Hi folks, I'm rescuing my analogue filmography from 300 VHS tapes. Expect Doctor Who fan films and cable TV curiosities. Here at 26 there are references to a number of my shows, which'll be increasingly online. For those, stay tuned! I'm still digitising old tapes, capturing cassettes, fiddling with floppies and marching old papers and photos through the scanner. Thankfully, most of my tapes are filled with recordings of useless stuff off TV rather than than fan film footage to be finessed:

• VHS / SVHS: 300
• Hi-8: 20
• MiniDV: 14
• U-matic: 4
• DVCPRO: 3
• VHS-C, Beta, DVCAM: 1 each

? Progress: twitter.com/peetfagan

What's in a name? A fair bit of variety, when it comes to Mars bars. A family of different confections bear the name, or are related to it. It's no coincidence that the slogan "a Mars bar a day helps you work, rest and play" was reworked in the US to advertise their Milky Way bar.

A few of us sharing a house in Berkeley, California got hold of some Mars bars and their ilk from around the globe. Our goal: to discover once and for all what nuances and nougats separate the different breeds. Or, y'know, to have a lotta chocolate.

We tried to arrange our tastings to set bars with more subtle taste differences close together and we had filtered water to hand to cleanse the palate.

Taster Profile

Name: Adina Zed
Nationality: Raised in the United Kingdom and Germany, then Stateside. Lived in Australia for a while.
Special Skills: hacking mobiles, collecting air miles
Vices: The Simpsons, clogging the LAN with UK telly downloads
Conceived and crafted the Mars bar-off.

Taster Profile

Name: Pete (beeblepete)
Nationality: United Statesian of both coasts (well, I was when I wrote this).
Special Skills: VHS filmmaking, song and story, discs and design, the whole renaissance bit.
First email address: 1991.
Vices: Funyuns, jellybabies, Dr Who, Waffles, Second Life

Taster Profile

Name: Peter (Lord Muppet)
Nationality: Scottish
Special Skills: Chessmaster, threatening housemates with a knife in the mouth of the padded shark oven glove. Studying philosophy at The University of California, Berkeley
Vices: Suicide Girls, Stoli

Respect his probiscuit. No, really.

Milky Way
United States

Adina: "Very sweet, very sugary."
Pete: "It's the caramel."
Peter: "It's basically a UK Mars bar."

 
Mars
United Kingdom

Pete: "Definitely more malty."
Adina: "There's less sugar. Eurpoean candy bars generally have less sugar."
Peter: "Mars bars in general are just too heavy."

 
Mars
Australia

Adina: "This is essentially the same as the UK Mars bar."
Pete: "Sure, but it tastes older. Sell-by date was the 21st."
Peter: "I think it's nicer than the UK Mars bar."

 
Mars
Canada

Adina: "Very similar chocolate to the UK but a different center."
Pete: "It's a US Milky Way!"
Peter: "Halfway, in terms of kinda sweetness. Almost identical."

 
Mars Almond
Canada

Adina: "It detracts from what makes a Mars bar special, the almonds and the bubblegummy crap nougat."
Peter: "Almonds? In a candy bar? Damn hippie liberals!"
Pete: "I like almonds, and a chocolate/nut combo is usually nice but for some reason this one doesn't work for me."

 
Milky Way
United Kingdom

Pete: "Fluffy! And as malty as a UK Mars bar."
Adina: "Lighter than a US Three Musketeers, even. That outer layer of chocolate is so thin."
Peter: "Rock me, baby. I'm not a fan of the Mars but I like this Milky Way."

 
The Loser
Mars Almond

This product was sold in a similar-coloured wrapper in the US but without the "almond" designation, despite the fact that US Mars bars always had almonds. We were surprised that we couldn't find any Mars bars for sale in 2005 USA and had to order this from Canada. Then again, maybe it isn't so surprising.

The Faves

Adina is all about the 'old standard,' the UK Mars bar. The Petes aren't into the heaviness, so it's UK Milky Way, all the way.

But not you, and that's OK. We're with The Love, and we want to know how you Mars it.

A treat for anyone with an eye for detail. A good deal of Dapol's production facility was taken up with this exhibition. There could never have been enough time for me to feast my eyes on everything they laid out and set into motion. Here's a glimpse.

Although I came for Dapol's sci-fi goodies, the main attractions are these scenes through which locomotives roll...... all in miniature, of course.

The largest, u-shaped showcase.Lime green? Must be from the Thomas the Tank Engine children's program. I didn't get a good look at the face, sorry.

At right, a common sight along UK railways: a gasometer (collapsible tank for gaseous fuel). 

Wait for it...... and we're off!

