#oneaday Day 857: Just normal men

A few weeks back I was introduced to a Bluesky account that apparently made the jump over from Twitter after being widely beloved back there in the pre-Nazi bar days: "We're just normal men".

The sole reason for this account's existence is so that it can, once a week on Monday, repost a clip from a Children's BBC continuity section, during which the presenter, Lauren Layfield, explodes into an uncontrollable fit of snort-laughing after her companion, the puppet mascot Hacker T Dog (puppeteered and played by Phil Fletcher), came out with an incredible non-sequitur of a response to a discussion about ice dancers.

The original broadcast was back in 2016, but, rather bizarrely, it wasn't until 2022 that it went truly viral. It's not hard to see why, even if it was a few years late; even when seen devoid of the original context, as many people online did, it's an infectiously funny clip. Seeing people corpsing, particularly during a live broadcast as seen here, is always entertaining — and it's even more entertaining to see a puppeteer leaning fully into corpsing by allowing his character to react in a very "human" sort of way.

My extremely late discovery of this clip via my chance encounter with the aforementioned Bluesky account led me on a little sidequest to understand where this came from and why it happened. The nitty-gritty of how it went viral can be found on the KnowYourMeme page linked above, but by far the most interesting thing for me in general was the broader existence of Hacker T Dog, and how he is a mascot character that is genuinely very funny indeed.

Back when I was growing up, Children's BBC didn't exist as a standalone channel; instead, it was a catch-all term for blocks of programming that were aimed at 6-12 year olds. Probably the most well-known and popular of these blocks was the after-school programming that ran roughly between about 3pm and 5.30 or so, and consisted of a variety of shows including cartoons, edutainment shows (distinct from "Schools" programming), kid-focused dramas such as Byker Grove, magazine shows such as Blue Peter and even a kid-friendly take on the news in the form of Newsround. Each show was punctuated by a brief continuity section hosted by, at various times, Philip Schofield, Andy Crane and Andi Peters (and doubtless some others I've forgotten), often accompanied by mascot characters.

The most… "memorable" of these mascot characters included Gordon T Gopher, a gopher puppet that communicated exclusively by squeaking, Sweep (as in Sooty And) style, followed up by Edd the Duck, who was basically the exact same character, but in the form of a quacking duck puppet. Both puppets were positioned as "cool dudes", such was the fashion at the time, but their characterisation was mainly limited to what you could interpret from the way the main hosts interacted with them.

Various Children's BBC presenters, along with the mascots, would also appear on Saturday morning programming such as Going Live, Live and Kicking and whatever came after that. Again, the mascots' role was relatively limited; although both Gordon and Edd's puppeteers clearly made an effort to make them as amusingly obnoxious as possible at times, there was only so much they could do without giving them the actual ability to speak human words.

Which is why Hacker T Dog is so interesting. Hacker T Dog speaks like a human being, and thus, despite being a puppet, has a much more equal relationship with his co-host. This means that situations such as the "just normal men" incident can occur, because the human host and the puppet can have some actual chemistry with one another — or perhaps it's more accurate to say the puppeteer is able to develop a much closer relationship with the human presenter than would be possible using a non-verbal mascot character.

I've been watching some other clips of Hacker T Dog working alongside Layfield and various other CBBC presenters, and he's consistently amusing and funny. The energy that Phil Fletcher brings to the character is infectious and appealing, and the fact that he seems to quite often be attempting to make his co-star laugh through improvisation and ad-libbed non-sequiturs makes it all the more entertaining. It gives Hacker T Dog an actual personality beyond "he's a cool dude!!", which is all we ultimately ever knew about Gordon and Edd.

I'm just sorry that I grew up much too late to have really had a chance to see Hacker T Dog at his finest in his original context, but at least there are plenty of clip compilations on YouTube of his finest moments. And Hacker/Fletcher is actually still performing: he joined the regular presenting team for Blue Peter back in 2025.

It's nice to find something that brings a little joy in this hellscape of a world we live in today. And "we're just normal men" definitely falls into that category for me.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 817: Pages from Ceefax

Okay. I mentioned it yesterday, so I may as well talk about it today, since apparently I'm on an "old TV" kick at the minute. Pages from Ceefax, right? It's something that I sometimes find hard to believe was actually broadcast on television, but the evidence is out there.

For the unfamiliar, Ceefax is the name for the teletext service that was available on the terrestrial BBC TV channels, BBC1 and BBC2. Over time the distinction between the two channels' service developed in such a way that you looked on BBC1 if you wanted to find something out quickly (they eventually managed to make the "page seek" on BBC1 work faster) while on BBC2 you'd get more in-depth material. This was in keeping with the channels' main remit; BBC1 had all the mainstream, primetime programming on it, while BBC2 had more niche-interest, specialist or cult favourite shows. And lots of Star Trek repeats, like, all the time.

