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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.

  1. In Red Dwarf fan circles, anyway. ↩

  2. Minus “Psirens”, due to Craig Charles’ legal situation at the time. ↩

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I Never Tossed Off

Published 12th July 2021

Film / TV Presentation

What is the best way for a teenager to watch John Hughes’ Weird Science?

I first saw it on a black and white portable TV in my bedroom. Maybe a black and white portable TV isn’t the ideal thing to watch Weird Science on. But the important thing here was that it was in my bedroom. Which means there is one scene absolutely seared into my mind, yes?

Lisa in the doorway

I mean, yes, that scene meant a great deal to me growing up. But my visceral memory watching Weird Science for the first time isn’t actually that shot. My memory is of the ridiculous hacking scene which precedes it, the big ACCESS DENIED sign, and then… this:

Skull from the hacking sequence

I can still remember the shiver that went through me as I glimpsed that horrific visage. The fact I was watching it in black and white made it even worse, if anything. I was absolutely terrified. And anyone who has hung around on Dirty Feed for any length of time knows exactly why. Clearly, my brain linked that skull with a certain life force symbol in Knightmare. Put into that context, I don’t even feel like I was being a wuss. Unexpected skulls which remind you of something you’re already scared of, when you were hoping for something naughty instead, would surely freak anybody out a bit.

Oh, OK, fine. I was also being a wuss.

*   *   *

When writing these pieces about my TV memories, I always try to nail down a date. Sadly, I’m not sure I can really do that here. I suspect the BBC network premiere on BBC2 in December 1989 is too early – I would have been eight years old. This BBC1 showing in November 1991 is possible, as is this August 1993 showing. It could even be later, I have no real idea.

But I can give you one date: Saturday 10th July 2021. That was the date I sat in NC1 – BBC One’s control room – and transmitted Weird Science to the nation myself. Three decades or so after watching it as a kid, I was on the other side of the TV screen, playing out exactly the same thing. Every time something like this happens, it completely blows my mind. It’s not something I ever could have conceived of happening, all those years ago. Two ends of my life, suddenly joining together unexpectedly.

The skull didn’t bother me this time round, mind. And as for Lisa… we’ll draw a veil over that one. Though I will admit I got excited at one point. Extremely excited.

Well, who wouldn’t? I got the end credit VO to fit perfectly over the instrumental section of the theme, so it didn’t crash any of the lyrics. That’s enough to get anyone tumescent.

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40.

Published 23rd May 2021

Life / TV Presentation

I was born on the 23rd May 1981, at Peel Street Hospital in Nottingham. Six months later, that hospital closed for good. I don’t think the two instances were linked.

Third child of the family, I weighed 3.73kg, and popped out at precisely 2:46pm. Which means we can ignore the rest of the gory details, and figure out the really interesting thing: what was on BBC television at precisely the moment I was born?

On BBC1 was Grandstand – specifically, the build-up to England v Scotland at Wembley. Meanwhile, over on BBC2, the afternoon film The Wonder Kid (1952) had just started. Make up your own jokes.

*   *   *

I am blessed with an absolutely fucking diabolical memory. My entire childhood exists as ever-disintegrating glimpses of quarter-remembered events.

But TV was always there. I distinctly remember running around the school playground with a camera, shooting the ongoing football match. I mean, I didn’t have a real camera. We couldn’t even afford Sky at that point, let alone have the money for something like that. I had to improvise. This improvisation consisted of a plastic ice cream tub, with stickers all over it for the buttons, and a toilet roll tube sticking out the side for the lens. This was placed on my head, so I could look through the tube. Sadly, this did not make Kerry Carter immediately fall in love with me.

I also distinctly remember watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit on Central… and then catching it again a year or so later, and noting that the shoe dip scene seemed to have been further cut. “Why would that happen?”, I wondered, not realising that it was the start of a lifelong obsession.

Then, there was Going Live! A show which got me out of bed early every Saturday morning – for half the year, at least. That show was mine, and Trev and Simon were the best thing in the world. I may never fall in love with a TV show in quite the same way again.

And one day, I noticed something interesting. A certain name showed up in those end credits. Erm, my name.1

Going Live! credits - Camera Supervisor John Hoare

Even at that age, it got me thinking. What would happen if I wrote into the show, told them that my name was the same as that guy who did the cameras, and that’s it’s what I wanted to do when I grew up? Surely they’d have me on the show, and I’d get to meet everyone? Wouldn’t that be amazing?