The exhibits are kept in period with the vintage of the locomotives.Electric-powered fairground Dodge'em cars.

Britain, circa 1940: The Blitz. The sky glows in time with the sound of atillery fire and fades back into darkness, as does this exhibit.Firelight flickers inside a house struck by German bombs.

... and the railway plays its part, rolling military vehicles to where they're needed most.At the time, Dapol had a line of science fiction toys from Doctor Who!

These images of Dapol Model Railway World are camcorder stills from my visit in 2001. – Pete

Being episodic got it made but at last this feature film can be enjoyed as such. Red Dwarf: Back to Earth wasn’t a huge success with me when first broadcast but the main problem back then was it being chopped up. Released to disc, it's now possible to watch the movie – and it is a movie – properly.

In the far future aboard spaceship Red Dwarf lives likeable slob Dave Lister (Craig Charles), whose only companions are the officious Rimmer (Chris Barrie), the flamboyant Cat (Danny John-Jules) and the bumbling mechanoid Kryten (Robert Llewellyn). Transported back to Earth in 2009, they get more than just culture shock: their lives are being sold to their forebears as a fictional TV programme.

A long-suffering Red Dwarf movie project evolved into Back to Earth and its 2009 broadcast over three consecutive nights seems like a compromise now. No third of this tale is very satisfying when viewed independently; as a single feature, it raises expectations and satisfies them in ways that were lost over those three evenings.

The broadcast premiere felt like the last shout of the programme and as such, I’d hoped for more resolution in the story. As a midpoint between 20th and 21st century Red Dwarf, I feel now that the story is right for its time. The 'fiction within a fiction' element externalises writer/director Doug Naylor's search for the essence of Red Dwarf. Properly presented, it invites fans to re-evaluate why we've loved it and gives us more to love.

One bit of that essence is Red Dwarf's live audience, something Back to Earth lacks. Chris Barrie notes in a series eight commentary how audiences bring energy to the comedy. Such crowds are usually given a stand-up comedian's ‘warm up’ so that when the show proper starts, they’re super receptive to it. For us at home, that early laughter graces the programme with a distinctively festive atmos. Maybe an audience wasn’t an option when Naylor got the chance to bring Red Dwarf back from its decade hiatus.

The high-def, blu-ray release looks gorgeous. The Dave HD channel wasn't ubiquitous in 2009 so there's loads of new detail for many of us to enjoy. The adventure is visualised on a grand, cinematic scale not seen in Red Dwarf before or since. On disc it's called 'the director's cut' in a nod to Blade Runner, the movie that popularised that phrase. A Blade Runner motif runs throughout the film, including a parody of its photo-zooming Esper machine and a gorgeous homage to the character Rachael.

Knowing that Back to Earth isn’t the end for Red Dwarf made its ending (no spoilers) more satisfying to me. The 70-minute feature plays like a funny, surreal drama rather than a sitcom: a laugh track prolly wouldn't suit. The self-analysis of the storyline gives the performers some reflective moments that are lovely to watch even if they aren't bog-standard Red Dwarf.

And the age that the decade put on those faces? Give over mate, it's been longer than that since and they're still smashing it. Boyz from the Dwarf forever.

Red Dwarf: Back to Earth is available here. If you take interest in earlier series of Red Dwarf whilst shopping, do please read first Andrew Orton's helpful article 'The Great Red Dwarf Blu-Ray Smeg Up.'

Early nineties Photoshop play with a Richard Avedon composite of Marilyn Monroe.

Marilynfinity

Initial North American broadcasts of 'Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius, Part One' had no incidental music or sound effects, apart from opening and closing theme music.

Who knows why. Perhaps the tape was intended for a non-English-speaking country and instead of separating the dialogue track out from the music & effects, the tape reel was somehow prepared with only the dialogue track present. Or perhaps the American distributor, Time Life Television, selected the wrong track whilst dubbing travelling copies of the tape received from Britain.

The clip above comes from the latter portion of the episode. When I reviewed my VHS recording recently, I got a bit of a surprise: the first half of the episode had been edited for adverts.

Back in the day, Time Life offered Doctor Who serials to American broadcasters in three formats: A la carte as individual episodes, compiled into omnibus editions and thirdly, with fades to black and minor time snips for use on commercial television. It was only the first four seasons of Tom Baker's scarf-wearing Doctor Who that were adapted for adverts, though the other two options were still made available.

My local TV station, known as The Center*, thankfully refused the edited versions of the programme, airing one proper episode each weeknight and sometimes a full story's worth of them on Saturday afternoons. Except on one occasion, when a commercial edit was inadvertently broadcast. It happened to be this eerily-silent first episode of 'The Brain of Morbius' and it was that which initially entered my videotape collection.