I realise there may be a few of you reading this who don't even know what teletext was, since it's not been A Thing for most of the world for a while now, but basically it was an information service you could access through your television using your remote control. You'd press a button to switch from live TV to teletext mode, and the programme would continue in the background as just audio while you entered a world of coloured text and, occasionally, extremely low-resolution pixel art. Some TVs provided the ability to "mix" the teletext and TV programme, so anything that was blank, black space normally would allow the programme to show through. It wasn't a terribly practical means of either watching a TV programme or accessing teletext, but it was nice that the option was there.

Anyway, the interesting thing about the various forms of teletext, including Ceefax, was that you could type in a number on your TV remote and it would take you to that page, allowing you to browse through information in a non-linear manner many years ahead of domestic Internet access becoming commonplace. Okay, there were limitations, probably chief among which was how most "pages" on teletext services were actually made up of multiple sub-pages, and you had to wait for them to cycle around rather than be able to browse them completely freely. For a practical example, if you were looking at what's on TV this evening and when the page came up it was only showing things late at night, you'd have to wait for it to cycle back around to showing what is on currently and up next, rather than just being able to immediately call up that information.

But! You might ponder at this point: what about people who do not have a television that can access teletext services, or which they have lost the remote control for? Well, never fear, for Pages from Ceefax is here! This is a chunk of time that the BBC carved out each day specifically for showing a selection of… well, pages from Ceefax, accompanied by some delightful elevator music. You'd normally get things like the news headlines, the weather, maybe the sport. Things that normal people might be interested in. It didn't tend to delve into more "magazine-esque" features or special-interest areas; if the legendary Digitiser had been on Ceefax rather than Oracle or Teletext with a capital T (which were the teletext services that were on the terrestrial TV channels ITV and Channel 4) it probably wouldn't have come up in Pages from Ceefax.

And, I mean… that's a bit weird, right? You would think that the BBC would want to fill up its timeslots with actual programming, rather than a clunky text-based interface that was designed to be interactive, but which was not, in fact, interactive at all when it was broadcast as part of the linear TV signal. But, like the "Follows Shortly" slides we saw yesterday, I guess Pages from Ceefax provided the opportunity for things to happen behind the scenes. Perhaps it's during Pages from Ceefax that continuity announcers swapped over, or had a break, or something like that.

It definitely broadcast when there was no other programming planned, such as before the first programme of the day or late at night, but I have definite memories of it coming up in the middle of the day, too. Like the "Follows Shortly" slides, I found Pages from Ceefax frustrating and boring as a child, but now I am oddly nostalgic for it.

Thankfully, as with literally everything you might be nostalgic for, you can recreate the Pages from Ceefax experience for yourself right now in various ways. Firstly, there's this delightful website, which presents today's headlines in the style of an authentic Pages from Ceefax broadcast, complete with optional music.

Then there's a whole channel devoted to the full playlists that were used for the various Pages from Ceefax broadcasts, an example of which you can enjoy right here:

Anyway. Yeah. That's that. Pages from Ceefax. Stupid. Pointless. Annoying. A waste of time that could have been used for more interesting programming. And yet I miss it. How strange.

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#oneaday Day 816: Follows shortly

Living, as we do, in an age where the entirety of human knowledge and creativity — and an increasing amount of machine-generated garbage — is available at our fingertips, it can be easy to forget that in the past, certain portions of entertainment were a lot more linear. And that brought with it its own considerations.

One of the most interesting things I occasionally think back on is the phenomenon of the "Follows Shortly" screen on television, which punctuated programmes that apparently weren't quite long enough, or, presumably, covered for when the continuity announcer needed to go and take a really big shit or something.

You never see these any more today, but at a certain point in the 1980s in particular, they were quite frequent. (I don't know about before that, because I wasn't alive to see them then, but I assume they still happened in the earlier years of television, too.) They are, in effect, "loading screens" for live television. And they came in varying degrees of elaborateness.

One of the most elaborate was the one that came before ITV's schools programming on Channel 4, which if I remember correctly was broadcast in the middle of the night because no-one in their right mind would want to watch that voluntarily. Thus, in this case, I'm pretty sure the "Follows Shortly" screens were there to cater for variations in the clocks on video recorders, which everyone would have had to set manually rather than just letting the Internet do it for them. If you build in a buffer of a few minutes either side of your programme, that means even if there is some variation in the time people have set their clock to, everyone will be able to record the whole programme without having to leave an impractical amount of time either side of it.

The other thing about ITV Schools is that it had incredibly memorable music, particularly for the final 1-minute countdown to the programme actually starting:

In fact, a lot of these continuity-filling slots actually had some really great music, similar to that heard during Pages from Ceefax. Have I talked about Pages from Ceefax on here? I forget. [checks] Apparently not. Well, there's something to talk about another day, then.

