Sometimes I write things about Red Dwarf which could be considered vaguely useful. Other times, I obsess about a door.
This door, to be exact. Hi there.
A Brief History of a Doorway in Red Dwarf (1989-96)
Published 4th March 2022
Corrections
Published 24th February 2022
Open Culture, “Revisit the Infamous Rolling Stones Free Festival at Altamont: The Ill-Fated Concert Took Place 50 Years Ago”, 9th December 2019:
“The stigma surrounding the Hells Angels greatly contributed the infamy, as news of their full involvement spread. Had accused killer Alan Passaro not been in a notoriously violent biker gang, Selvin believes, he would have been seen as a hero, since Hunter had rushed the stage with a gun after an earlier altercation with the gang. (Passaro was not charged.)”
Me, 21st February 2022, 5:41am:
Unless I’m misreading the piece, I think there’s an inaccuracy regarding Passaro; he was in fact charged, he just wasn’t convicted.
— John Hoare (@mumoss) February 21, 2022
Open Culture, “Revisit the Infamous Rolling Stones Free Festival at Altamont: The Ill-Fated Concert Took Place 50 Years Ago”, 21st February 2022, c. 5:55am:
“The stigma surrounding the Hells Angels greatly contributed the infamy, as news of their full involvement spread. Had accused killer Alan Passaro not been in a notoriously violent biker gang, Selvin believes, he would have been seen as a hero, since Hunter had rushed the stage with a gun after an earlier altercation with the gang. (Passaro was charged but not convicted.)”
* * *
So, y’know, the correction here is good. Slightly less good: no acknowledgement anywhere in the article that it’s had a whacking great error in it for over two years. (We’re not talking about a tiny mistake; reporting criminal proceedings correctly is kinda important.)
Oh, and I also didn’t get any kind of thank you for helping them correct the mistake. Not even a reply on Twitter, let alone in the article itself.
Let me make Dirty Feed’s editorial policy crystal clear on this one. If you spot an error on this site, please let me know. If the comments are open, you can use that; if they’re closed, grab me on Twitter or drop me an email. Not only will you get a thank you – because I think anyone who takes the time and trouble to help me make this site better deserves one – but I’ll put a note at the bottom of the article to tell the reader exactly what was corrected.
Silent corrections are death when it comes to trust with your readers. And not thanking the person who takes the time to help fix your crap is just rude.
I Want Names, I Want Places, I Want Dates
Published 20th February 2022
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?
Select the ‘Production’ section. ↩
A Bunch of BBC Studio Schedules 1965-66
Published 13th February 2022
Sometimes, this site indulges in a complicated analysis of TV shows. And sometimes someone just sends me in some scans that are interesting, and I immediately bung them up. Both approaches are valid. After all, how else would you know how much the rhubarb crumble cost at Wood Norton in 1971?
From an anonymous donor, then, here is a bunch of studio schedules detailing what was recorded in various BBC studios at the tail end of 1965, and the start of 1966. It is not in any way comprehensive, but it is in every sense fascinating. I’ve put the odd note here and there, but I’ve deliberately not said much; the whole joy of these schedules is flicking your eye across them, and seeing what programmes catch your eye.
(Presenting these things is never easy online. Click/tap on each image for a larger version.)
25th – 31st December 1965, TC1/TC2/TC3/TC4
The Doctor Who episode recorded in TC3 on the 31st December was Episode 10 of The Daleks’ Master Plan, “Escape Switch” – one of only three of the twelve episodes which still survives.
All the News That’s Fit to YouTube
Published 9th February 2022
Life / Meta / TV Presentation
Content warning: sexual assault, but no graphic details.
Yesterday’s article about Smashie and Nicey: The End of an Era brought up a problem that I have to contend with every so often. And that problem is: how to deal when a real, horrible thing suddenly intrudes on the silly kind of nonsense I usually write about on here. In yesterday’s case, what was supposed to be a shaggy dog story finding out how a production team adapted a newspaper, turned into a story about a 21-year-old woman being brutally stabbed to death by her husband.