Also thankfully, the unedited version of that episode made it back to The Center afterwards... but I was late tuning in for some reason. I can't remember exactly what happened but it's clear I hurriedly fast-forwarded the tape and began recording over the commercial edit with the good stuff, engaging record mode as close to the right point as possible.

Digitally adjusting my recording to remove the artefacts of advert breaks wasn't too much work and I'm looking into ways I can share the episode with those online, who've expressed interest in this obscure aural oddity. I'm already pushing the boundaries of 'fair use' of copyrighted material in my fan films, so I'm hesitant to lob an entire episode of BBC television onto some video-sharing site. Neither can I assume that a technically-incomplete Doctor Who audio track like this is of interest to the BBC, who've already properly released this entire serial. I guess I'll just have to invite you all round to tea, eh?

* The University of North Carolina Center for Public Television (The Center) is headquartered on that school's campus and is received in homes on several different TV channel numbers statewide. In its hometown of Chapel Hill it broadcasts on WUNC, channel 2. I recorded its programmes via WUNK, channel 25.

– Pete

As premieres near, promos, previews and leaks prompt debate about what things constitute spoilers. Wikipedia's definition: 'any piece of information regarding any part of a given media that a potential consumer would not want to know beforehand.' Those of us who don't like spoilers have loads to say about what we'd like to avoid. Others point out that protecting folks from spoilers is tricky. Stepping aside from that conflict, let's look into what avoiding spoilers is really about.

To avoid spoilers is to save attention instead of paying it. The spoiler-averse adhere to the notion that 'the play's the thing' – advance, peripheral media ain't the play. Of course, artists and their representatives have a right to promote their work in advance and it's music to their ears when a buzz develops around such promotions. Naught wrong with that.

Still, no one actually owes attention to anything connected with a show before they've seen it: not even the slightest thumbs-up or sad emoji from someone who's gone ahead. Show me a person avoiding a show's spoilers and I'll show you a pledged member of its upcoming audience. Such folk neither want nor need anything in advance.

Enjoy plays your way, just play nice in the run-up. No one who's playing nice is looking for scoop kudos or shifting responsibility onto others.

Photo: Paramount Theatre, Oakland, California  /  PJF 2004

Above: The Doctor and friends (and an enemy) from Doctor Who Season 8 and Series 11.

Below: Leela and The Shobogans from Season 15 with the rap lyrics from Series 11 Trailer Two. The Gallifreyan Citadel added to the background is from Series 9.

From Australia, across the USA and up and down the UK, here's a quick list of fellow fan filmmakers and podcast pals. Some I've contributed work to, some I've been shoulder to shoulder with and with some I've just exchanged tapes and tips. Don't look so surprised that so many other folks get up to my sort of nonsense, eh?

• Afterhell
  Terrifying audio drama for mature listeners. From Joe Medina and Jamie Lawson, makers of the Dr Who / Prisoner crossover fan film, The Prisoner and the Time Lord.
• Bad Wilf
  An audacious podcast from Martyn Vincent, Gerrod Edward and occasionally me, too. Reviews of Doctor Who and loads of other films, TV, comics et cetera.
• BTR Productions
  Fun-to-watch Dr Who fan films from Beyond The Rim, Melbourne Australia.
• Cheeky Monkey Pictures
  Adam Manning is The Doctor against Daleks realised with some great props. Recently he's played a villain in the stage show James Bond Spectacular!
• DAM Productions
  David Nagel and Matthew Chambers, who both have played the good Doctor in fan films.... brilliantly. They also do audios and 3D animations.
• The Federation
  The fan film beginnings of the Chicago TARDIS crew.
• Half-A-Dozen Lemmings
  Jonathan Blum as the 7th Doctor, in adventures from Washington D.C. to L.A. California.
• Home Grown Productions
  Well-written characters in these Los Angeles fan films featuring The Alagiannis Doctor.
• The Invasion of NCSSM
  An ersatz Doctor at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics: The Admiral (pictured) battles a silver army of robotic Argentoids.
• Timebase Productions
  Rupert Booth's Doctor has a manic appeal not unlike the role as played by the great Tom Baker.

From series 4 of The Avengers, when Diana Rigg joined the cast as Mrs Emma Peel, the programme had ceased to be television in the classic Doctor Who style. "These were movies, made on 35mm film with the best of talent," said Brian Clemens in comment on the first of these episodes.

These 'films' comprise the most popular era of the programme and the scrutiny they've received has proved invaluable as they've come to disc.

The Avengers was filmed and recorded at feature film's 24 frames per second speed, despite the 25 FPS of British television being slightly faster. The film speed and early use of colour in these episodes optimised them for overseas sale.