Anyway, all you need to know for the moment is that Pages from Ceefax had great music, and a similar crop of inoffensive yet undeniably catchy instrumental tunes were used for "Follows Shortly" pages, particularly when schools programming was involved.

It's funny the things that you start to miss and even pine for as you get older. When I was a kid, a "Follows Shortly" page coming up on TV was immensely frustrating, because I just wanted the show to start now! Today, though, they can be seen as a symbol of a lost age: a time when we didn't feel the need to be constantly "consuming content", and when it was okay to stop for a moment, put the kettle on, have a wee, tickle the cat and perhaps have a brief conversation before the programme you were waiting for actually came on.

So yeah. I miss them. And I suspect my thinking back oddly fondly on these stupid inconveniences is at least part of the reason why I've never minded load screens and load times in video games all that much. Sometimes waiting a moment is just part of the experience, and it doesn't have to be a negative thing. Sometimes it can be quite valuable.

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#oneaday Day 804: More like Golden Shower

A new trailer for an upcoming animated series based on Sega's classic arcade game, Golden Axe, came out today. It is… not good. And I am not surprised. Disappointed, yes. But not surprised.

For some reason, a lot of people making animated series seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking there is only one way you can possibly make this sort of thing: irony-poisoned "adult animation" with a complete lack of sincerity and earnestness. And it fucking sucks!

Now, I'm not someone who swears off the sort of genre-savvy, quasi-fourth wall-breaking meta-comedy style as an automatic and immediate matter of course. There is a time and place for that sort of thing; we call it parody. Right now, I have been casually playing Agents of Mayhem by Volition, which is a spinoff of the Saints Row series that focuses on a band of gun-toting superheroes. It is full of this sort of humour, and it works because the whole thing is set up to be a parody of a particular genre. You go in expecting that sort of thing, and it delivers. You have to be in the right mood for it, but it is not throwing any particular curveballs.

Hell, it doesn't even have to be parody. I still enjoy Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, even though series creator Joss Whedon apparently turned out to be a bit of a dildo, to say the least. People who complain about the dialogue in modern Marvel movies often accuse them of being full of "Whedonisms", and that may be a fair point, given his involvement in several of them — but in the context of Buffy and Angel, again, this sort of humour worked, because it was a bunch of kids saying it, and in turn that made it highly quotable in the playground.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is another great example. I thought I was going to hate this series after the first episode, which was pretty "wacky", but I kept watching out of curiosity and was pleasantly surprised to discover a series with a lot of genuine heart, soul and sincerity — plus an appreciation of and admiration for Trek canon. Sure, it had its silly moments — a lot more than in most of the live-action shows — but it struck a good balance, and at no point did it feel like it was designed primarily to mock its source material maliciously.

But, like, Golden Axe? This is a beloved arcade game that, in its original form, played things reasonably straight for the most part, at least until its ending sequence. Sure, it had its silly elements like the treasure goblins and the weird mount creatures, but it's clear what the intent was: make a game designed in the style of pulp fantasy, complete with loincloth-clad barbarians, bikini-clad female warriors and hairy dwarves.

When you adapt something like this in the obnoxiously referential, wise-cracking "adult animation" style popularised by shows like Family Guy, you just put across the feeling that you don't respect the source material at all; there seems to be an unspoken assumption that if the creators of this show took Golden Axe seriously, then no-one, in turn, would take this animated series seriously.

You could make the argument that Golden Axe, as a franchise, didn't really have much meat on the bones in terms of narrative in the first place, and you'd probably be right about that. But there's more than enough there to act as a basis for something more — and perhaps to build something genuinely interesting which uses the lore that does exist as a starting point. That could have been cool! There aren't that many good fantasy-themed shows out right now other than Game of Thrones and its spinoff, House of the Dragon, and those are very much an acquired taste (not to mention the poster children for "dark fantasy", which is distinct from more traditional approaches to fantasy) — and there's definitely scope for one in the animated space. Remember stuff like Xena: Warrior Princess? Golden Axe could have been a new Xena: Warrior Princess, but animated!

But no. Instead we get a show that just feels like everyone involved with it has complete and utter contempt for the fantasy genre, for the source material, and for the audience. And I don't really know why! It's not as if animated adaptations which take potentially rather silly source material seriously don't exist — look at Castlevania! That turned out great! It managed to tell a compelling, serious, earnest story with interesting characters and even incorporate some humour without it all feeling forced and filled with such a sense of not giving a shit.

I guess ultimately it's no real skin off my nose, because with Golden Axe being on Paramount+, I'm not going to watch it — and I'm certainly not going to make an effort to seek out some alternative means of watching it (be that official or "unofficial"), based on that trailer. It's just frustrating that this sort of thing is so very predictable; it makes it difficult to have any excitement for announcements of potentially interesting adaptations of video game properties into other forms of media, and very easy to be cynical.

