Dirty Feed

Rapped Knuckles All Round

Published 5th July 2022

I don’t spend all my time trying to prove people wrong on here, you know. Sometimes there’s joy in being able to prove somebody right, too.

Take this little anecdote about Yes Minister in Paul Eddington’s autobiography:

“There were rapped knuckles all round on one occasion. We had finished the recording one night and were waiting for the tape to be checked before the audience could be released and we could all go home when someone doing the checking noticed a slight mistake in one of Nigel’s long speeches.

The poor man came back with it all to do again, took a deep breath and did it, perfectly. We got our clearance and shot off home. But what no one had noticed was that since Nigel recorded the speech the first time there had been intervening scenes with costume changes, and Nigel was wearing the wrong tie. It was a viewer who spotted the mistake when the episode was shown.

– So Far, So Good, Paul Eddington, p.168

Unfortunately, Eddington doesn’t go into such piddling little details such as which episode he’s actually talking about. We’ll have to do the work for ourselves. Or at least cheat by grumpily searching Google.

Sure enough, “yes minister” bloopers tie comes up with the following IMDB entry. Apparently, during the Series 1 episode “Big Brother” (TX: 17/3/80)¹, “Sir Humphrey’s tie changes several times during one scene with Jim Hacker.”

“Several times” is an exaggeration. In fact, it changes once, and then back again, as we can see in this clip:

Humphrey’s “Yes, quite so, Minister” is the funniest part of the whole episode.

Anyway, we can clearly see the tie change for Hawthorne’s mildly difficult speech, and then change back again, indicating the reshoot. From blue and burgundy, to burgundy with white spots:

Tie in original scene, blue and burgundy

Original shoot

Reshoot

And what’s more, the errant tie genuinely is the same one as that worn in the final scene, indicating the reshoot took place exactly as described by Eddington:

Reshoot

Final scene

And there you have it. Proof that Paul Eddington wasn’t talking bollocks. Why bother fact-checking actual ministers who run the country, when I can fact-check pretend ones instead?

In all seriousness, though: it really is just as pleasurable for an anecdote to slip neatly into place as fact, as it is to prove somebody wrong. Poking away at these things isn’t an exercise in self-importance. The truth about something, no matter how inconsequential, is always worth striving for.

Yes, I’m no fun at parties, what’s your point?

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Just out of interest, the episode was recorded on the 13th January 1980, a shade under two months before transmission. ↩

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John’ll Fix It

Published 22nd June 2022

Other TV

You may wonder why I have spent some time recently watching videos of Jimmy Savile on YouTube. This is a very good question, and one that I am unable to fully answer. I guess this is what happens when I get fed up of new Star Trek and get desperate for something to watch.

Nonetheless, here is yer evil bastard himself, on BBC2’s Open to Question in the 80s, being interrogated by a bunch of high school kids. Warning: video contains Jimmy Savile.

If you don’t want to watch the above – which is perfectly understandable – the below hilarious video condenses it down to three minutes. And while it’s clearly made partially for comedy purposes, it does accurately represent much of the content and feeling of the full interview:

Anyway, our question for today: when exactly was this interview broadcast?

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tx date investigations

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.

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

Medium, Message, Etc

Published 29th May 2022

TV Comedy

Right now, I’m buried in a load of research on early Spitting Image. In particular, I have been carefully examining an original off-air of Series 1, Episode 11 (TX: 10/6/84), for reasons which will prove extremely interesting. But we’ll get to that in its own sweet time.

Instead, I want to talk about the two sketches in this episode before and after the ad break. Before the break we get our very first look at the puppet of Diana, Princess of Wales, who had hitherto just been heard off-screen. After the break, we get the ad parody “There’s an indifference at McGregor’s you’ll enjoy”, about the contemporary head of the National Coal Board, Ian MacGregor. The miner’s strike had started just three months previously.

Below is the sequence as presented on the DVD, released in 2008:

The link the sketch draws between the Scottish-American MacGregor, and applying certain American business practices to the UK, gives it a little more depth than a fair number of ad parodies manage.

While it’s obvious that the McGregor’s sketch is a McDonald’s parody, and of a very famous ad campaign which had been running for years, it’s still startling to compare an ad from the actual campaign, and realise the jingle really is virtually identical.

