Dirty Feed

Something New

Published 11th December 2022

On a Google Sheets document, I have a list of articles planned for Dirty Feed. As it stands today, there are 236 items on it. The chances of getting round to writing all of them are zero. The chances of getting round to half of them are also zero. What makes it even worse is that it isn’t even my only list of potential Dirty Feed projects.

But one potential article seemed so vanishingly unlikely to get done, it never even made it onto any of my lists. That article was a history of a little show called Parallel 9. A Saturday morning kid’s show from my childhood, which I vaguely remembered, clearly had a hugely interesting story attached to it… and yet nobody had really done any research on it at all.

Well, now they have. My old pal Jonathan Bufton is currently writing a multi-part history of the show. Part 1 and Part 2 deal with how that first series of Parallel 9 looked on-screen, but it’s Part 3 where things begin to get really special. Having been given access to plenty of never-before-seen documentation, Jonathan has put together the true story of how the programme was made. A story which has never, ever been told before, that people have wondered about for years… and suddenly, there it all is, 30 years later.

[Read more →]

Read more about...

writing

That-cher

Published 24th November 2022

TV Presentation

I do love reading stories by people who worked in the BBC Presentation department in times gone by. Especially all the hair-raising tales about breakdowns or near-misses. What always strikes me is how while some things have obviously changed over the years, many other things have stayed exactly the same. Believe me, I speak from experience.

For instance, take this page of stories, on the Tech-ops History Site. I’m not yet in a position to tell many of my stories, but versions of most of those things have certainly happened to me while I’ve been directing BBC One and Two. Why yes, I am in therapy right now, why do you ask?

But one particular story stands out. In just a few short words, it builds up a real image of a dreadful piece of transmission, on a supremely important day when BBC1 needed to get things right:

“Margaret Thatcher resigning and having to go the News off an intro from some idiot presenter on a daytime prog in Birmingham who said ‘Now for news of Margaret Thatcher’s resignation, here’s Moira Stuart…'”

In my head, I could see it clearly. News are supposed to be the ones actually breaking the story. A daytime presenter is not supposed to gazump the national newsreader and tell the viewer first. It sounds like a hideous piece of television, at least from a professional point of view.

[Read more →]

Read more about...

best of

Exodus

Published 11th November 2022

Procrastination.

Published 28th October 2022

Internet / Life

Hey, everyone! Fed up with your ridiculous procrastinating? Don’t worry, this article will tell you how to stop once and for all.

“Most of the tech industry is designed to turn you into a vegetable. They invite you to click on things until you click ads, and then they try to make you click ads until you click buy. Since many of us work on the screen, it can be confusing to discern between consumption and production. Here is a guideline:

No one came back from YouTube feeling fresh and energized.

No one peeled out motivated and happy after two hours of scrolling through Instagram.

No one ever got inspired to finish things up after a Netflix Bonanza.

Buying some stuff online is not very productive. It’s consuming.

Hang on.

I can’t comment on Instagram; I don’t use it. But I most have definitely come back from YouTube feeling fresh and energized; I most definitely have been inspired to finish things up after a Netflix Bonanza, and I most definitely have been productive through buying things online.

Take YouTube; it never occurred to this person that someone might genuinely be inspired by what they see there. Or, in my case, use it as a proper research tool. Which I do, endlessly. You only have to read my articles on here to know how useful people’s uploads are to me on Dirty Feed; here’s a particularly good example.

Or how about having a “Netflix Bonanza”? Well, there’s a loaded phrase if ever I heard one. So let’s replace it with the rather more normal phrase “watching television”. Now we have the phrase “No one ever got inspired to finish things up after watching television”, which is a self-evidently ludicrous phrase. As though television can’t be inspiring. As though television hasn’t inspired most of the writing on this site. It’s the same old “television is mindless” stuff, all dressed up for a new generation. There are times when I have watched some TV, and not been able to resist the urge to immediately go to my laptop and start writing about it.

As for buying things online? Bang go all the books I’ve bought which have been vital while researching one of the most popular things I’ve ever written, then. Writing that article took the purchase of four books, none of which I could easily access any other way.

Indeed, discerning between “consumption and production” is difficult at best. So much of the writing I do here involves both. I consume in order to create. The two are entirely intertwined. Consumption here is being painted as entirely passive, and I really don’t think that is the case at all.

But the further I get into the article, the more I blink in confusion. Here are some things which have apparently “never ignited any meaningful action”:

Discussing with strangers

Discussing things with strangers has lead to endless improvements and corrections to the articles on this site.

Reading the comments

Reacting to comments

Comments on here have lead to endless improvements and corrections to the articles on this site.