I can't say I was particularly hungry for an animated adaptation of Golden Axe generally — and thus, honestly, I'd rather they hadn't bothered at all than come out with this predictable nonsense.

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#oneaday Day 703: Peepo!

I finished a rewatch of Peep Show the other day, confirming for myself that I had indeed never watched it right to the end. Now I have, and I came away from it with some thoughts that I wanted to share, so that's what I'm going to do today.

Peep Show, for the unfamiliar, is a Channel 4 comedy show starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb, written by Sam Bain, Jesse Armstrong and Andrew O'Connor, with occasional contributions from Mitchell and Webb themselves. It's the show that put Mitchell and Webb on the comedy map for many people, and is noteworthy for its main gimmick of being shot entirely in "first-person" from the perspective of the various characters, including the occasional ability to hear their thoughts — hence the name. We're getting to "peep" into the most intimate parts of their lives, including their private thoughts, in a way that simply isn't possible in "reality".

From the beginning, Peep Show sets itself up as a show where its two main characters are heavily, heavily flawed. Mitchell's Mark Corrigan character is stuffy, socially anxious, nerdy and, at times, rather arrogant, while Webb's Jeremy Usborne is also arrogant, albeit in a different way, self-obsessed, selfish, unambitious and, at times, borderline deluded about the possible directions his life could go in.

Early in the series, one could argue that Mark is somewhat set up to be the "protagonist" of sorts, since much of the ongoing storylines follow his attempts to woo his work colleague, Sophie. As time goes on, though, the show becomes more generally about how both Mark and Jeremy find themselves on their own separate pathways towards self-destruction, each coming at the concept from a different direction. Mark approaches it from the angle of repeatedly fucking up the genuinely good things that happen in his life, while Jeremy's obsession with drugs, alcohol and sex to the almost complete exclusion of building a "normal" adult life makes his trajectory clear pretty early on.

In many ways, Mark and Jeremy are polar opposites, but they are also a lot more similar than they would care to admit. And, as the show progresses, one comes to realise that perhaps the "El Dude Brothers" perhaps aren't as close friends as they thought they were; indeed, the very last line of the show comes from Mark, looking at Jeremy, reflecting on the many trials and tribulations they have both faced — and inflicted on one another — and thinking "I simply must get rid of him". The implication, of course, is that Mark will never be able to get rid of Jeremy — not because the pair of them are incredibly close friends, but because they're stuck with one another, thanks to each other's most awful tendencies having rubbed off on each other to an exceedingly unhealthy degree.

Thus one could probably say that Peep Show is about toxic masculinity. And indeed there are plenty of examples of that throughout the show, with the main ones being Mark's erstwhile boss, Alan Johnson, who is an obnoxious "alpha male" business leader type — although later shown to have enjoyed success primarily through luck and charisma rather than actual talent — and Jeremy's friend "Super Hans", who in many ways is far more fucked up than Mark or Jeremy will ever be — though at times he does seem to have his shit together a lot more than the pair of them.

Interestingly, though, neither Mark or Jeremy are examples of toxic masculinity in quite the same way. Jeremy likes to talk a big game and make out that he's always getting women, but we see repeatedly throughout the show that he is completely incompetent in developing close interpersonal relationships. Mark, meanwhile, has aspirations for a while of being a big balls businessman like Johnson, but over time comes to accept that he is, at heart, a fairly unremarkable person — and that that is not necessarily a bad thing.

To be sure, the pair of them do engage in behaviour that is plenty toxic, often in the name of pursuing masculinity. But a lot of the time they do this for the sake of living up to a misguided sense of "ideals" rather than because they actually feel that way. Neither of them have a clue how to navigate the challenges that life repeatedly confronts them with, and neither of them really know how to be a stereotypical "man", in terms of the unattainable ideal they both have in their minds. And this leads them both down destructive paths that ultimately bring them both to their own downfall — multiple times.

But Peep Show isn't a bleak tragedy. While I'm sure many people watching the show do feel a bit bad for Mark and Jeremy, particularly by the time the final episode rolls around, the central duo are, at their core, figures to laugh at. The show is a comedy because the situations they keep getting into are so ridiculous, but I think a lot of the humour lands because it's plausible. You can picture people you know going down some of the roads that both Mark and Jeremy fling themselves headlong down. You might even have broken off friendships with similar degrees of toxicity that the pair of them demonstrate.

It's a cautionary tale in many ways, then. Neither Mark or Jeremy are "villains" as such, nor are either of them fundamentally "bad people". But one thing Peep Show demonstrates more than anything else is that it is very easy to find yourself circling the drain if you don't make at least a bit of an effort to get your life under control — and that, as you grow older, if you don't find a good balance between "things that make your life better" and "things that make you feel good in the short term", where those two things are seemingly in conflict with one another, you will almost certainly find yourself bitter, twisted, and if not alone, then certainly stuck with someone who is bad for you, and that you will never, ever be able to get rid of.