Finally, let’s take a look at this sequence in Spitting Image as it originally transmitted – ad break fully intact – on LWT in 1984:

And all of a sudden, what the production was doing with the McGregor’s sketch is obvious. By putting it at the start of Part Two, it’s right up against a load of other ads, and feels part of them. I highly suspect that it’s only the Spitting Image logo at the beginning keeping the thing compliant with IBA rules. What was merely amusing on DVD starts to feel genuinely subversive when viewed in its originally broadcast form.

Now sure, if you’re actually thinking about the material, you could make the link anyway. It is easy to forget that back in 1984, you didn’t tend to get trailers for other programmes during the centre ad breaks like you do now, which would completely ruin the effect. But if you did remember that, you could easily put two and two together and understand what the programme was up to.

But it’s one thing knowing that logically. It’s another actually seeing the effect it has on the show. It’s the difference between having merely having the facts at your disposal, and feeling them. Original off-airs for Series 1 of Spitting Image are very difficult to come by. Things like this give me a new appreciation for just how cheeky the show was being at this point.

And it’s a reminder that when making comedy, you need to consider how everything feeds into it. Context is vital. If you can get the format of your chosen medium to add meaning which is impossible to achieve in any other way, then so much the better.

With thanks to Nigel Hill for the original recording of this episode of Spitting Image.

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Clocking Out

Published 27th May 2022

Life

For five years between 2003 and 2008 – with a brief, self-enforced break in the middle – I worked for a certain UK-based Cash & Carry company. I will not dignify them with a name. It remains one of the worst employment experiences of my life, rivalled only by the job I had making dental moulds for the NHS where I kept breaking all the teeth off.

My list of anecdotes from that time is long and unpleasant. Yes, I had the obligatory moment where I was told I was no good at the job, and sat sobbing in the manager’s office. But there were worse things afoot. How about the time a customer ordered a pallet of rice, and I witnessed them being referred to in a stupendously racist manner by someone in the order office? That seemed particularly awful – not just the racist abuse itself, but that the racist abuse was about someone who was literally giving us money and keeping us in work.

Or maybe there was the time where I passed an interview to move from the shop floor to the order office. I was given a start date, and all was well… until the job was pulled out from under me the evening before I was due to start, just because someone in management didn’t like me. Moreover, I hadn’t even been told by my manager that the move had been stopped. Someone else let me know, and I had to confront my errant manager about it myself.

Then there was the morning where I was given a sheet of instructions by that same manager, and found on the back the instructions given to him by his manager. The phrase “I am not convinced about John Hoare” is etched onto my mind to this very day. I mean, I’m not convinced about myself either, but I don’t usually have to see it written down by somebody else.

From the above, I may give the impression that I was awful at the job. This isn’t actually true. I may not have blown people away with my work, sure. But after I left, did something else for a bit, and then needed my job back, they gave it to me, and they sure didn’t do that out of the goodness of their hearts. I would suggest that the place was so badly run that doing the job well was a virtually impossible task. With years of hindsight, and experience of a half-decent work environment, I can see that now. But at the time, my self-esteem took a wholly unnecessary beating.

But with all the chaos above, there’s one incident which truly makes me realise that the place was a pathetic place to work.

I eventually did get that job in the order office. And part of that job was to talk to all the sales reps. The transaction wasn’t complicated: they tried to convince us to order more of their products, and I had to make sure we didn’t over-order and end up with stock we couldn’t sell. I remember having an argument once with the Cadbury rep about the outrageous withdrawal of Wispa from the market.

Occasionally, the reps would bring in some merchandise; I once got to try a flavour of Tic Tacs which hadn’t gone out on sale yet. This remains the highlight of my working career to date. This practice of accepting things wasn’t banned: nobody was going to order something they couldn’t sell, just because they got some free Tic Tacs. Not even me.

But one day, I had an idea. If the reps could bring in silly things like pens and the like, then maybe they could bring in something a little bigger. Like, say, a wall clock, branded with their company’s logo. Then I could put them all on the wall of the order office, and we could get an international time zones thing going. LONDON – PARIS – NEW YORK, and the like.

We could look like an important news room. In a scruffy order office somewhere in Exeter, sure. But we could have some fun. And our walls needed something interesting to put on them.