Certain DVDs of The Avengers operate at 25 FPS with an accompanying increase in audio pitch. Cinema films were routinely screened on UK and European television in this way but coming out of modern speakers, the slight changes to the sound are more pronounced:

• the famous theme tune in the wrong key
• all other music equally out of tune
• actors' voices pitched high, like oddly-recorded actors in early 'talkies'

As with the 'stretching' of old television episodes to HDTV width, some in The Avengers' audience are simply not bothered by the difference.

Only certain discs in the DVD sets have been affected and chasing down just which can be tricky. The Avengers Forever! team have assembled a nice guide describing the problems and offering details on how to get problem discs replaced by the vendor, Canal+.

Contrary to the guide however, the Complete Series DVD set may not be immune to the audio problems; the Series 5 portion of the set I own certainly isn't, as illustrated in the video above. Please note I'm speaking of DVD region 2, which includes the United Kingdom. Releases in other regions may have all, some or none of the problems described here and in the guide.

Happy ending: with the blu-ray release in the UK, the vendor has at last delivered a product that accurately documents this much-loved piece of Western popular culture. This is a huge win for fans, film historians, the artists involved and Canal+.

"Getting the software available to all has democratised the platform."
– Carl Attrill, Facebook, 18 April 2017

Teletext is back and it's here to stay. In some countries it never went away. Broadcast engineers and a community of enthusiasts have used the free software culture of the internet to create apps like Edit-TF that bring the medium of teletext to an increasing number of interested parties, particularly artists.

Mosaic graphics are a distinctive artefact of the technology. All the 'sixel' combinations occupy just 64 mosaic characters. This allows capital letters to remain available in graphics mode – convenient for things like weather maps. Six pixels per mosaic doesn't divide evenly, however, so the top and bottom pairs are more rectangular than middle duo. This uneven cadence is more or less unique to teletext.

There's also 3-bit colour: teletext's palette of black, white, red, yellow, blue, green, cyan and magenta. The red, green and blue components of those eight colours are either full on or absent. Notably this excludes orange, which is a mix of 100% red with half-intensity green.

Orange: Teletext's Forbidden Fruit

Alistair Cree is pushing the boundaries of teletext. He's made a pastime of exploring obscure features detailed in official teletext specifications. His ZX Editor and associated tools have yielded the first enhanced teletext pages produced since unpublicised experiments by broadcasters years ago. Above is an enhanced colour page by Dan Farrimond, whose love for classic teletext extends to a feigned distaste for the colour orange.

Teletext is attractive to artists, certainly, but it still performs well when used for its original purpose. In an era when information is buried in pop-up windows, auto-play videos and other distractions, the black background and simple colours of teletext are very pleasant to peruse. Sized between tweets and blogs, teletext pages are easy to consume in either active or passive contexts: you can hurriedly click through the pages of Teefax or sit back and watch Pages From Ceefax roll by.

Teefax via Raspberry Pi

Teletext is good for the internet – and vice versa. Online systems make VBIT possible, a bit of software that brings the teletext controls of TV remotes back into service when such tellys are lashed up to internet-connected computers as shown above.

The remotes themselves, however, are dwindling in supply.

"I'm in Amsterdam right now and my hotel room TV has Das Erste. RTL has an Erotiek section. It's mostly text but there are a few funny frames with gfx. It does say the service ends on April 1st."
– Kieran HJ Connell, Teletext Slack, 27 March 2017

With Ceefax gone and cash-earners like erotic adverts starting to go, there's no question that broadcast teletext has seen better days. At one point, the MB21 Teletext Museum compiled a list of services that broadcasters made available online. Sadly, just fourteen of its 52 links worked at time of writing.

The odd teletext system can be found onscreen in betting shops or airports but the new broadcast methods of digital TV have no facility for teletext data; neither do the HDMI cables that tie together modern home video equipment.

Broadcasters like ARD in Germany and Cuatro in Spain are stalwarts of the medium, as least until Europe abandons analog broadcasting entirely. And TV manufacturers continue to make teletext gear, for now.

Teletext will never completely vanish. A community has risen around the system and new generations find it rearing its retro head from time to time, in the way telegram style occasionally pops up. It's fitting, then, to end on a few words from a fake telegram a friend sent me in 1986:

KEEP THE FAITH AND DON'T EVER STOP

Sources

What can you do with a screenful of teletext? Some answers are found in this look at design examples past and present. The deceptively simple teletext canvas accommodates an almost endless variety of art.

The graphics pixels in teletext are grouped into sets of six. Each mosaic of 'sixels' takes up one letter's worth of space. Sometimes the mosaics are displayed in a separated fashion.