Reading tweets

Liking tweets

Tweets have… fill in the rest of this sentence for yourself.

Some of my best work here has involved reading tweets and comments. Without them, the site would be far less worthwhile, as I wrote about recently. “Reading tweets” was responsible for a major update and correction to one of the most popular pieces I’ve written all year.

Now, if you want to argue that writing this site isn’t “meaningful action”, then that’s fine. I feel awkward making the argument that it is, because if you’re a certain kind of person, you’re conditioned into thinking that’s arrogant and self-important. But this site has given enough joy to people over the years for me to confidently state that what I do here is, in fact, meaningful. And all the above would be absolutely terrible advice for me, and I think many others.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be careful. I presume what the writer is trying to say is that you should be careful about distractions. I get it, I truly do. But trying to entirely silo off “consumption” and “production” is not the way to make your case. It’s not that simple. Nowhere near so, in fact.

And if you truly think that watching television is always that passive, or that reading tweets is always that pointless, I would suggest that you aren’t very good at either watching television, or reading tweets.

Read more about...

writing

Relative Time Dilation in an Amazingly Compressed Space

Published 18th October 2022

TV Comedy / TV Presentation

It’s Tuesday 21st November 1989 at 9pm, and the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned” is broadcast on BBC2 for the first time.

What was I doing? I have no idea. It was presumably a school night. I don’t think I even knew what Red Dwarf was. My Dad always watched the Nine O’Clock News at this time anyway. I had no rights over the television by that point in the evening.

The moment passed, unnoticed. By me, anyway.

* * *

It’s Friday 15th April 1994 at 9pm, and the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned” is broadcast on BBC2 for the third time.

What was I doing? Something very different than in 1989. This was the famous¹ repeat season, where BBC2 showed every single episode of the first six series of the show.² A lot of fans got into the series through this set of repeats, and I was no different. I quickly became obsessed with the show.

I was, however, only 12, verging on 13. My Dad still had a monopoly on the television, and still always watched the Nine O’Clock News. Luckily, I had a plan. I’d manually set the video recorder going downstairs, then rush upstairs to my bedroom to watch the episode… on an old black and white telly. It wasn’t as good as watching it in the living room on the proper TV, but it would do. And I could always watch the show downstairs later using my video. Which I did.

Endlessly.

* * *

It’s Saturday 14th June 2014 at 9:55pm, and the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned” is broadcast on BBC Two for the sixth time.

Lots has happened since 1994. I’ve long since been subsumed into Dwarf fandom, or at least, one particular corner of it. At this point, I’d been writing for fansite Ganymede & Titan for over a decade. But I’m not sitting watching the episode at home. And not just because I now own the episode on DVD.

Three months earlier, I’d finally got the job of my dreams: working in BBC presentation, in charge of originating most of the BBC’s domestic channels. And I just happen to be in work that evening. But unfortunately, I’m not doing BBC Two right now. I’m on another channel.

Luckily, just like when I was 12, I have a plan.

At 9:50pm, I gently appear at the door of NC2, the BBC Two pres suite. There is a very experienced director in the chair. The most experienced, longest-serving director we have, in fact. I ask if he minds if I sit with him for the next five minutes. He’s fine with it. I pull up a chair.

I watch, as I Love 1988 ends. The director runs a couple of trails: Shopgirls, Tigers About the House. Then there’s the ident; a special one, for BBC Two’s 50th anniversary. Duncan Newmarch, the duty BBC Two announcer, opens his mic and speaks: most continuity announcements are still done live. The director counts down through the ident. At 0, the picture fades down, then up again, and “Marooned” is on air, for the next 28 minutes and 35 seconds.

And two decades apart, two different parts of my life join together, briefly. Watching the same episode of Red Dwarf… but from opposite sides of the TV screen. And my teenage love of the show, and my brand new adult job, were now properly linked. Forever.

Sometimes, I’m aware enough of what’s going on around me to make sure a piece of personal history actually happens, rather than letting it slip from my grasp. Just sometimes.

With thanks to Christopher Wickham for the endlessly useful Red Dwarf BBC Broadcasts Guide, and Pip Madeley for inexplicably but brilliantly having the above video to hand.

In Red Dwarf fan circles, anyway. ↩
Minus “Psirens”, due to Craig Charles’ legal situation at the time. ↩

Read more about...

best of, red dwarf, tv memories

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 →]

Read more about...

writing

Small Fries

Published 8th October 2022

Internet / Videogames

An interesting thing happens to people who are very successful in their chosen line of work. Often, when they retire or just move on, they never want to talk about the field they worked in again. Maybe it bores them now. Maybe they were never truly interested in the first place. Either way, it’s stymied a fair amount of research for Dirty Feed: people who achieved great things, but are more interested in walking their dog these days.