A downer ending? Perhaps. But it was perfect for the story the show was telling. It would have been easy to give everyone on the show a "happy" ending for the final episode, but as harsh as it sounds, I'm glad they didn't get it. They got the ending that they deserved — and that has pretty much ensured I will remember the way things concluded a lot more vividly than if everything was all neatly resolved and tied up with a little bow.

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#oneaday Day 674: A product of its time

For some reason, I decided to start re-watching the Channel 4 comedy show Peep Show recently. I say re-watch; I'm not sure I've ever watched it all the way through, but it is a show that I always used to like, and as the show that shot David Mitchell and Robert Webb to stardom (or at the very least "household name" status), it's something I've always considered to be fairly evergreen, even if its somewhat "cringe comedy" nature makes it unpalatable to some folks — my wife being one of them.

I was dismayed to discover upon starting my rewatch that Peep Show is over twenty fucking years old. I don't know why, given that I remember having DVDs of it just after my time at university, but I've always thought of it as a relatively "recent" show. But no! It's a show that pre-dates smartphones and flatscreen TVs and monitors; it's a show that is old enough to come with one of those "this show was made in 2003 and is not representative of today's values" disclaimers that you normally see on shit from the 1920s.

The source of this particular warning is a scene early in the second series that is essentially blackface. I say "essentially" because the scene in question is actually criticising blackface, particularly in the context of using it as something to be deliberately provocative — or even a fetish — but it still involves Robert Webb with his skin painted a darker colour and thus I appreciate that to some, it may be hard to defend.

I do find the whole "today's values" thing mildly interesting, and occasionally annoying. I find it especially grating when people start talking about how a piece of dialogue is "problematic", when the dialogue in question is supposed to be depicting a character that is a piece of shit. There's a certain subset of people, many of whom have grown up with what passes for cultural critique on asinine platforms like TikTok, who have a very black-and-white (no pun intended, given the above) view of morality in fiction. These people tend to find it especially "problematic" — a word I've always hated, if that wasn't already clear — when "villains" of the piece act in a villainous manner. Who would have thought it?

I mean, sure. You probably can get across the fact that a person is a piece of shit without resorting to actions and utterances that are offensive by modern standards. But at the same time, I do feel writers should be able to depict characters who are offensive in some way or another — otherwise your critique of them and their actions lacks a bit of bite. It's like all the people on YouTube who bleep out any time they say words like "sex" or "death". It's a bit too much, y'know?

Obviously I'm not advocating for black-and-white minstrel shows and racial slurs 24/7, but I feel like there comes a point where you can wrap modern audiences in cotton wool just a little too much, and the result is an entire cohort of people who cannot cope with being challenged by fiction even a little bit. We already see this on "BookTok" (ugh). Don't even get me started on those idiots.

I guess, thinking rationally, the solution Channel 4 took with this Peep Show episode is probably as good as one can expect right now; the episode itself is untouched, it just has a warning before you watch it. And, as far as I'm aware, that hasn't caused any particular scandals around the place online. So perhaps we should just keep quiet, acknowledge these when they exist and just get on with things. Because the alternative is a dark place for the creative arts, as we're already starting to get a hint of in some places.

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#oneaday Day 659: Justice for RTS: achieved... again

I realised I never followed up on RoseTintedSpectrum's recent YouTube woes that I posted about a while back. Chances are if you're familiar with Rosie's work, you already know that there was, thankfully, a happy ending to the situation: he got his YouTube Partner Program status back, which means he can get paid again, with the only unfortunate news being that there would be a month or so's delay before he would be able to get what was owed to him during the demonetisation incident.

If you're not familiar with Rosie's work, however, I thought I'd take today to highlight some of the great things he's been doing, because he's a hardworking lad who makes consistently entertaining YouTube videos on a variety of subjects. He shot to (relative) stardom when he decided to cover the questionable classic UK TV show GamesMaster, and, having previously been a channel primarily about old games (and longstanding GamesMaster rival-though-not-actually-that-similar show Bad Influence!), he decided to lean into what had brought him some success, and cover old TV instead.

GamesMaster is still a recurring feature — his most recent video covers the legendary "Dave Perry Super Mario 64 Incident" — but he also looks at old kids' TV shows, too, and offers commentary that is both hilarious and insightful, and without dropping into either dry, boring quasi-academia or just straightforward summaries of the shows accompanied by occasional "oh my God, you guys, I can't believe they did that" reactions.

Anyway, here's some of my favourite videos from him. I recommend subscribing to his channel and giving them all a watch — many of them are on the long side by the very nature of covering entire series at once, but he punctuates these with short videos about fluff like Rainbow and Rosie and Jim if you want something a bit shorter.