So I set to work asking the reps, and set the plan in motion. I believe we got to a grand total of two clocks on the wall before it was stopped from above. No reason given; certainly no worries about bribery, however idiotic that would have been when it came to clocks. Just a general air of “Obviously, we aren’t going to do that.”

And that’s what I remember most from working at that company. Not the sobbing in the manager’s office. Not the racism. Not the insults, given to me personally by hand. No: it was that I tried to have a little bit of fun in what could be a fairly boring job, and it was immediately stamped down on with no explanation. Because who would want to enjoy themselves at work?

Retail jobs usually suck. But the worst thing is: they don’t have to. Sometimes, fun is disallowed, because people are suspicious of it. Even something as harmless as a wall of clocks in an order office.

It crushes the soul something rotten.

* * *

In a transmission suite for a certain television channel in London, there is a poster on the wall. A poster of… a mirror globe. And if you walk just across the way to the opposite suite, there is a striking, stripy, numeral 2.

And last Christmas, a certain festive-themed Ceefax poster made its annual appearance for the third year running.

Just a tiny scrap of fun, to get you through the shift. It helps.

Still Not Writing

Published 26th May 2022

Internet

Over the last few months, I’ve spent far too long slagging other people off for pretending to write. I worry that some people have misunderstood my point on this, and that I think everybody should be writing shit for free on the internet. Needless to say, this is very much not the case. Most people have better things to do.

My argument has always been a little more subtle: it’s about people who seem to want to write, but put needless barriers in their way. It could be because they’re worried that their chosen topic isn’t “important” enough. It could be a bad site design which looks cool, but makes actually publishing your thoughts difficult. It could be the idea that you can “reclaim the open spirit of the web” simply by publishing a manifesto, rather than actually writing something interesting. If people who want to write could break past their own self-imposed obstacles to writing, then the net as a whole would be a lot better off.

But it’s amazing the excuses people will find not to do so. For instance, I saw this on Twitter just recently:

“I do sometimes miss my blogging days. But for it to come back, I’d really need some kind of directory like Technorati used to be. I want to follow who I know but also have some kind of awareness of the landscape as well.”

Now, would I like to see a brand new, modern blog directory? Of course I would. It would be a bloody great thing to have. I’m not the person to make it, but I wish someone would.

But here’s the thing: if the only reason you’re not writing is because you can’t find a decent blogging directory, you don’t really want to write. That’s fine: nobody is obliged to. But it’s not the lack of good directory that’s the problem. You can fill in the blanks it would provide in other ways: RSS feeds, social media, and the like. I let people know about my posts through Twitter, and learn about other people’s blogs and personal sites there too.

Is that perfect? Of course not. But what is?

If we want a lively, open, independent web, the one thing we can’t do is to sit and wait for somebody to provide it. And if you want to write, you have to write first. The act of writing and publishing is the important part. And that writing will inspire other things to slot into place. To fold our arms and say we won’t write until the blogosphere is thriving is simply an admission of defeat.

Nobody will provide your preferred way of linking blogs together, without having the blogs to link together in the first place. And the first step to improving the independent web isn’t to put together anything complicated. It’s to write something interesting, and hit publish.

We’ll sort out the rest later.

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Bad Teenager

Published 14th May 2022

Life / TV Comedy

It’s funny, the things you remember. The things you remember when everything else surrounding is a dull haze. Standing out in the middle: a conversation with someone who I used to know at primary school, but saw less often now I was at secondary.

I can’t even remember how old I was. I got into Red Dwarf in 1994 when I was 13, so it must have been after then. A couple of years later? We’d talked about the show before, anyway. And then once, during a normal conversation, he suddenly informed me that he didn’t like Red Dwarf any more. He’d grown out of it, you see. The show was for kids.

I was confused. I mean, the show definitely wasn’t made for kids. Even forgetting its teenage audience, the show was clearly made for adults. But he was adamant. He’d grown out of the show, and – by heavy implication – I was a baby for still liking it. Oh well.

Looking back, that was the moment when I realised that some people won’t be honest with you about this stuff. That some people will worry more about how they look, than about what they like.

This guy’s contempt for a show he used to enjoy was just teenage posturing.

* * *

A few years later, I was standing in a bowling alley, attempting to be an American teenager. I was in a group. A… mixed group.

Somehow, the conversation got onto the Spice Girls. My best friend slagged off “Mama”. I was confused.