I never did it. I’m not exactly sure why. I mean, I can tell you that I was a lazy little shit. I also thought that thousands of letters would be sent into Going Live! each week. I suspect I didn’t think it was worth trying. These days, my gut feeling is that it was more likely something amazing might have happened than I expected at the time, but who knows, really.

So I never got to go anywhere near the Going Live! studio, unfortunately. I had to settle for lurking behind the camera at a Nottingham OB for one of the ITV Telethon programmes, and yelling out excitedly when I saw the Central logo on the camera. I distinctly remember the cameraman turning to me, and giving me an indulgent smile. To be fair, that was great too.

But none of this – not even the ice cream tub camera – meant I really thought I’d ever work in television. As much as it was a huge part of my life, working on the other side of the screen seemed somehow completely impossible. Anyway, I was obviously going to end up as a computer programmer or something. No, not a software developer. A computer programmer, that’s what it was called.

*   *   *

Six days after I was born, on the 29th May 1981, the Did You See…? team filmed a segment going behind-the-scenes in the BBC presentation department. Delightfully, somebody has uploaded this segment to YouTube. And at 5:49 into the video, we get to spend a bit of time in NC1, where BBC1 network originates. Warwick Cross is your network director, and the man in charge.

I find watching that video an incredibly weird experience. Because sitting in Warwick’s chair is where I find myself, 40 years later. Some of the job is different these days, and I could write a book about exactly what. But that’s all for another day. Instead, I want to draw your attention to the following.

The hunch forward. The hum to the theme tune. The tiniest hint of world-weariness. None of that is changed, 40 years on. I do all of them. The genetic memory of how to be a network director lives on.

And as for what I might be transmitting on any given day? Who knows. Maybe football on BBC1. Or an old film on BBC2.

Some things never change, 40 years later.

  1. With thanks to Mark Simpson for the screengrab. This particular edition was broadcast on the 4th February 1989. ↩

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“It doesn’t rain in TV studios!”

Published 28th April 2021

Other TV

It’s odd, how some shows fade from the common memory.

Take How Do They Do That?, a magazine show which aired on BBC1 between 1994-97. You do not require a long explanation of what the point of the show was: the format of the programme is contained entirely within its title. Just ask that question a few hundred times per episode, give some answers, and you have yourself a television programme.

These days, the show mainly known for two things. Among TV presentation fans, it’s known for this behind-the-scenes look at the making of the BBC2 idents. And among Red Dwarf fans, it’s known for this behind-the-scenes look at the model effects for Series VII. And that’s pretty much your lot.

But I have one very, very strong memory of the show. Something which stuck with me for 25 years. The other day, I decided to see if anybody had uploaded it anywhere, not expecting to be rewarded. And blow me down, somebody else had remembered it too.

Here’s the day – the 24th January 1996, although the explanation part of the clip comes from the following week – when the How Do They Do That? studio was flooded.

Usually, when writing about my TV memories, I make an effort to note down what I remember about a show before watching the resulting video. This time, however, I was caught off-guard. I never really expected it to be online, let alone to find it so easily. So my memories of watching this stunt in 1996 are now thoroughly blended with me watching the video in 2021, and they’re difficult to disentangle.

But there is one moment I 100%, absolutely do remember. And that’s the point 36 seconds in, where we cut from studio VT to film.1 It blew my mind when I first watched it, aged 14. It still fairly blows my mind now. Suddenly, with that one shot change, we see the barriers between different kinds of television breaking down. Magazine shows just aren’t supposed to turn into films on a whim. But this one had. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing.

I’ve always had a love for television which send genres crashing into each other. Red Dwarf is a sitcom crossed with science fiction. Ghostwatch is a drama, done as a live documentary. And here is a normal magazine show, crossed with a disaster movie. There’s nothing that is more designed to send my brain flying off in weird directions than that. It’s exactly the kind of TV that I adore. The fact they actually then went behind-the-scenes in order to tell us how it all worked was the icing on the cake, but that wasn’t the thing I truly loved about the sequence. I loved the initial genre-bending, legitimately odd piece of television.

Wide shot of studio
Flooded studio


And this is exactly the kind of thing which TV finds it difficult to do in 2021. No evening magazine show on BBC One is going to have the money to go off to Pinewood Studios and shoot a sequence like this in their water tank. With a few honourable exceptions such as The One Show, evening magazine shows are an endangered species full stop these days, let alone anything else. The budget for television to go out and do spectacular, stupid things like this just isn’t there any more, at least for this kind of show.