Here's the aforementioned video about GamesMaster and The Dave Perry Incident. It's worth watching the prior videos in the run-up to this, as it's interesting to revisit the show and contemplate how it evolved (and not always for the better) from series to series, but this one, which many of the newer members of Rosie's audience have been eagerly awaiting for some time, represents some of his best work to date.

California Dreams is not a show I remember ever seeing back in the day, and having seen Rosie's retrospectives on it, I'm not sure whether or not I would have been into it. It's undoubtedly rubbish, particularly when viewed from a modern perspective, but it's also a really interesting show to explore, and Rosie's videos on the subject do a great job of explaining why. You won't come away from them desperate to watch the series as a whole, but even if you never saw it back in the day, you'll feel like you have a better understanding of its existence and its context.

Tottie: The Story of a Doll's House is another show I don't think I ever saw, and I'm not sure I would have watched it when I was a kid even when it was on. However, like his retrospective on California Dreams, Rosie manages to make a look back on the subject compelling, interesting and frequently hilarious — as well as pointing out the weirdly dark nature of a show about stop-motion animated toys, in which the title character is, by a significant margin, the least important character in everything that unfolds on screen.

And finally, from his earlier (pre-GamesMaster) channel, a video on Xenon 2, and how the reality of a game that was popular back in the day can differ quite significantly from the critical consensus on its original release — and how people who cling relentlessly to the latter can make it quite difficult to talk about something.

Rosie's a good lad who puts a ton of effort into his videos, and I'm happy to see he's enjoyed so much success over the last few years. His recent woes with YouTube — along with a similar, but worse situation back in 2024 — are an unfortunate reminder that this sort of success can be worryingly fragile through no fault of the creator. So go give him a view or two, and if you like what you see, consider becoming a YouTube member or a Patreon supporter. Good work — particularly when it's achieved without the usual manipulative "influencer" tactics — deserves to be compensated, or at the very least, appreciated.

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#oneaday Day 652: New Tricks - done

I've finished watching the full run of New Tricks, the BBC sort-of police procedural about the "Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad", or UCOS, a unit in London's Metropolitan Police made up of one actual police officer and several other retired coppers. I enjoyed it a lot, even if the cast changes in its latter seasons arguably made it into a bit of a different show, and it meandered a bit in search of its own identity as a result.

New Tricks opens with UCOS being fronted by Sandra Pullman (Amanda Redman), a semi-disgraced police officer who gained notoriety after shooting a dog on a bungled raid that left the person she was supposed to be rescuing paralysed after falling out of a window. She assembles a colourful team of former police officers, including the diamond geezer Gerry Standing (Dennis Waterman), the extremely neurodivergent Brian "Memory" Lane and the relatively-normal-but-talks-to-his-dead-wife Jack Halford.

Between them, they form an initially uneasy alliance that subsequently blossoms into both genuine friendship and a wonderful sense of camaraderie as they solve a series of cold cases, many of which have been dormant for 20-30 years or more. As a result, Pullman more than redeems herself in the eyes of her superiors — though she still occasionally gets stick about the whole dog-shooting thing — and her band of merry old men find some meaning in their lives, as well as some closure in some longstanding issues.

This core cast remains constant for a significant proportion of the show, and we get to know them all very well. Halford is the first to leave; after finding closure on the murder of his wife, he departs to live out the end of his life peacefully after discovering he has a terminal illness. Lane is next to go, once again after reaching some closure on his "case that got away" — closure that involves him sacrificing his new career in the name of justice and the truth when he accuses a powerful member of the police for wrongdoing.

Standing lasts the longest, sticking around until the second episode of the show's final season. The two-part story that sees him departing after having faked his own death gives him a good story to go out on; he didn't have quite the same "issues" hanging over his head as Halford and Lane, so he needed something like this to make his departure an event of note in the same way, and it worked well, revealing some hitherto unknown details about his past career that felt very much in keeping with what we had learned about him over the course of the prior eleven seasons.

The replacement cast members include the Glaswegian Steve McAndrew (Denis Lawson), who is rebuilding his life following estrangement from his wife and son; Dan Griffin (Nicholas Lyndhurst), who is a frighteningly competent, knowledgeable individual who acts a bit as the group's "Superman" at times, despite occasionally demonstrating himself to be a bit unaware in terms of social interactions; and the latest to join the group, following Standing's departure, is Ted Case (Larry Lamb), a superstitious but intelligent former detective with a gift for interviewing witnesses and interrogating suspects. Outside of the "old men" of the group, Pullman is eventually replaced by Sasha Miller (Tamzin Outhwaite) towards the end of the series, and while this is probably the biggest upheaval the series saw, she settles into the new role quickly and does a good job.