There are invisible codes to change colour or separation that also take up a character cell each, often leaving a blank space in the design. These peculiarities may seem like frustrating limitations but they deliver amazing graphic designs to screens using just a tiny vocabulary of digital codes. Teletext was a true breakthrough at its conception and it remains a distinctive art style today.

The most common teletext graphics form highly visible page headers above text content, particularly in news stories and list tables, as shown in the images above. The vast majority of teletext is variations on these two designs.

Occasionally teletext designs will include 'spot illos,' miniature illustrations amid the page's body text. Mr Biffo uses these often, as seen in one of his recent gag adverts below.

Then come larger elements like infographics, where text can become a minority element of the display. The classic example is a broadcaster's weather map, although the one above is a pisstake from The Day Today.

Devoting an entire screen to art was something even the earliest teletext designers did. The Christmas advent calendar below is from Ian Irving, who has produced teletext for Ceefax and Intelfax. It's primarily foreground graphics over black, with careful gaps here and there to allow for changes in colour. There are a few other tricks thrown in, for example short stripes of background colour:

The 'Weather News' sun is a well-remembered design from Mort Smith of the Ceefax team. It's primarily separated graphics using 'negative space' – the space amid the coloured regions defines the artwork. Here too, black spaces make allowance for invisible codes permitting the mosaics to change from one colour to the next along each row.

Because background colour always fills its cells, it's comparatively limited in its effect upon design. Below is a screen full of blue background rows that nevertheless complement the foreground in this advert for Ceefax subtitles:

The error page above from the Teefax teletext service takes advantage of the striped nature of background colour. At points where the sky mingles with shapes, the illustration reverts to coloured mosaics over black.

Steve Horsley often traces his colour changes tightly around the shapes he draws. These form the heavy, black 'code borders' that define the shapes in this David Bowie portrait he's done:

The artwork above right by Andy Jenkinson uses a similar trick, 'code shadows.' This sneaks codes into areas that the eye expects to be dark anyway.

Below, Dan Farrimond has tightly wrapped colour around codes but in a different style. By alternating mosaic colour each row, he's created an illusion of background colour stripes.

The next pic, above, is representative of the art book Thread of Fate by Raquel Meyers. For effect, the palette over black is limited to one or two colours and the image subjects are rendered in an angular style independent of the teletext pixels.

Jellica (Jake Manley) has only recently developed what he describes as 'a teletext problem.' His style is new and distinctive whilst incorporating classic techniques:

One last trick, above right, is another one from Horsenburger (Steve Horsley). For the tiny points of light he's used text mode full stops and colons amid the sixels.

The Artist's Canvas

Images of teletext are constantly shared online as teletextrs exchange pages past and present. Sometimes an editor link will be included for others to mashup or simply to show the artist's working. These links can be quite long so URL shorteners like goo.gl are recommended.

Here are some more tips for presenting teletext images on blogs and in social networks:

When you export an image from a teletext editor, it might look too narrow. Such raw content isn't really created to be looked at. Editors and televisions display that content a bit wider.

In typical examples of teletext, like those above, content is widened from 480x500 pixels to 576x500. Modern HDTVs may stretch the art further to 680x500. Those tellys do it to make room for a list of numbers at the bottom which is a handy subpage index. Below is a 480px-wide export graphic and a peek at the wide, indexed layout seen on some HDTVs:

Forgetting the subpage index for a moment, note that the art above is only 23 rows high. Teletext services like ARDText and Teefax use rows 0 and 24 for things like the date and 'fastext links' which correspond to multi-coloured remote control buttons. Because teletext services are good showcases for art, 23 rows is a good maximum height to stick to.

Consequently, it may be practical to crop a bit off the top and bottom of your widened exports. If your art would look strange with its content sitting against the edges of the image, it may be worth leaving 10px or so of margins all round.

Sometimes, artists may simply choose not to adhere to these guidelines. For example, the last row can occasionally accommodate artwork if the teletext service agrees to forgo fastext for one page. In other cases it might be valuable for historians and others to preserve lines 0 and 24 of broadcast teletext. All 25 lines might also make sense for a screen shot in some documentation.

Art should, after all, be free as thought. If someone paints teletext onto the side of a building or a vehicle or even a cow, no one is going to fault the artist going narrower or wider to match their 'canvas.'

Inspired? Why not have a go yourself? Check out the How-To Guide PDF for Edit-TF, whose concepts also apply to ZX Editor, wxTED and other teletext editors.

I got my start in pixel art making graphics for VHS films on Commodore and Atari computers. Having later moved on to Adobe programs and such, I've recently been back in an 80's style doing teletext.
– Pete

Further reading: Teletext Lives, an introduction and Teletext Future, some thoughts on what's next.

