Dirty Digest #32: August 2025
"Pardon?"
Hey there. Welcome to the last edition of this newsletter, at least in its present form. Yes, I’ve said that before. Yes, I really mean it this time.
More later, let’s dive in. And your musical accompaniment for this edition:
This Month on Dirty Feed
“From Here?” - By far the most popular thing I’ve posted on the site this year so far, a look at a famous joke from Porridge, and how it stretches back far further than you might initially think. (Make sure you read the comments on this one, they take the story even further than the article itself.)
Insults, Cups of Tea and Quips - Love Thy Neighbour and prop newspapers. I promise you, this one ends up being 1000 times more fun than it actually sounds.
Location, Location, Location Redux - Love Thy Neighbour and location sequences. This one is only 45 times more fun than it actually sounds.
That’s probably enough about Love Thy Neighbour for the moment. Well, aside from…
Britain’s Biggest Daily Sale
…the following. As the prop newspapers article indicates above, Series 1 of Love Thy Neighbour was recorded in 1972, for transmission that year - sometimes with less than a couple of weeks before recording and transmission.
But what about the unbroadcast pilot of the show, as seen on the various DVD releases? Can we tell when that was made?
It’s not too hard to work out. The edition of the Daily Mirror that Eddie Booth holds in his sweaty little hands there was published on the 24th September 1971.
It seems somehow fitting, given the ever-present threat of strike action by Eddie and the gang in early episodes of Love Thy Neighbour, that the front page of this edition has a large section indirectly referencing that the paper wasn’t published in the past week. I think we can all guess why this was. Still, I’m grateful to be given the chance to “Catch up on the girls you missed”. I wish I could do that for my whole life.
Anyway, from the paper above, it seems very likely that the pilot was recorded in late September 1971, and indeed the DVD inlay for the Network/Old Gold Media release confirms it:
SPECIAL FEATURE: Unaired pilot
The original pilot recording from September 1971.
All of which makes it a shame that nearly everywhere online claims that the pilot was made in 1972. Including whoever ripped the whole thing off and shoved it on Dailymotion. If you’re gonna pirate commercial DVD releases, at least do it accurately.
Not on Dirty Feed
World of Telly: Killer Net - John Williams, with a piece on Lynda La Plante’s 1998 thriller which is far more thoughtful than the majority of thrown-together thoughts on the series. (See also: a similarly thoughtful piece on Nathan Barley.)
London Weekend Television in Colour - Brian Power writing for RCA Broadcast News in October 1970, about how LWT prepared for colour broadcasting. (Republished by Transdiffusion.)
each one a classic - “And today, I’m in the CeX closet.”
The Day Today: “Min Resigns Update” - A sacred text, posted by Jason Hazeley.
Gypsy Creams - My partner Tanya Jones’s site, featuring WEIRD and WACKY vintage magazine scans. Last updated in 2017, but it’s been offline for a while and I only just got round to fixing that, so you won’t have had a chance to browse it for a while.
Abban Dunne - An absolutely incredibly-designed personal site. This is the kind of thing I wish I could make. (via Andy Clarke)
Bottom “Break”, alternate version - An extended version of an episode of Bottom… and not the usual suspects “Holy” or “Digger”. This requires FURTHER INVESTIGATION. (via Jack Horsley-Green)
Email is Easy - My head hurts.
Ghostbusters: “You crossed the streams” - Iain Mew on the origins of Activision’s Ghostbusters game.
As detailed below, this is the last edition of this newsletter. Quite a few of you have said you enjoyed these little link lists, so I might try and find a way of carrying them on over on the main site. We’ll see how organised I am.
Way back in the heady, medieval days of January 2023, I kicked off this newsletter. I’ve not really made much of a secret about why I started it: Twitter was blowing itself up, and I felt I needed an escape route for people to still keep in touch and read my stuff over on dirtyfeed.org.
32 editions later, and I know some people still keep in touch with the site using this newsletter… but not really enough. The hits to my real articles I get from this newsletter are dwarfed by the hits I get from Bluesky. Plenty of people read my stuff here - I’m just shy of 1000 subscribers - but precious few click through to my main site and read the bits I really want people to read.
Perhaps that wouldn’t matter if I still got something out of writing here, and for a time I really did. It was a nice little break away from the main site, and a chance to write something different. But over the past few months, the grind of getting something out each month has started to grate on me. And with some important LIFE CHANGES coming up - don’t worry, good ones! - I need to both free up some spare time, and stop giving myself pointless deadlines for things which are supposed to be fun.
In short: this is the last edition of the Dirty Digest. I may decide to use this mailing list for something else at some point - the most appealing idea is simply for some work-in-progress glimpses, on no set schedule. But if that sounds worryingly vague to you, then by all means unsubscribe today.
As for other ways of keeping in touch with my work: try these. I recommend using RSS, personally. My life vastly improved when I started scrolling an RSS reader a little more, and social media a little less.