Dirty Feed

An Utterly Worthless Experience

Published 13th February 2026

I have to be honest: I’ve been feeling a little guilty over the past couple of weeks. When I fell in love with The Dick Van Dyke Show, I wrote something which tried to explain at least some of what I loved about it. With The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I leapt straight into stupid production minutiae. I feel like I’ve given poor Mary a bit of a bad rap.

So let’s try to redress things a little. I want to talk about one of my very favourite scenes in the show. No, it’s not from “Chuckles Bites the Dust”, which is clearly an amazing episode, but has been talked about far too much by this point. Instead, it’s the closing scene from “Mary and the Sexagenarian”, first broadcast by CBS on the 12th February 1977, and written by Glen and Les Charles.

The whole episode up to this point has been about the trials and tribulations of Mary dating a man 30 years older than her, a topic which could have been potentially queasy, but is dealt with in the show’s typical sensitive fashion. And then we get the final scene of the show. What have we learnt today?

And instead of answering that question, Mary Tyler Moore expertly skewers TV’s propensity for giving life lessons and issuing moral guidance.

LOU GRANT: You take two very different people. Different backgrounds.
MARY RICHARDS: Different outlooks.
LOU GRANT: Right, right. One more than 30 years older than the other. You bring them together. With all the odds against it. Even though the whole world ridicules it. It can still turn out to be… an utterly worthless experience.
MARY RICHARDS: Thank you.

There are so many reasons why I love this. Firstly, it was slightly surprising even to me to find a US sitcom from 1977 be quite so relentlessly cynical. This feels more like a gag from The Simpsons than anything else. Sorry Simpsons, Mary Tyler Moore already did it.¹

Secondly, I adore Mary Tyler Moore’s performance in this scene. True, it’s a scene which is more about selling an abstract idea than an emotional beat. But the actors have to make that idea work within an emotional context, and they do a magnificent job. Mary looks so revolted and defeated as she leaves the office, and she never gets enough credit for just how good she is at those kind of scenes. The very opposite of “turning the world on with her smile”.

We dumb down Mary Tyler Moore into being merely a bright, smiling, all-American gal at our peril. When needed, she brought as much edge to that show as anyone.

But thirdly, and perhaps most importantly: the scene is a reminder to me that I truly love comedy with what I like to call “an evil, beating heart”. I sometimes worry that people misinterpret what I mean by this; that I’m specifically referring to, say, racist or homophobic gags, or at least material which goes into those kinds of areas. But that’s not what I mean at all.

Instead, it’s something a little more subtle: that I enjoy comedy which does not always have a pleasant meaning behind it. Here, it’s the idea that we can all go through painful experiences, and there truly is no real lesson we can learn from them. The pain has been for nothing.

It reminds me very much of one of my favourite jokes from Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em:

FRANK SPENCER: As my mother used to say – a trouble shared, is a trouble doubled.

A joke which, as friend of the site Mike Scott pointed out, is amusing because of the rhyming trouble/double; it just sounds funny. But what I love most about it is that it talks about a real truth which we would all prefer to ignore. Of course we should talk about our problems… and of course that has a bad side too. By sharing a problem, you literally are giving a piece of it to someone else.

And that’s life. Some troubles just have to be doubled. And sometimes, a relationship you had was an entire waste of time, and there’s nothing positive you can take from it. Sucks to be you.

But maybe comedy like this does have a message after all. It sucks to be all of us.

With thanks to Tanya Jones.

The James L. Brooks connection is not lost on me. ↩

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A Programming Note

Published 1st February 2026

Film / Meta

It may not have escaped your attention that this year, Dirty Feed is taking a slightly different tack to normal. Yes, I’m currently on a Mary Tyler Moore kick. And if you think writing about programmes which were never that successful in the UK is a bad idea, just wait until I get onto Mary’s variety shows, which as far as I can tell were never even broadcast in the UK.

I’m doing this for a few reasons. Firstly, yes, I’ve completely fallen in love with Mary’s work. (Seriously, get a Region 1 player, the complete boxset of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and knock yourself out.) Secondly, I’ve been getting a bit itchy about writing about the same things over and over again. Fawlty Towers and The Young Ones are amazing, but there is a limit to how much I can write about those shows without them becoming tedious. I’ve already ruined Red Dwarf for myself. I don’t want to ruin any of my other favourite things.