New Tricks, across its entire run, strikes a good balance between the inherent comedy in such an unusual, eccentric ensemble cast, and the inherent darkness of a series about investigating longstanding cold cases, typically murders. The show thankfully sidesteps some of the clichés of police procedurals after its initial episodes; the pilot episode and the first couple of regular episodes give Pullman a superior who is the very definition of the stereotypical "shouting police chief", but before long he is replaced by Robert Strickland (Anthony Calf), an altogether calmer individual who, while coming from a background of privilege, often sides with "the little guy" (relatively speaking) rather than The Establishment as a whole. In the context of the series, this means that while he is often outwardly a by-the-book sort of individual, on the down-low he is immensely supportive of UCOS' eccentricities and lets them get away with a lot — because they get results.

(Yes, I know UCOS can be argued to be part of "The Establishment" also, given that they are a police department in their own right. But New Tricks makes a point of showing that the police as a whole are certainly not infallible, and there are several cases that involve the unit uncovering corruption within the organisation, eventually bringing justice to someone who had been wronged, many years ago in some cases.)

New Tricks' biggest strength is in its characters. We get to know the initial ensemble cast particularly intimately over the course of their time with the show; the later additions are also plenty likeable and get their own stories to shine, though by the simple fact that they have less time on screen in total, we never feel we quite get to know them as well as Pullman, Standing, Lane and Halford. Ted Case is the character who suffers the most in this regard; joining the cast full-time partway into its final season, some of his development feels a little rushed — although this, in itself, works quite well in the context of his character. The reveal that he is gay is handled in a particularly entertaining way that, from the relatively little we know of him at that point, feels very much in keeping with how he does things.

Given that the show ran for a long time — 2003-2015, to be exact — means that things change quite significantly in society over the course of its complete run. The show starts in a pre-smartphone age, for one, though the team are all comfortably using tablets (as in, iPads, not little boxes of pills) by its conclusion, and, as you might expect from the composition of its cast, issues such as sexism and ageism are explored. Several episodes, particularly later in the show's overall run, also deal with crimes that have a racial component or that involve domestic abuse and sexual assault, and while the show isn't particularly gory or shock-horror, it also doesn't shy away from real issues.

I'm sure there's plenty one could criticise about the show as a whole, particularly as today, in 2026, a lot of people have a somewhat skeptical view of the police and their role in society — and the way in which police-centric TV shows can somewhat "whitewash" this fact. But taking it as pure escapism — as a fun detective show with some colourful characters — it was highly entertaining, and I'm glad I took the time to watch it from start to finish.

Now I need something to replace it…

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#oneaday Day 632: New Tricks

Longtime readers may recall that back in November, I started watching a show called New Tricks from the BBC. It's a detective show with an interesting concept: following the exploits of a fictional Metropolitan Police department known as the Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad (aka UCOS), the show sees its core cast (which gradually changes over time) reopening various cold cases and getting to the bottom of them.

I'm just coming up on the end of the tenth series out of twelve and I've been enjoying it a lot. It's been a consistently interesting watch, with some excellent characters who have some good backstories that get some decent payoff over the long term. I understand that the point I'm currently watching is where some people feel like it started to run out of steam a bit, leading to, among other things, one of the original cast members moving on because he felt things had become stale and another two departing after an apparently public spat with the writers, but I'm still enjoying the show with its new cast members. Former lead Amanda Redman said she felt like the cast had lost their anarchic edge in the later episodes, and I see why she said that — but really it's just a different vibe thanks to a different set of characters.

Of particular note is the presence of Nicholas Lyndhurst, an actor who I'm sure most people associate with comedic roles thanks to his most well-known appearances as Rodney in Only Fools and Horses and Gary Sparrow in Goodnight Sweetheart, but in New Tricks he does extremely well as a particularly serious-seeming member of the team. He still has his humorous moments, but they're mostly delivered through deadpan humour; the show is somewhat on the "gritty" side, but isn't above a bit of levity, primarily through little character moments.

The show covers an interesting time period, too. It launched in an era before smartphones and ran until the mid-2010s. A lot of things changes about society in that period, in retrospect, and it's interesting to see the show reflect that. Quite a few early episodes of the show are about Redman's Detective Superintendent Pullman character having to fight to be taken seriously in a world that is still very much male-dominated — and particularly after her assignment to UCOS came after a botched raid in which she shot a dog — and there are frequent explorations of the challenges people with mental health concerns have to face in their daily life.

Of particular note in this regard is the character Brian "Memory" Lane, who is a recovering alcoholic and highly likely to be autistic. Some of the best character moments in the show come from an exploration of Brian struggling to deal with simply existing in a world that he doesn't quite feel comfortable in, and the unique challenges he faces considering his background and his daily struggles. He could easily have become a pathetic, tragic character, but the show handles him well and shows that people contending with the things he is dealing with still have something to offer society, and that they can often find great comfort from the love of people who support them unconditionally. His exit from the show, involving an extremely satisfying resolution to a plot thread that had been dangling for most of the series' run, was handled very well.