When writing the piece, I had to figure out how to tackle that. Did it make the article inappropriate to publish? Did it at the very least require a warning? In the end, I decided no to both. The story is shocking, but was also ultimately quite short, with no gruesome detail beyond mentioning “multiple stab wounds”. Being over-sensitive can be just as awkward as not considering things enough. I decided to let it stand as it was, and while the piece does actually end as a joke, it’s a joke that acknowledges the awkwardness and hopefully puts everybody on the same page. A joke with a point.
But it did remind me of another issue I had a few years back. It’s something I never wrote about at the time; there is no way of discussing the actual case in question, for reasons that will become apparent. But a conversation on Twitter reminded me of it, and I think it’s an interesting thing to discuss in terms of the problems you can easily run into with examining old telly. So let’s try to examine it… without actually linking to the video in question.
Because this is a case of jigsaw identification.
The video I wanted to write about was a news bulletin. It was a news bulletin with something particularly interesting about its production, which is why I wanted to write about it; the actual news stories were mostly irrelevant to my point. But throughout the bulletin, there was a story about a woman who had been abducted, and then rescued. There was plenty of information given about the abduction: the woman’s name, place names, and the details of how it ended. It’s very, very easy to research what happened with this story after this news bulletin aired.
And when you do that, the woman’s name – so prominent in the bulletin – disappears. And it disappears for a very obvious reason: because she was raped during her abduction. This fact isn’t mentioned during the news broadcast – as much as anything else, it’s too soon for that information to come to light. But once it did, and the rape itself is reported, the woman’s name is entirely excised.
When I found all this out at the time, I was horrified that I’d managed to piece this together. These days, perhaps I’m a little less shocked; given that part of what I do on here is to drag out obscure things, I guess it’s not a surprise that I’d accidentally touch on stuff like this. But it’s a reminder of how easy jigsaw identification is, and you don’t have to be a journalist writing about current criminal cases to mean you have to be careful about it. You can run into these issues even just writing stupid things about old TV.
It’s also a reminder that we’re really not supposed to be able to see that bulletin, here in 2022. It was meant to be watched at that particular moment in time. I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been uploaded; far from it, in fact. But the intent with that piece of reporting was not that any random person would be able to see it in 2022.
There are historic videos and articles like these everywhere online. They’re not intentionally doing anything untoward. But you can piece together all kinds of things using them that you really shouldn’t be able to. I’m not sure there’s an easy solution; any potential “fix” could create a problem ten times worse.
But it’s why, even when writing about old telly… you have to be aware of certain things you might not expect to have to deal with.
DJs Leave Radio Fab
Published 8th February 2022
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?
Incidentally, I also enjoy the Hippies take on this joke: HIPPIES IN POINTLESS, STUPID PROTEST AT OBSCURE SANDPAPER EXHIBITION. ↩
The Button
Published 7th February 2022
When I worked in Channel 5 transmission, a long time ago now, there was an old lag. The kind you often find in TX. He’d been doing the same job for absolutely years; if I recall correctly, he’d worked on Channel 5 ever since its launch in 1997. Nothing fazed him, or at least seemed to faze him, which is the same thing. He was the kind of person you wanted to soak up every single last bit of knowledge from.
One day, we got talking about mistakes. Specifically, on-air mistakes. In my line of work, we’ve all made them. That horrible moment where your heart sinks, as something stupid happens to the channel you’re supposed to be protecting the output of. It’s a horrible, awful experience; you go home feeling like absolute shit. Sometimes you’re still thinking about it days later. I still have flashbacks to a mistake I made in 2014.
But I’ll never forget what this old lag told me, as a way of putting it all in perspective.
“Just imagine a button. Your job is to press that button at a certain time each day. That’s the only thing you have to do. Nothing else.”
I looked at him. “Yeah?”
“One day, you’d forget to press it.”
Dirty Feed IV
Published 6th February 2022
Yo, babes. After nearly five years, it’s time for a bit of a change around here. Welcome to the fourth incarnation of Dirty Feed.1 So what’s new?
In many ways: not much. Tags have been rethought somewhat; I was getting rather bored of writing “television, sitcom, comedy” for every single bloody post, so that nonsense has gone. In its place are a far more streamlined set of tags, along with a proper category system labelling articles as TV Comedy and the like. Far more pleasant and useful, I hope.
