  • Some kind of fourth-wall breaking malarky – the Visual Effects team, perhaps?

Answers on a postcard*, please.

* In the comments or on Twitter.

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Dirty Feed Podcast #2: Bodysnatcher

Published 15th April 2012

Podcast / TV Comedy

Screengrab from Bodysnatcher

And so, with the surprising success of the opening episode, welcome to the second Dirty Feed podcast. This time, I take a look at Bodysnatcher – an unmade episode from the very first series of Red Dwarf…

[mejsaudio src=”https://www.dirtyfeed.org/downloads/podcast/dirtyfeed-2.mp3″]

Download Podcast #2: Bodysnatcher (23MB MP3, 11:45)
(Subscribe using RSS / iTunes)

As ever, I’d love to have your feedback below. Hopefully they’re interesting in their own right, but these podcasts are also warm-ups for some longer, half-hour shows later in the year – so any suggestions are pathetically gratefully received.

DISCLAIMER: I do know someone who worked on the DVD release mentioned here. Seeing as I spent an entire year slagging off Back To Earth though, I think you can be confident that my opinions about Red Dwarf are honest.

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Dirty Feed Podcast #1: TV Offal

Published 26th February 2012

Podcast / TV Comedy

TV Offal title sequence

Because there clearly aren’t enough of them in the world, here’s the first in a new venture on Dirty Feed – a podcast. This episode, I use Victor Lewis-Smith’s 90s series TV Offal as an excuse to play a one minute long jingle from a radio station in Denver:

[mejsaudio src=”https://www.dirtyfeed.org/downloads/podcast/dirtyfeed-1.mp3″]

Download Podcast #1: TV Offal (22MB MP3, 12:00)
(Subscribe using RSS / iTunes)

These will be published WHENEVER I CAN BE BOTHERED, and are deliberately starting off pretty short. Feedback more than welcome – I’ve been involved in G&T’s Dwarfcasts for over five years now, but this is the first time I’ve done one myself.

Give it a listen! Or: don’t.

With thanks to David Barras, Bigdave, Robin Blamires, jlehmann, jonno, Sean Martin, and mjb1124 on JingleMad for help and audio.

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Underestimating Your Audience

Published 4th February 2012

TV Comedy

So, the BBC have announced Laugh Track, a talent contest to find “the next big Studio Sitcom”. OK, so maybe I’m not so keen on the contest side of things – and alarm bells ring in my head when I read things like “we’re looking for writers that reflect modern Britain” – but hey, it’s still pleasing to see the BBC obviously care about audience sitcom, after some wobbly moments a few years ago. And to go with it, we have this blog post, giving some “handy” hints on how to write your script.

Let’s swiftly move past some of the questionable things in that article – a “comedy sitcom”, eh? – and get to the key section:

“In non-studio comedy series you can do strange, subtle, unusual things – think The Office, Peep Show, The Thick of It, Flight of the Conchords. In studio sitcoms, you have to make the people in the room laugh – out loud, and preferably as often as possible.”

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Red Dwarf X Set Reports Roundup

Published 30th January 2012

TV Comedy

Last Friday saw the last Red Dwarf X audience recording. And last Saturday saw the last Red Dwarf X Ganymede & Titan audience recording report. I’ve been part of the site since 2003, and whilst I don’t like to blow my own trumpet, as Alex Picton-Dinch would say, I do think these are some of the best things we’ve ever published, and worth a link here. If only because it’s fairly difficult to make them boring.

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The Road to Bannu

Published 23rd December 2011

TV Comedy

With David Croft’s death earlier this year, there has been much talk of how his shows proved that audience sitcom works best if, y’know, it’s actually about something. (You may have thought that was fairly obvious, but hey, it’s a start.) Indeed, one of my favourite sitcom episodes of all time is It Ain’t Half Hot Mum‘s final episode in 1981, The Last Roll Call, which deals with demobilisation – a weighty topic which people used to trust audience sitcom with at one point.

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DwarfCast: Red Dwarf X Preview

Published 12th December 2011

TV Comedy

“What is the point……really?” – david barnes, DwarfCast iTunes review

So, Red Dwarf X is starting the first of six audience recordings this Friday. And I can’t resist plugging the latest DwarfCast from Ganymede & Titan that I’m “proud” to be part of, talking about our hopes and expectations for the new series, alongside a healthy dose of ignorance.

We’ve been doing these for over five years now, and they’ve grown from being crap, to not being that crap but still quite crap. Give us a try if you’re at all interested in the upcoming series, though.

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How GOLD ruins programmes, Part #367234

Published 22nd October 2011

TV Comedy / TV Presentation

Whilst we’re on the subject of GOLD transmission errors, the below – broadcast yesterday – brings me out in FISTS OF RAGE. The dinnerladies episode Minnellium – and just as we get to the discovery that Anita was the one who abandoned her baby:

One of the most heart-wrenching endings they ever had to an episode: ruined. The last joke in the episode: ruined. One episode of dinnerladies: ruined. All because they triggered their pre-recorded voiceover in the usual place, rather than actually checking the end of the episode to see if it fitted.

Brilliant, GOLD, well done.

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