Oh, and thirdly, I need to make sure this site isn’t purely writing about BBC shows. I got a new job in December last year which makes this a really good idea. You can join the dots there for yourself.

Anyway, while I fool around with things like this, there’s something else I’ve started recently which I’ve found thoroughly enjoyable. I’ve finally got myself a Letterboxd account, and have been logging – and mostly reviewing – every film I’ve watched so far this year. That’s a total of eighteen films in January, and represents a side of my viewing habits which I don’t really talk about very much on here.

I have to say – years late – I really have fallen in love with Letterboxd. As someone who has mainly grown to despise social media, I’m having a ludicrous amount of fun with it. Most social media is filled with people who will punish you for not covering every single possible thing in any given post. And while I love writing Dirty Feed, my pieces on here these days have grown so complex, that it really can feel like work.

Letterboxd allows me to write random thoughts on what I’ve just watched, without feeling like any given review of a film has to be “complete”. The result is something where I can just take five minutes to write up some vague ideas, without it being in any way stressful. It’s the kind of thing which makes you fall in love with writing all over again.

Perhaps my favourite little piece I’ve written over there so far this year has been on Frank Tashlin’s brilliant The Girl Can’t Help It:

“Of COURSE the thing everyone talks about with Tashlin is how is animation background is obvious in his live action films. This is true. But it goes well beyond sight gags like melting ice, cracked glasses, and overflowing milk bottles. Note how the actors here not only strike very obvious, fixed poses, reminiscent of Warners animation, but how *quickly* those actors move from one pose to another. Jayne Mansfield putting her head in her hands is this film at its most animated.

The lesson everyone should learn from films like this is that to make great comedy doesn’t mean dialling everything down to nothing. You can do your big gestures, your stupid jokes, your heightened acting. You just need to make sure all of those things are hanging off real people in situations which mean something. It’s a lesson which is obvious with every frame of The Girl Can’t Help It, and yet so many simply don’t get it. It’s just a shame that too many of those people keep making comedies.”

And yes, I’m currently on a Jayne Mansfield binge. Which is a difficult thing to do these days, with most of her films being slightly less available than you’d think, especially in the UK. It’s things like this which make me fantasise about setting up a boutique Blu-ray label. And losing hundreds of thousands of pounds doing so.

So there we have it. Less nonsense about The Young Ones, more nonsense on The Mary Tyler Moore Hour and The Las Vegas Hillbillys. That may not feel like a win to many of you. But it will probably stop me going slightly mad, at least.

We’ve Put It All Together

Published 30th January 2026

TV Comedy

The great thing about YouTube is that it’s full of unusual clips of TV programmes which used to be difficult or impossible to see any other way. The less great thing about YouTube: often, these clips are given little or no context.

With that in mind: what exactly is the following, ostensibly from The Mary Tyler Moore Show?

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The Mary Tyler Moore Show: Prod. #7001

Published 21st January 2026

TV Comedy

The problem with coming of age as an archive TV nerd through Red Dwarf DVDs is that you get thoroughly spoilt. You expect every single sitcom release to feature a copious selection of deleted scenes. Sometimes you hit lucky; the Seinfeld releases are absolutely incredible. But for older shows, you’re pretty much always going to be disappointed.

Luckily, we know how to make our own fun around here. Last time, we saw how the script for the first episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show pointed towards a reshoot of a key scene. And in that script, there’s a fair amount of material from other scenes which was removed before the show was broadcast.

Let’s investigate. I haven’t noted every single minor change in dialogue phrasing, as that would be immensely tedious, but all significant differences are noted. Times given are from the Region 1 DVD release of the show.¹

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The DVDs of The Mary Tyler Moore Show contain the original broadcast versions of the programme – albeit with the odd edit – not the cut syndicated versions. So this article is definitely about material which was never broadcast. ↩

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best of, mary tyler moore

“Aunt Rhoda’s Really a Lot of Fun”

Published 18th January 2026

TV Comedy

In 2025, I watched all of The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-65) and its spiritual successor The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77), with a chaser of Rhoda (1974-78). That’s such a concentrated burst of greatness that I feel like anything I watch this year will be a disappointment.

So while I scrabble around for something to replace the giant hole in my life – and no, spin-off Phyllis (1975-77) doesn’t quite cut it – I can at least throw myself into the usual behind-the-scenes books and documentaries. Very quickly, you learn all the standard tales which have come up over the years. And with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, one tale looms above all: the disastrous preliminary filming of the opening episode, three days before the real one.