Which makes me sad. Because this is one reason why I loved the kind of TV that was around when I was 14. Not because I was 14. Not because of rose-tinted spectacles. But because truly odd, spectacular things like this could happen on a Wednesday evening on BBC1.

And I miss it.

With thanks to KillianM2 for the original YouTube upload. Their YouTube channel has loads of great stuff, that you could – and should – get lost for hours in.

  1. Sadly a little obscured by the upload, as the VT sequence has been folded down to half the temporal resolution it would have had on broadcast. But you still get some of the effect. ↩

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Temporal Signatures

Published 6th November 2020

TV Drama

I often wish I’d kept a diary. I never have.

Well, not a proper one. I did write one for a week when I was at secondary school, which went into deeply unfortunate detail about a girl I fancied in my class. This would have been fine, if it was just for my own personal use. Unfortunately it was for homework, and I had to give it in to my English teacher at the end of the week. The details of this incident are far too embarrassing to discuss voluntarily, but let’s just say that when I got the work back, my teacher said that while the diaries were “too personal”, they were very entertaining in an “Adrian Mole” kind of fashion. I took this as a compliment at the time. It was only years later that I realised that when applied to somebody’s real life, rather than a satirical work of fiction, it… really was not a compliment in any way whatsoever.

Regardless, the fact that I’ve never managed to keep a proper diary has really annoyed me over the years. As somebody obsessed with when things actually happened, not being able to pin down key events in my own life is troubling. I’ve just never managed to fit the actual writing of a diary into my day. Finding the energy to do a half-decent write-up of the past 24 hours just before bed has never been something I’ve been able to do.

Instead, to identify the exact date of things that happened years ago, I have to piece things together in other ways. Like, for instance, what was on the telly.

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Carry On Exploding

Published 20th September 2020

Film

Hello there. Join me once more, for another of my TV memories… and another insight into my warped and generally unpleasant mind.

*   *   *

As usual, I can’t remember exactly how old I am. Around 10, maybe? I’m upstairs in bed, and I should be asleep; it’s past midnight. But for some reason, I am awake, and I hear my Dad laughing away downstairs. I rarely hear this. Not because Dad doesn’t laugh much, but because in general, I’m a very good sleeper.

I don’t know what made me get up. I rarely did that, either. But I distinctly remember creeping downstairs, and finding Dad chortling away in his chair. He’s watching a film. Unlike some of these memories, I need no help identifying what he’s watching. It’s etched clearly onto my memory: Carry On Again Doctor. Probably the first bit of Carry On I ever saw. It won’t exactly be the last.

For some reason, Dad doesn’t send me immediately back to bed. We end up talking. He tells me that the Carry On films were known for their low budget. Why haven’t I been sent upstairs back to bed at this point? He really must have been in a good mood. Maybe Kenneth Williams pulled a face.

And this is probably the point where I share a touching moment with my Dad, about a shared experience of comedy. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Because what appears on the screen disturbs me.

There’s something wrong with the electrics in the hospital. There’s a fusebox, with sparks pouring out of it. A lady is listening to earphones, which blow up in a shower of yet more sparks. I distinctly remember thinking: “How can this film be low budget? Surely it costs loads of money to do that and not hurt someone!”

And worst of all, there’s some kind of scary pump attached to a person. And that pump starts moving faster and faster. I really, really, really don’t like this. Something highly unpleasant is about to happen to that person in the bed. Will they explode in a shower of guts? I have no exact memory of what happens next, and I can’t say for sure that I ran screaming from the room. But no doubt I’m back upstairs safely in bed before too long.

Carry On films were clearly just too disturbing for me to deal with.

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The Spelling Machine

Published 22nd June 2020

Other TV

Earlier this year, I wrote about how I traced down an early childhood TV memory. It seems to be quite the year for it, because blow me down, somebody’s helped me track down another one. And today’s story involves a certain Paul Daniels.

Not his famous Halloween stunt from 1987, which I have precisely zero memory of, and almost certainly never saw. (That’s the kind of thing which makes you feel cheated of a really good TV memory. Luckily, I fully remember Ghostwatch, five years later.) No, my memory of Paul Daniels is rather more low-key.

Although, like many of my early TV memories, it involves an explosion.

*   *   *

It’s around 1990, and I’m about nine years old. Could be a couple of years earlier or later. Paul Daniels is doing a card trick on the telly, as he is wont to do. But this is a slightly unusual card trick. Some kind of strange machine is spitting out cards at Paul. What is he doing – guessing which cards will come out? I can’t quite remember.

