You know that opening shot, the one that's gorgeous, from Contest, the pilot (but third broadcast) episode of Bottom? Yeah, this one. It's in the script. On the page these opening moments play ...

Bottom manages to pull off a good trick, and in doing so it makes itself a much better sitcom for it. On the one hand, Bottom is a cartoon. A big, garish, violent, over the top cartoon. On its own,...

A few caveats before I begin. Nowhere in the Bottom: The Scripts book does it say what version of the scripts are being presented. They're certainly not transcripts, and are most likely the shooting s...

There's a reason I keep trawling old newpaper articles about comedy, and that's partly to see what contemporaneous reviews really said, partly to see how shows were being publicised, and perhaps more ...

YouTube video by Thomas Boynes

Sometimes two things collide in one day to form an interesting narrative, in a way that life rarely affords. Such a thing happened today. On my feed, I was served up with this wonderful bit of c...

YouTube video by Memovids

Sometimes two things collide in one day to form an interesting narrative, in a way that life rarely affords. Such a thing happened today. On my feed, I was served up with this wonderful bit of c...

YouTube video by CliveandJerryTV

YouTube video by sawing14s

Often when you see a newspaper on a TV show it's a mock up, and often it's one that's been mocked up from a real paper. Take this, for example, from the first episode of Bottom (Smells), which aired o...

Here's an article timed to promote the first series of Bottom, the beginning of Waiting For Godot, and the release of Drop Dead Fred, all in one go. It's full of wrong info, and proceeds from the shoc...

As the 70s turned into the 80s, a little story unfolded quietly in the local Reading paper. It began in October. Reading Evening Post - Wednesday 31 October 1979 There's a nice story from perenn...

YouTube video by The Pie Man

Often when you see a newspaper on a TV show it's a mock up, and often it's one that's been mocked up from a real paper. Take this, for example, from the first episode of Bottom (Smells), which aired o...

What’s the most influential British TV programme made in the last quarter century? The answer is TV Burp! What do you mean, “No!”? Of course it’s TV Burp. There isn’t another TV show that has chang…

(c) BBC 1996

As the 70s turned into the 80s, a little story unfolded quietly in the local Reading paper. It began in October. Reading Evening Post - Wednesday 31 October 1979 There's a nice story from perenn...

As the 70s turned into the 80s, a little story unfolded quietly in the local Reading paper. It began in October. Reading Evening Post - Wednesday 31 October 1979 There's a nice story from perenn...

Here's the first mention of Alexei Sayle that I can find on the British Newspaper Archive. It's from The Stage on Thursday 24th June 1976, and it's a small notice that the company he was a member of w...

He might have cut a fearsome figure as Malcolm Tucker in The Thick Of It. But Peter Capaldi's brief stand-up career came to be defined by him getting…

Here's the first mention of Alexei Sayle that I can find on the British Newspaper Archive. It's from The Stage on Thursday 24th June 1976, and it's a small notice that the company he was a member of w...

I wrote another book about television. I like television. I like television so much that the first thing I modelled and printed on my new 3d printer was this ... What shows do they make you t...

I popped open another vintage magazine from the pile this morning. It's been a while, and the pile has just been sat there, so it was time for another delve. This time, I picked TV Zone #55 from June ...

For a long time now I've been wanting to write an old-fashioned programme guide. One you can hold in your hand and thumb through, make notes on, spill coffee on. So I did. Proctology: A Bottom ...