This is probably most succinctly expressed in the book Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted (Simon & Schuster, 2013):

“The day of The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s first chance to perform in front of a studio audience began with news of a bomb threat on the lot… The threat was determined to be unfounded, and audience members were herded in. But the folks in the stands couldn’t see the actors over the cameras, which were twice as bulky as the standard kind, so they were forced to try to catch the action on small monitors instead. The air-conditioning broke down, so the two-hundred-member audience and the actors were left to swelter in 90-degree July temperatures while watching a practice run of a series already being promoted to viewers as if it were a done deal. The microphones didn’t work properly.”

The problems continue from there. At times, the stories about this recording take on an almost absurd tinge; everything that could have gone wrong, seemingly did. Showrunners James L. Brooks and Allan Burns did a dreadful job with the warm-up; the actors weren’t quite ready; the director hadn’t had enough time with the camera crew… the excuses just keep piling up. The dodgy aircon and sound system would surely be enough to kill a recording, let alone anything else.

And then there was Rhoda, a character which seemingly made a few people nervous. To be fair, she is set up initially as an antagonist to Mary, and spends the entire episode trying to nab her apartment. But also: never underestimate some people’s unpleasant reactions to a gobby Jewish woman.

Either way, she certainly didn’t test well with the studio audience that particular night. What to do? Back to Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted:

“Script supervisor Marge Mullen, who’d held the same job at The Dick Van Dyke Show, stopped by the producers’ office. She had an idea – maybe not the biggest one, but it was something. “People don’t seem to like Rhoda,” they remember her saying. “There’s this little girl who’s Phyllis’s daughter, and if the little girl likes Rhoda, it’ll give the audience the opportunity to love her, too.”

It was the only substantive idea for an improvement Brooks and Burns had heard all evening. They decided to take Mullen’s suggestion, cut a few other lines, and call it a night, putting their faith in what they’d written and the cast they’d hired. Many things had gone wrong with that first taping, but the words and the talent, they believed, were there.”

Come the second recording, three days later?

“The only major change to the script was pigtailed twelve-year-old Lisa Gerritsen as Phyllis’s daughter, Bess, saying, “Aunt Rhoda’s really a lot of fun,” as Mary opened the curtains in her new apartment to see a harried Rhoda on her balcony in the opening scene. Gerritsen was the granddaughter of child actor and later screenwriter True Eames Boardman, as well as the great-granddaughter of silent film actors, but she had now made her own showbiz history.

This time, the audience roared. Gerritsen’s new line seemed to indeed be the magic bullet.”

Unlike all the other problems with the first recording, which was a smorgasbord of failure, this at least is a nice, neat anecdote. One single line changed how the audience felt about Rhoda, Marge Mullen and Lisa Gerritsen save the day, job done.

The problem is, it’s not quite the full story.

[Read more →]

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Everything That You Need to Know

Published 1st January 2026

TV Comedy

Something unexpected has happened with The Peter Serafinowicz Show over the years.

For a programme which had just eight episodes, one of which was a Best Of, and which has never been repeated by the BBC¹, the show has become a fixed reference point for certain strata of comedy fans. When I first watched it back in 2007, I rather liked it, with a few reservations. In 2025, it lives rent free in my head. If you think people endlessly quoting Python are annoying, just wait until I do my Ringo Remembers. “I just thought it was inappropriate. Especially at Christmastime.“

But of all the characters in the show, the one with the longest life has turned out to be inept businessman Brian Butterfield. A character inspired by this ludicrous advert, but which became something stranger and wilder almost immediately. A character which ended up going on tour fifteen years after the series was first broadcast, with all the associated paraphernalia. Who would have predicted that back in 2007?

All of which means it’s high time I wrote something interesting about it. So let’s take the second episode of the show, broadcast on the 11th October 2007, and one of the most well-remembered sketches of the lot: the Butterfield Detective Agency.

Of all the incredible moments in that sketch, my favourite might be Peter’s eye-flick upwards on “Australian”, as though Brian has just begun to realise he might have got it wrong.

But if you know this site well enough, you can probably guess where I’m about to go. What about the fabulously inappropriate music for the sketch, trying desperately to give a sense of showbiz that Brian Butterfield is incapable of providing? Well, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that it’s a library track: “Theatre Land”, credited to David Arnold² and Paul Hart, and first released in 1991 by Carlin on the album TV/Radio/Showbiz/Logos (CAR 188).