But something wrong. The machine keeps spitting out cards faster and faster. Paul is concerned, and tries to stop it. But it’s to no avail. The machine explodes, leaving Paul with a cartoon-like blackened face. He looks straight to camera, with a look of resignation, and throws the remaining cards away. End of routine.

I’m intrigued… and mildly disturbed. Electric things going wrong are already a slight fascination with me. I remember nothing of the rest of the show, but this one moment is seared into my memory. And I never saw it again.

*   *   *

Well, until now.

This is one of those memories where I made a few half-hearted searches over the years, but never made any serious effort. (There is a lot of Paul Daniels on YouTube.) I occasionally mentioned it, but had kind of resigned myself to never seeing it again.

Until I idly mentioned all this on Twitter… and hello, Timothy Roger Talbot came up with the goods. Here it is, from the very opening of the episode:

There are clearly many things I didn’t remember, or remembered wrongly – I’d even forgotten about the fundamental conceit of a “spelling machine”. But it came flooding back as soon as I watched it; this is definitely the programme in question. I got a Proustian rush when the cards came flying manically out of the machine, and when Daniels blows the flames out; images I couldn’t quite dredge from my head until now, but were clearly buried deep within my skull.

As for the routine itself, I’m the world’s worst person at figuring out magic tricks. From my exceedingly untrained eye, presumably the following is happening:

  • The cards Paul puts in the machine at the top are nothing to do with the rest of the trick, and are never seen again.
  • The dial at the front is pure misdirection, and also does nothing.
  • The pure power of suggestion gets the required words out of the audience member. The obvious rhyme for bow is “cow”, and the obvious rhyme for mouse is “house”.

It’s a fun piece of television, and certainly the kind of thing you don’t get much of on BBC One any more, unfortunately. Though let me extremely clear: the reason this particular routine stuck in my head is because it was something electrical which exploded, which I found faintly unnerving.

So, the final question: when exactly was this broadcast, and how old was I? The video says the show is from 1988, and luckily, BBC Genome made it very easy to track down the exact episode, as luckily it specifically mentions the spelling machine. Unfortunately, The Paul Daniels Show routinely got a repeat on BBC2 – which is, incidentally, where the video above comes from. So I either saw it on its original BBC1 showing on the 30th January 1988, or the BBC2 repeat on the 11th August 1988. Both these showings are earlier than I thought; I would have been aged 6 on the first showing, and 7 on the repeat. I’m slightly amazed that the memory still lingers.

I’m not going to end this post with “now that’s magic”, because I simply have too much respect for you.

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“Feeling Poorly Again, Are You?”

Published 2nd May 2020

Life / TV Comedy

My dad died when I was 13. Which is a rotten age to lose your dad.

Not that there is any brilliant time, of course. If he’d died when I was 18, I’d say it screwed me up for university.1 If he’d died when I was two, I’d be upset I never got to know him at all. Still, at 13, I was just starting to have the occasional adult conversation with him. There was the vague sense of the beginning of the relationship we could have had, where I really got to know him. To have him snatched away right on the cusp of that moment makes the sense of loss all the more terrible.

And over the years, I’ve learnt that one of those things we really could have connected over was comedy. I have flashes of my dad’s love for it. There’s the time when I crept downstairs well past midnight, and found him watching Carry On Again Doctor. There was the revelation I learnt from my mother recently that he loved Python. (Being as technical as he was, would have adored the Blu-ray.) And then there was making Hitchhiker’s references in official documentation he wrote for the Medical Research Council:

But one moment stays with me more than any other. And on my recent full rewatch of Bottom, it came flooding back. Specifically: the episode Digger.

*   *   *

I distinctly remember sitting with my dad in the living room. I didn’t watch the whole episode, I don’t think. I just remember the last scene, with Richie and Eddie sitting in the ambulance, Richie having nearly died in his latest attempt to actually have sex with a lady. My dad turns to me, a grin on his face.

“Watch this.”

I watched, as Eddie reveals to Richie that he ended up having sex with the Viscountess2 instead. Richie takes this about as well as you would expect, and asks Eddie to hand him the defibrillator.

Richie electrocuting Eddie

My dad chortles away. I also laugh, but not just because of what was on the telly. I just liked that my dad had let me in on what felt like an adult joke.