The exit of Redman's Pullman character was a little more sudden, however, and it was a little unsatisfying. It feels like she just sort of suddenly decided to move on, and her reasons for doing so just weren't really explored all that much; on top of that, I feel like it would be a much longer process for someone in the Metropolitan Police, particularly in a leadership position, to be able to move on, whereas she was pretty much just out the door and gone. Her replacement, Tamzin Outhwaite's Sasha Miller, seems like a solid character, though, and has already had some interesting things happening to her in just the two episodes I've seen her in so far.

Dennis Waterman's Gerry Standing, as the longest fixture in the series, is a great anchor point for the show. While his cheeky chappy Cockney act could have easily become a bit tiresome, he is shown throughout the series to be a character with some interesting depth and plenty of admirable qualities, even if he sometimes takes a somewhat laissez-faire approach to following the rules. Some of his interest comes from his three amicable divorces and the fact that all his ex-wives and children form one big extended family, but he also gets plenty of his own moments to shine.

The show isn't anything particularly revolutionary and I'm sure it's not regarded as a "classic" or anything, but it did successfully run for twelve series, which suggests it was doing something right along the way. I've enjoyed watching it so far, and I'm glad I took a chance on it; if you're after a detective show to spend some time with, you could do far worse.

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#oneaday Day 537: Old dogs

Since I've exhausted both Death in Paradise and its spin-off series Beyond Paradise for the moment, I was looking for a new "detective" show to watch. I considered the other Death in Paradise spinoff, Return to Paradise, but thought I fancied something a bit different. And BBC iPlayer was certainly keen to provide suggestions.

I settled on a show called New Tricks, which I hadn't heard of before, but which apparently first aired all the way back in 2003, and concluded its complete run in 2015. I've watched two episodes so far, and while it's a very different sort of show to Death in Paradise and Return to Paradise, I've enjoyed what I've seen so far.

New Tricks (at least initially) follows the semi-disgraced Detective Superintendent Sandra Pullman (Amanda Redman) of the Metropolitan Police who, after a botched hostage rescue in which she shot a dog and the person she was supposed to be rescuing flung himself out of a window, paralysing himself when he landed on a car several storeys below, has been placed in charge of the fictional "Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad", or UCOS. This is a branch of the Met specifically tasked with re-investigating unsolved "cold cases", with the officer in charge, initially Pullman, charged with wrangling a small group of retired former officers in the hope of their insights being able to put the various cases to bed once and for all.

Conceptually, it's a tad silly, particularly since the initial lineup of old men all initially appear to be somewhat comedic caricatures. There's Brian Lane (Alun Armstrong), who struggles with severe mental health issues and an obsession over the case that ended his career on the force; there's Jack Halford (James Bolam), who talks to his dead wife when no-one else is around, but is otherwise the most well-grounded of the bunch; and there's Gerry Standing (Dennis Waterman, the only constant member of the cast throughout the entire run of the show), who is a bit of a geezer and a "naughty boy", in his words, with a string of failed marriages behind him and a somewhat unorthodox approach to following the rules. The characters are all introduced as each having their own sort of "thing" that defines them, but just the initial two episodes shows that there's clearly potential for some interesting character work going on.

What I've found quite fun about New Tricks so far is that it blends quite a few disparate elements and comes out feeling quite coherent. There's the obvious conflict between Pullman being a modern police officer (by 2003 standards, anyway) — and a woman, at that — and these retired former officers, all of whom are set in their ways to varying degrees. And then there's the friction between the private lives of all the characters and their professional responsibilities. The show is, on the whole, somewhat on the "gritty" side, with the struggles the various characters encounter all being somewhat realistic and relatable rather than the easily resolved fluff or material for comic relief that the Paradise series tended to favour, but there's also plenty of comedy inherent in the whole situation — particularly when Pullman shows herself to be the sort of woman who takes absolutely no shit from anyone.

The fact that the show premiered in 2003 with a 90-minute pilot before going into full production in 2004 is an interesting consideration, too. In some respects, the way the show is presented makes it clear it's from a different time — and while I try not to think of 2004 as being too much "of a different time" to right now, the fact is, it was over 20 years ago — and it's quite pleasant to return to that world. I'm not talking thematically or in terms of societal norms displayed in the show, obviously, but rather literally the way it is presented. It has a theme song, for Heaven's sake, and one sung by one of the cast members (Waterman), at that! What was the last show you watched that had a full-on theme song — and, more to the point, one that had been specifically composed to include the show's title as part of its lyrics?

Anyway, that's about all I want to say about it for the moment. I'm looking forward to getting to know the series a bit better. I'd actually never heard of it before, somehow, but I guess if it ran for twelve seasons, it must have had something to it, no?

Or, to put it another way: it's all right. It's okay!

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