Sources

Text is primary sourced. The jargon 'code borders' and 'code shadows' and assertions like 'the vast majority of teletext is variations on these two designs' originate from my own experience of teletext live and archived.

Allen Halden appears in my Doctor Who fan films 'TARDIS Adventure' and 'Temporary Exile.' He also appears in my sci-fi comedy 'Gate Crashers.' I met Allen when he rented a room in my pal Scott's house in Orange, Connecticut. Both the house and Scott made loads of contributions to earlier films.

About Allen, Scott says "we were friends during an intense period in my life in the latter half of the 80s, in a way that forges a lifelong connection." Same goes for me.

On the surface, Allen was just a regular American guy but he had fun with the subject of his German heritage; that's how I know that The Bundeswehr is the German army. He'd seen their logo used fashionably on a load of teen couture and tagged it "Bundeswehr that's fun to wear!"

He enjoyed the SCA. In case you didn't know, the Society for Creative Anachronism holds primarily outdoor events where folks engage in medieval-style combat and culture to varying levels of accuracy and high levels of enjoyment. Allen's 'scadian' name was Baron von Stumfenberg, or 'Shtumfy.'

He also loved anime and collected Japanese toy robots, the kind that are about a foot high and were certainly imported because they had those little spring-loaded missiles that were banned from local toy stores. We devised a sort of table top war game where dice rolls determined how the robots could move and aim.

Allen was very much into table top war gaming. He had stacked drawers of miniature lead figures. He also had real lead, which is to say a German pistol.

He'd dismantle it into a gajillion parts, clean and oil the lot and then reassemble. He was the sort of person you'd trust with a gun; he treated the subject with suitable irony. This included a sticker on his used American sedan that read, 'World Peace through Superior Firepower.'

Shtumfy was a good-natured guy, really open and kind. He wasn't courting or dating anyone when I knew him but that wasn't for lack of social skills. Or hugs.

After Gate Crashers, I went to school thousands of miles away. As a student, long distance calls weren't in the budget and the internet wasn't ready for prime time. So all I had from Shtumfy was the occasional letter, sometimes signed with a quote from The Andromeda Strain: "Allen. 601."

Allen made changes, too. He left Connecticut for New Jersey, and then Pennsylvania, moving in with his dad. Allen's health, however, wasn't something that changed for the better. As a young man in CT he'd already had gout in his feet. He hit a run of bad luck in recent years with worsening health, financial stress and the death of his father.

Then, recently, he posted care packages of possessions to his friends. Nobody really thought anything of it at the time. Soon after, Allen put an end to his medical and financial strife and took his own life.

It's only been a few days since I heard about Allen's suicide from Scott. I've pulled his film appearances out of my boxes of tapes and produced the video above. Allen had recently changed his surname to Hayden, so the original spelling in the credits has become something of a stage name. I called the video a showreel because what he showed us will eventually become more important than the fact that he's left.

It's so sad that we lost touch over the years. I have thought of him and related him to others many times. It's probably quite selfish of me to grab more time with Allen in these thoughts and in pictures but hopefully others of you will benefit from this as well.

Missing you, mate.

The BBC One series Sherlock reworks the original tales of the great detective Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Dr Watson, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, respectively. This overview of the programme is chiefly an aid to memory; it has averaged about two episodes a year over its seven-year run. The latter portion of the programme is discussed in revealing detail towards the end, preceded by a paragraph warning of the spoilers.

Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss began this tale in 2010 and have set it in the present day. It boasts numerous innovations, from the tilt shift photography in the titles (making Piccadilly Circus seem like an intricate special effects miniature) to the inclusion of modern information technology. The stories are also presented at high resolution, compared to past adaptations: we're given a more detailed look at both the objects in vision and the minds of the characters.

Sherlock's three-episode series format is about as brief as one can get whilst still delivering more story than a trip to the cinema. This maximises the production resources allocated each episode, giving the look of cinema a run for its money.

A hallmark of the programme is its use of motion graphics, which convey thoughts without the use of voice overs and relate the content of observed text without the need for cutaways to the text observed. Also notable is Watson's blog, a small nod to the books' convention of the doctor as narrator. Its online readership becomes an element of the stories.

Whilst making free with the original stories, the episodes themselves are a treat for devotees of the Sherlock Holmes books. Throughout the programme there are nods to both major storylines and obscure details.

Series One begins with the introduction of John Watson as a war veteran (Afghanistan) with a healing quest that's a mystery in itself. This balances the character well against the activity of Sherlock, whose period eccentricities are expanded into modern-day excesses that make him even more in need of a decent foil. The pair get to know each other throughout the series, culminating in a confrontation with Sherlock's most famous nemesis, Moriarty. He's a fresh, modern maniac with decades of well-written baddies acknowledged and integrated.