*   *   *

Because this is me, I feel the need to track down the date of the above event. We definitely weren’t watching it on commercial video – for a start, Series 2 was released on VHS in 1995, the year after my dad died. I can’t guarantee he hadn’t recorded the original broadcast of the episode to watch later, but unlike me, I don’t think he watched the same things over and over again, so it seems unlikely that he would have kept it. And we obviously weren’t watching the original broadcast on the 1st October 1992; otherwise, how could he have known what was going to happen?

So a bit of work with Genome reveals that the day this happened was almost certainly Friday 5th November 1993, which is the very first repeat of the episode. I think my dad remembered that moment for a whole year, and on a whim decided to share it with me.3 A moment of extreme violence about sexual frustration. I was 12.

He died less than a year later. And the stuff I missed out on still makes me sad, nearly three decades on. A sense of a lost part of my adolescence, when I could have discovered comedy with him. Instead, I had to do it by myself. And whenever I watch that scene, it hits me all over again.

As though Bottom wasn’t melancholy enough.

  1. Luckily, I managed to do that all by myself. ↩

  2. Lady Natasha Letitia Sarah Jane Wellesley Obstromsky Ponsonsky Smythe Smythe Smythe Smythe Smythe Oblomov Boblomov Dob, third Viscountess of Moldavia, to be precise. ↩

  3. One other thing strikes me about all this, years down the line. My dad was born in 1928; that makes him 65 when we were watching this episode. That is… outside the target age range for a show like Bottom. The show is often compared to Hancock’s Half Hour; my dad almost certainly watched both of them when they were first broadcast. Which shows a certain omnivorous taste for comedy that is deeply pleasing to me. ↩

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Soapy Tits

Published 13th April 2020

Other TV

I’ve written before about vivid TV memories of mine that nobody else seems to remember. Here’s another one.

It’s The Big Breakfast, during the Rick Adams era. So this must have been in ’96 or ’97, when I was aged 15 or 16. (This is important for reasons which will soon become apparent.) It’s coming up to the end of the news, and the silly “and finally” item. What will we get? A duck on a skateboard? A dog on a skateboard? Any kind of animal on a skateboard, in fact?

Erm, no. My eyes widen, as we cut to footage of… a topless car wash. The details escape me. But it’s a car wash, and the girls are topless. Soapy boobs and everything. If I recall, they were pressed up against the windows at one point, as we looked on from inside the car. But one thing was for sure: this really, really shouldn’t be being broadcast at this time of morning while kids are watching. This wasn’t the non-sexual nudity you occasionally got on Holiday. This was rude.

Rick Adams confirms my thoughts. As we cut back to the house, he’s standing in front of the television on which the newsreader appears, trying to block it from view. “It’s a family flippin’ show!”, he screeches. I blink, unable to quite comprehend what I’ve just seen. I’m 15 or so, and have just seen unexpected boobies. OK, so it’s not exactly how I’d choose to see unexpected boobies when I was 15, but I’d take what I could get.

And like that, it was over. I didn’t record it. And nobody I’ve ever mentioned it to remembers this thrilling piece of television. But I definitely, definitely didn’t imagine it. There were boobs. Definitely actual naked boobs. There were no bikinis, I promise.

Which leaves me wondering… just how did that item get approved for broadcast? Was it someone’s last day at ITN?

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Diving into Memories

Published 1st February 2020

Film

What memories do you have watching TV as a kid, of programmes that you’ve never managed to track down since?

I wrote about one of mine last year, but I have so many others. One particularly vivid one is Trev and Simon on Going Live!, and their feature “The Bottomless Bin”. As I recall, it was essentially Trev and Simon dicking around with a wheelie bin, and pulling unpleasant stuff out of it. One fateful week, they tried to go on an expedition to find the actual bottom of The Bottomless Bin… so they lowered a camera down into it. Cue the TV picture breaking up, the Going Live! breakdown slide being cut to air, audio of chaos in the studio… and one very confused me, sitting in front of the television, trying to figure out whether the show had actually fallen off air or not.

Come to think of it, maybe The Bottomless Bin is responsible for my career working in TV presentation. If any of you have a recording of this sketch, I will love you forever if you send me a copy. These memories tend to be so much more satisfying when you actually track down what the hell it is you actually watched.1

However, I do have a tale of a distant television memory which I did manage to figure out. Let me share it with you.

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  1. My favourite ever example of this is podcast Jaffa Cakes for Proust finally finding out about the comedy show Nuts, which is a tale of intrigue that I can never hope to match. ↩

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