Specifically, it’s three different versions of “Theatre Land” bunged together. All three are included below.³ I shall leave where the edit points between them are in the original sketch as an exercise for the reader.

So, job done, yes?

Not quite.

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Aside from the Christmas Special, which had a repeat a couple of days later in a different edit. I’ll write about that one day. ↩
Ah, the everlasting confusion with there being two British composers called David Arnold. One scored multiple James Bond films. The other did the themes for The Big Breakfast and Live & Kicking. We are dealing with the latter. ↩
There are nine versions of “Theatre Land” in total on the album. ↩

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best of, the peter serafinowicz show

Dirty Feed: Best of 2025

Published 26th December 2025

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end of year review

Various Cutaways of Rat

Published 10th December 2025

TV Comedy

(You’ll need to have read this piece on the Fawlty Towers episode “Basil the Rat” and its two-day recording schedule, along with this short follow-up, in order to get anything out of this post. Also, fair warning: we get deep into the weeds with this one.)

Somebody recently emailed me with a reasonable enough question: where do I get all the old television scripts I use in my writing here on Dirty Feed?

You may perhaps expect me to be hanging around various libraries and archives, but for boring practical reasons, that isn’t usually the case.¹ Instead, I have various other sources. Some of them are already published in books, like the Absolutely Fabulous pilot.² Some of them are just sitting online if you know where to search, such as the pilot for Mary Tyler Moore. Some of them I simply get sent by friendly people every now and again. (Yes, I will write about that Love Thy Neighbour script one day, promise.)

Then there’s auction houses. And while I occasionally buy scripts from eBay and the like, I can’t afford to do that too often.³ But just occasionally, you get lucky. As I was when it came to Fawlty Towers, and – you’ve guessed it – “Basil the Rat”, or just “Rat”.

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Oh, you want a longer explanation? Fine. I believe I’m very careful here on Dirty Feed when it comes to copyright and fair dealing. I only use extracts of copyrighted works for the purposes of criticism or review – and the stuff I do here definitely counts as that.

However, archives are generally a bit stricter than this when you’re actually quoting material they hold, and demand that you get permission from the copyright holder. It’s a) a faff, b) you might not get permission, and c) I seriously want to make sure I don’t upset anyone and make myself persona non grata by disobeying the rules. So with a lot of my stuff, it’s ironically easier to avoid official avenues. ↩
Though you have to be careful to figure out you’re not working from transcripts, or scripts which have been edited to take all the fun stuff out of them. ↩
I recently had to stop myself from buying the script for an episode of long-lost Bob Monkhouse sitcom The Big Noise. I still slightly regret controlling myself. ↩

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fawlty towers

“I Don’t Own a Television Machine”

Published 29th November 2025

TV Comedy

Every so often, when struggling to analyse what I love about a TV show, I reach for the phrase “a complete comedy”. It’s a bit of a shitty, half-arsed idea. Let me at least try to explain what the hell I mean.

Some shows are built to do very specific things. Fawlty Towers is one of the best sitcoms ever made, but it’s essentially a wind-up engine for producing farce. Something like The Young Ones might look wild and anarchic and like it could do anything… but watch how the show immediately has to retreat once it brings up the death of Rick’s parents in “Summer Holiday”. There are some places the programme simply can’t go.

Then you have shows like Hi-de-Hi!, where it feels like they can go anywhere, and do anything. One episode might be a sadistic parody of light entertainment with Ted which would make Filthy, Rich & Catflap blush, the next could be another chapter in the touching Gladys/Jeffrey near-romance, then we’re headlong into a farcial plot about illicitly screening mucky movies.

An even better example is Frasier, a show which would seemingly mould and bend itself to take any kind of comedy the writers felt like doing. Oh, you want to do Mr. Bean this week, but with Niles? No problem.

Of course, it’s not a perfect categorisation. With any show, you’ll eventually bump into its boundaries and limitations; it’s just a question of how far you can wander first. It’s also not meant to be a criticism of shows which are more limited in scope; slagging off Fawlty Towers for not being something it’s not even trying to be would be completely ludicrous.

And yet I have to admit a certain fondness for those shows where you simply don’t know what kind of comedy you’ll be getting this time round. And The Dick Van Dyke Show, which aired on CBS between 1961-66, falls squarely into this category of a “complete comedy”.