You’ll also note that the Twitter link in the header has permanently gone. I’m still around on Twitter, but the idea is to try and move away from it as the sole way of telling you all what I’m up to on here. The new Subscribe page is fairly basic at the moment, but over the next few months it should hopefully grow into something a little more interesting. I’ll keep things as vague as that for now.
But the main idea behind this redesign is to try and give this place a little more life. A splash more colour, quirkier but hopefully still readable fonts… and a brand new logo. Yes, that is a T. I think this spruce-up is more garish than the last design, and that is entirely deliberate. I’ll write a little more about this side of things in the days to come.
The usual health warnings apply; I’m still going through old posts to convert them to the new format, so don’t worry about any dodgy stuff there for now. In fact, while I say this every time, this design really is meant to be a work-in-progress rather something which sits there going mouldy. Let’s see if I manage to actually commit to that this time round, but I have plenty of ideas. Having said all of that, if you spot anything obnoxiously wrong, please let me know.
And for those of you who don’t give a tinker’s fuck about redesigns… hey, how about some brand new stuff on Smashie and Nicey: The End of an Era? OK, I’ll see what I can do.
Previous incarnations: 2010, 2011, and 2017. ↩
Tedious Site Update
Published 29th January 2022
As anybody who has followed either me or this site knows by now, I have a rather nasty habit of deciding one thing on here, only to do the exact opposite. This reached its ultimate expression last year, where the site went on hiatus in January… only to give up two weeks later and then have the busiest and most prolific year in the site’s history.
Therefore, despite having plans, I was wary of promising exactly where the site was going at the start of this year, lest I completely change my mind as per fucking usual. But a month in, it’s become rather clearer what’s actually happening. So, in the spirit of actually wanting to communicate with you all properly, here’s the deal.1
1) The big news is that after years of promises, I’m finally in the middle of a proper redesign of this place. In fact, the main part of it is actually finished, and I’m currently picking away at fixing all the annoying little corners. I’m not going to give a launch date – I’ve learnt my lesson on that one at least – but it’ll probably be in the next few weeks.
2) While this redesign takes place, Dirty Feed is on Reduced Power. There might be the odd post here and there, but nothing in-depth. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of fun stuff planned as soon as the redesign is complete. I’m itching to get started on them already.
3) Some of you will have noticed that I’m not currently on Twitter. I always planned to take a bit of a break at the start of the year, but I’m usually desperate to get back on there after a month away. I’m really, really not feeling like that at the moment. In fact, I’m happier than I’ve been for some considerable time as a direct result of not being there, and I’m getting more things done into the bargain.2
When Dirty Feed relaunches, I’ll end up reactivating my account, in order to catch up with various people, and let everyone know about updates on here. I’ll probably end up tweeting various silly things as well. But after years of trying, I’ve finally managed to break the habit of checking Twitter as soon as I wake up and getting into a spiral of feeling terrible for the whole day, and I don’t intend to go back to that.
TL;DR: Redesign coming, no in-depth posts until that happens, and Twitter is a fucking nightmare. See you soon.
At this point, I like to think of a certain site who welcomed aboard a new writer, had them post for a couple of years, until they went on hiatus… and never returned. And never told their audience where they had gone, or what they were doing. And to top it off, silently deleted their last few posts. That is called treating your readers with contempt. ↩
Fifty hours and counting on a replay of Final Fantasy XII qualifies as “getting things done”, right? ↩
The Wrong Wavelength
Published 28th January 2022
When I was a kid, I went through a period of being obsessed with light bulbs.
Not in a useful way, mind. I wasn’t really obsessed with how they worked, or how they were made. No, I was interested in types of light bulbs. I’d wander any given department store, investigating. What’s this, a 40 watt bulb? 60W? 100W? 150W? When do you use which type of bulb, Dad? Why? Why?
And if the wattage alone was exciting, then you can imagine the state I was in when I discovered that you could buy bulbs of different colours. And, of course, I wanted one in my bedroom immediately. Why would I put up with a boring white bulb, when I could have something far more interesting instead?
* * *
Nottingham, in the early 90s. A detached house in the beautiful leafy suburb of Wollaton. There’s a primary school just over the road. It’s as respectable a scene as you could ever hope to find.
But beware. Every night, one window of the house glowed a curious, inviting red.