Sherlock's Brother Mycroft is quite prominent in the programme. In the books, it's said he surpasses Sherlock's talents but hangs back, as he "would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right." The detectives' landlady Mrs Hudson is also embellished, justifying the precious time allocated the character.

The Detective Lestrade character has years of good police television woven into his fibre. Completely new to the myth is pathologist Molly Hooper. The young Sherlock of this programme is a bit pretty and Molly's awareness of it explores an angle that would be a mistake to ignore.

Series Two initially feints from Moriarty and sets Sherlock against Irene Adler, his intellectual match and a dominatrix to boot, as it were. The middle adapts the famous Hound of the Baskervilles tale and the climax sets Sherlock and Moriarty so well against each other that their mutual destruction seems certain.

What sort of person could join the celebrated team of Holmes and Watson on equal footing? What skills would they have? The answers are in the character of Mary Morstan, John's girlfriend at the start of Series Three. A mystery of her true identity soon begins to unfold. The series finale sets all three against the unimaginable: Magnussen, a mastermind who could not be outwitted. No, really. As the trio's final confrontation with him nears, we get psychological insights into them that truly complement the work of Conan Doyle.

Series Three's inclusion of Wanda Ventham and Tim Carlton as the brothers' parents is a treat for viewers, as they're Cumberbatch's parents and Ventham appeared three times in Doctor Who, before Moffat became its current showrunner.

One episode exists between Series Three and Four, apparently set in the Victorian era. It's delightful and concerns a mystery from long ago with clues toward the fate of a major character in the present day.

Series Four begins with a classic puzzler, mixed with another chapter in Mary's story. It's the greatest test of John and Sherlock's friendship yet and its aftermath may leave the viewer wondering if the entire programme has come to its conclusion.

At this point going further will reveal things about the series you may not wish to read without having first seen the episodes for yourself. If you have done so or you simply don't mind having various and sundry plot details revealed to you then feel free to proceed to the rest of this piece. End of warning.

The programme appears to climax at the end of Series Three, three whole years before its most recent episode. To protect John and his new family from blackmail secrets locked into Magnussen's photographic memory, Sherlock shoots the mastermind at point blank range. It's an act of programme-ending proportions.

For his adopted family, Sherlock sacrifices both himself and the regard many viewers had for him. The bureaucratic erasure of the act by Sherlock's brother does nothing to mitigate its impact. The writers appear to have chosen the hero's moral death instead of his friends' physical death.

In death, Magnussen has perhaps defeated Sherlock. Episode One of Series Four shows the great detective in fear of a children's story about The Grim Reaper; it presents him as a man on the run from inevitable fate.

Sadly, we lose Mary despite Sherlock's self-sacrifice. The sequence of events in her doom is somewhat replayed at the end of Series Four when a prison warden tries to make a bargain similar to Sherlock's.

Another reading of the dark finale is that Sherlock is such a high-functioning force of nature that Magnussen's murder is not a character-damning event for him. Series Four perhaps expresses this through the revelation of Sherlock's criminally-insane sister Eurus. She exists on a psychological plane symbolically illustrated as a passenger jet aeroplane: elevated, out of control and strewn with bodies. Like Sherlock, Eurus is malformed: a child in a complex vehicle. Her pleas for help are brutally violent but even more shocking is that they are ultimately successful.

Faced with an opponent he can neither outwit nor destroy, Sherlock is pulled forcibly from his emotional shell and subsequently provides the support Eurus needs from him. He finally understands the meaning emotional context gives to life and death situations, even if Eurus remains beyond redemption.

Mary has an imaginary presence to John in Series Four following her death. She also appears on a pre-recorded DVD with posthumous condemnation for Sherlock. She appears to have anticipated the effect of her own harsh words and a second disc arrives at the very end of the series with warm accolades for both the detective and his sidekick.

That positive note has perhaps ended Sherlock. We're shown time healing Holmes and Watson in a joyous, concluding montage. If further episodes are made, Moffat and Gatiss have quite a developed detective to work with. Will Sherlock and Molly become closer? Are texts from Irene in Series Four the beginnings of something more? Has Watson, the old soldier, new things to teach a Holmes who has seen so much combat in the field?

Sherlock, by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Sherlock Holmes: Benedict Cumberbatch. Dr Watson: Martin Freeman. Mycroft Holmes: Mark Gatiss. Moriarty: Andrew Scott. Mary Morstan: Amanda Abbington. Detective Lestrade: Rupert Graves. Mrs Hudson: Una Stubbs. Molly Hooper: Louise Brealey. Eurus Holmes: Sian Brooke.