Then there’s the other type. Those successful people who still clearly love what they did. People like Ed Fries, who writes an amazing blog about vintage arcade games… and was Vice President of Game Publishing at Microsoft for much of the initial XBox years. The kind of person who shatters any notions that huge success requires a destruction of your soul.

Ed’s pieces are fascinating; just read his brilliant pieces on the first arcade game easter egg, or fixing old games like Gran Trak 10. Each is a wonderful mix of research, history, and practical electronics. One of my favourite things about his writing is his acknowledgement of other people in the research process. It’s something I always try to do here on Dirty Feed; to point out that this kind of writing doesn’t always spring out of nowhere, but is often the result of people working together.¹

But here’s the real reason I want to link to Ed’s work here. His blog currently consists of just six articles, written between 2015 and 2021. On average, one a year, although there was some concentrated work in 2017, and his writing has slowed recently. But each of those articles is wonderful, and each of them forges new ground in our understanding of its topic. You won’t find six better posts anywhere on the net.

And it’s a reminder that blogging – or just writing, or whatever you want to call it – can take many different forms. Despite my occasional sarcasm, it’s not something you need to show up every day to do, or even every month. One in-depth post a year, if that’s the best way you write, can result in something amazing.²

Owning a blog doesn’t need to take over your life. Nor does it need to be at the technical level that Ed Fries is working at. You can still contribute something worthwhile.

All you have to do is attempt to say something new. That’s all.

To read some people’s writing, you’d think they were the only people who ever did anything. This kind of self-aggrandising gets my goat. No, I’m not going to give examples. But it’s truly pathetic. ↩
Frankly, it’s how I’d prefer to write myself, but I come up with too many silly things I want to write about. ↩

Read more about...

writing

Mmmm, Nice

Published 29th September 2022

TV Comedy

Hello there. Welcome to another exciting instalment of “interesting studio recording dates for audience sitcoms”. And if you’ve managed to get past that sentence and onto this one, I’m presuming you find them exciting too. Hey there. I like you.

Previously, we’ve taken a look at recordings for So Haunt Me, where part of Series 3 was shot just nine days before transmission. We also proved wrong some nonsense on Wikipedia about Series 5 of Are You Being Served? being shot the day before air – in fact, it was a week. Still close to transmission, but rather different than a mere day.

That particular situation is far from without precedent. Huge chunks of Series 3 and 4 of Dad’s Army were also recorded in studio a week before transmission¹; “The Day the Balloon Went Up” was recorded on 23 October 1969, and broadcast just a week later on the 30th October. A couple of weeks later, “Menace from the Deep” was recorded on the 7th November, and broadcast just six days later, on the 13th November.

All of which is worth noting. But there is a vague disappointment that I couldn’t find a normal sitcom which really did record the day before it was due to air. Sure, we could cheat and just say Drop the Dead Donkey, but that’s no fun. That was a topical show specifically designed to be shot close to transmission. The joy here would be an otherwise normal sitcom being made surprisingly down to the wire.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have one. Regular helpful person to this site David Brunt stepped in, and gave us a brilliant, highly unexpected example.

[Read more →]

As referenced in Graham McCann’s Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy. ↩

Read more about...

some mothers do 'ave 'em

“I Don’t Need a Brolly, You Wally!”

Published 20th September 2022

Adverts

The greatest crossover event of all time? There’s clearly no contest. It’s Star Trek and Hi-de-Hi!, of course.

This early 90s advert for National Power and Powergen – specifically, for the sale of shares as part of the privatisation of the UK electricity market – exists in a weird hinterland for me. I don’t remember it from the time; I only really got into Star Trek in the mid-nineties.¹ So who knows when I first saw it properly. All I know is that once I finally saw it on YouTube, it hung around in my head, ready to drop into conversation at a moment’s notice.

Even if you’re not keen on the main body swap gag – which is still more tasteful than “Turnabout Intruder” – there’s still plenty to enjoy. I’m a particular fan of Scotty’s paper aeroplane. The ad justifies its existence with Simon Cadell’s “Good afternoon” alone. But as I watched it recently for the 1,585th time, I started to wonder something. Exactly when was this advert shot?

[Read more →]

Blame my Dad wanting to see the 6 O’Clock News on BBC1, instead of me being allowed to watch BBC2. ↩

Read more about...

best of, hi-de-hi!, star trek

← Earlier posts

Later posts →