“But I thought you said you liked that one!”

Awkward silence. My friend was livid. But I fancy that even the girls thought I hadn’t really played ball with society’s expectations.

I never was very good at that pesky teenage posturing.

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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 →]

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

Design for Creation

Published 7th May 2022

Internet

A shade over two years ago, someone’s personal website had a very high profile redesign. Well, high profile among a certain kind of Very Online web design crowd, anyway. And that gang were falling over themselves to praise it. A “lovingly hand-carved redesign”, one person called it. “New, gorgeous, funky-fresh”, said another. It caused a stir for good reason: it really was was an interesting, bold piece of work. In a world where so many have abandoned their own little place on the web, it really did stand out a mile.

A year ago, it stopped updating. The person who designed it is still around, and still regularly posts on Twitter. But their site – launched in a blaze of glory – is essentially dead.

* * *

No, I’m not going to name the person, or their website. The specific example isn’t important. Let’s talk about me instead.

Earlier this year, I launched the current design of Dirty Feed. Throughout the design process, I had plenty of ideas which I considered, and then rejected. Many of these involved grids of pictures, much like the current design of Anil Dash’s site. Other ideas involved splitting my writing into two types: longer “Articles”, and shorter “Notes”, much like the old Noise to Signal that I designed over a decade ago. The idea being: give more prominence to the really big pieces on here, without them being shoved aside too easily by the smaller blog posts.

In the end, I abandoned both ideas, for very similar reasons. In terms of just going with one huge picture grid for the front page, I just don’t think they really work when you have shorter posts too. A clickthrough picture for a tiny blog post feels over-egged and wrong, selling it as something bigger and more important than it actually is.

As for splitting my writing into two types, that superficially feels like a much better idea. But then I thought a little more about how I write. Something like this is clearly a long article, and something like this is clearly a short blog post. But what about this piece, which sits in a weird hinterland between the two: too short to be a full article, but too long for a tiny blog post?

In the end, I abandoned both ideas entirely, in favour of a more traditional front page layout. Maybe it’s not stunningly exciting, but I’m not forced to either shrink my writing to fit a blog post, or expand it to be a proper article. Each piece of writing can be exactly the length it needs to be, without forcing it into a shape that it doesn’t fit.

My point is obvious. That when designing your personal site, don’t design for how you wish you wrote. Design for how you actually write. A good design isn’t there for people to coo over for being bold and original; a good design helps you write and publish.¹ And a bad design is one which gets in the way, and makes sharing your ideas difficult.

And why does this matter? Let’s go back to the “hand-carved redesign” which opened this piece. The overall reaction from the Very Online web designer crowd was: “How great that people are moving away from social networks and back to their own place on the web. It’s important to have ownership of your own work.” Which I 100% agree with.

But unless you keep your site updated with your thoughts and ideas, having your own place on the web doesn’t really mean that much. It doesn’t have to be updated every day, every week, or even every month, especially. But I don’t think it’s unfair to say that a site lying stagnant for a year isn’t going to be fresh and exciting, no matter how funky your design is.

If you do that, no wonder people will just stick to Twitter to keep up with what you’re doing.

Or upload images and publish, or link to podcasts and publish. Whatever it is that you make. ↩

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A Few Random Thoughts on 2point4 children

Published 1st May 2022

TV Comedy

What is the first thing that comes into your head when I say 2point4 children to you?

There is one obvious answer. “Great show, which never got the credit it deserved.” I’ve heard this said over and over in different ways. And I don’t think it’s wrong, per se.

But whenever I’ve talked about the show over the years – on Twitter and elsewhere – I’ve found something slightly different. So many people have told me that it was… erm, a great show, which never got the credit it deserved. Moreover, enough people watched it and loved it at the time that it managed to rack up eight series.

At some point, does it not stop becoming a great show which never got the credit it deserved, and merely become a great show?

Of such questions are comedy flame wars made. The answer, of course, is that it depends which people you hang around with. And it proves the risk of generalising about the kind of reaction to any given show. Among plenty of my friends, I’m not sure 2point4 children even needed any reappraisal when it was made available on iPlayer earlier this year. It got the right appraisal from them at the time.

If that isn’t a universal truth either, then we should be wary of trusting any one narrative of the show. There are a million of them.