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Poor Old Jackie Rae

Published 24th November 2025

TV Gameshows

The Golden Shot logo

Researching a programme like The Golden Shot (1967-75) is a nightmare. As I pointed out last time, for a show which ran for hundreds of editions, vanishingly few of them actually survive. Even fewer are generally available to view. You’re left scrabbling for what you can find in old newspapers and magazines… and the odd autobiography.

Such as Bob Monkhouse’s incredible Crying With Laughter (Century, 1993), often regarded as the gold standard in celebrity memoirs. And one of the most arresting sequences in the whole book is the section where he details his thrilling takeover of The Golden Shot from first host, Jackie Rae.

“Having concluded that I was lucky not to be presenting this calamity and so suffering condemnation by press and public alike, I was puzzled when Peter¹ phoned to say I was wanted as the guest star for the tenth week. The fee was insignificant and the inconvenience considerable as it meant travelling from Liverpool to Elstree and back again for my midnight jobs at Jack Murphy’s Cabaret Club in Duke Street. And who was watching ‘The Golden Shot’ now anyway? Its Saturday ratings had plunged. ‘I know, love, but it’s a chance for you to show ’em a thing or two on that set.’

I got the message.

Having made sure the set was standing, I drove out to the studio and looked it over. The guest had to fire the bow using a joystick in a glass booth. The booth looked like the one featured in a frequently seen soap commercial of the day where a man went into a phone kiosk which turned into a bathroom shower. I sought out my pals in special effects and had the booth rigged to do the same. Next, I consulted the props men and they agreed to build what I’d drawn.”

According to Bob, his guest performance went spectacularly well.

“Half an hour of the usual stuff, tedious as ever, with no audience reaction other than cued applause where required. Then I was announced and my first appearance brought a crack of laughter that registered on the Richter scale. I was dressed as a big target, the golden bullseye over my middle. The absurdity of anyone showing up at an archery contest in such an idiotic costume delighted the previously bored crowd. A fusillade of gags followed as I removed my outer costume to reveal a Tyrolean outfit in the style of William Tell, put an apple on my head and did some comic business with a curved crossbow that could shoot round corners. Then I announced that I had my own private armourer, ‘Heinz the dolt!’ A four-foot tin of Heinz Potted Shrimp was wheeled on and tiny Johnny Vyvyan climbed out, dressed as a stormtrooper with a spiked Prussian helmet and carrying a gigantic door bolt. We plunged into a fast and crazy routine in which I fired at various objects he was holding up, each of them rigged to explode when hit and shower the stone-faced little man with their contents. The laughter was just as explosive, roars of hysterical mirth and applause bursting from two hundred and fifty people who had been spending an evening starved of any semblance of fun.

When I started stuffing Johnny feet first into a large cannon, Jackie Rae must have been wondering what had hit him. Unrehearsed, he was rooted to the spot by his need to read his lines off idiot boards.

I ran into the glass booth to fire the cannon and rattled off a few funny lines while Johnny was secretly replaced by a dummy. On a signal that Johnny was out and clear, I pressed the firing button. There was a hell of a bang with confetti and red smoke, the dummy soared fifteen feet in the air and its spiked helmet stuck firmly in the bullseye.

The crowd went wild and Jack Parnell, watching the show on the screen of a TV monitor in the bandroom, waited for the din to diminish before giving his orchestra the downbeat. Precious seconds were ticking by.

Then the music from the then famous soap advert filled the air and, just as in the familiar commercial, the lighting changed to make a silhouette of me as my firing booth became a shower stall. A cascade of water hit me from above and I washed myself, working up a lather with the detergent already in my clothing.² If an audience ever howled with laughter any longer and louder, it could only have been in comedy heaven.”

The inevitable then happened:

“On the Thursday of that week Lew [Grade] sent for Peter. ATV’s light entertainment booker Alec Fine joined the meeting and Lew told them to do a deal for me to take over as host on ‘The Golden Shot’ as soon as possible.”

All very nice. The question is: how much of it is true?

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Peter Prichard, Bob’s agent. ↩
With many thanks to Simon McLean, the advert Bob is referencing here must be this one for Lifebuoy soap, or a similar one in the same series. ↩

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best of, bob monkhouse, the golden shot, tx date investigations

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