As part of the BBC's Writers Room project, Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat and his script editor Nick Lambon gave a talk today at the Radio Theatre of Broadcasting House in London. Here's my minutes-old recollection of the event, written across the corridor in the cafe just afterward.

Ideas

Sarah Dollard's name came up. Her pitch for 'Face the Raven' raised the idea of 'trap streets’ and Moffat saw immediately that they were a Doctor Who idea. One of Moffat’s own episode ideas had been set aside, until one of the production team noted it would be just the thing for this year's Christmas episode. It’s now currently in production.

Moffat, Lambon and the rest of the team actively avoid steering the creative process using authority; it's very much interactive with winning ideas from all quarters bubbling up. Moffat pointed out that time almost demands that approach. In a sense, all telly programmes are like sinking ships, running out of time as soon as they begin production. "You're not going to turn away an idea you know is going to help the ship not sink, whoever it's from." Crew, leads, guests, even those with small parts may have valid input. Moffat pointed out that making these programmes isn’t generally contentious; feedback from crew or actors is usually just matter-of-fact concerns about making things work.

Story arcs and planning

A story "has to work as an episode; the arc can't come too far to the front," said Moffat, noting that he hasn't always achieved this ideal. Late in their first year on Doctor Who, Moffat asked showrunner Russell T Davies what 'Bad Wolf' was. At that point Davies still didn't know. Around the time of 'Journey's End,' Julie Gardner shared with Steven a number of series finale details. Behind her, silently, RTD made it clear that absolutely none of what she was relating was really settled. The 'two buildings' idea at the end of 'The Husbands of River Song' was a very last-minute addition, coming in after the read-through. 

Short stories

Moffat said that any scale of story seems to present the same challenges to him, from the feature-length ‘Day of the Doctor’ to the online short ‘Night of the Doctor.’ "The right size of a story is to have a beginning, a middle and an end" whether it goes on for a few or a lot of pages.

Pitching

A first draft "is already a repeat," said Moffat, if its pitch was too detailed a miniature. Ideas come and go in the process, so a writer can trap themselves if a pitch is too much of a plan. It’s a sales device that precedes the main process of writing and Moffat sees his own pitching expertise as a potential hindrance to freedom later on.

Noting another approach, Lambon described how writer Toby Whithouse needs to share in detail what he's planning when he delivers a pitch. Of course, a good idea – like Sarah Dollard's above – or a trusted writer can be very brief. Moffat’s trusted colleague Mark Gatiss pitched 'Cold War' with little more than "what if there was an Ice Warrior on a submarine?"

Diplomacy

"You'll get more from emphasising a writer’s good points than attacking the bad. There are a million ways to miss a target and few ways to hit it." Both writers agreed it's not about diplomacy, it's about maintaining a focus on what works.

Tone meetings

"The tone part of a tone meeting is usually settled early on," said Moffat, with most of the time being devoted to the logistics of realising the script for screen. Making sure the story is understood by those physically building and performing it includes ferreting out any silently 'understood' things which aren't in fact correct. Those sorts of misunderstandings could result in a lot of wasted effort.

Sometimes tone meetings go a bit mad. Moffat and his producer had to leave the 'Silence in the Library' tone meeting 15 minutes early and moments later someone suggested this: instead of leaping dramatically down a tunnel of light to rescue River Song, The Doctor might instead just take a lift. (Moffat then mimed The Tenth Doctor casually whistling in said lift).

Read-throughs

The Doctor and the companion attend them with as much of the guest cast as possible. Those in small parts aren’t usually present and Nick Lambon reads many of those parts aloud. He joked that a lot of those seem to get cut afterwards! Moffat riffed on that, remembering one of Nick's predecessors who read the part of the child in 'The Empty Child.' His constant deadpans of "Are you my mummy?" were very worrying. Both writers onstage noted that read-throughs are good refreshers. Loads of drafts can leave them a bit numb and not entirely sure what scenes in their memories are actually still in the script.

Continuity

Moffat knows the Doctor Who canon as well as any fan. He knows that it doesn't add up so he sees no point in writing with 50 years of baggage. Moffat considers the madman and his box to be quite a self-contained thing to work with. "The format is actually very small.” He doesn’t sweat the petty stuff, noting that “Amy Pond’s timeline makes no sense.” That’s not to say that fans haven’t connected those dots themselves.

Trailers

To an audience member concerned about spoilers, Moffat said "you're already going to watch the programme. Avoid the trailers! We try to give notice when they'll be on anyway." The important function of trailers is to lure the undecided. Moffat felt he initially gave too little away in last series' trailers, with consequences for ratings. Sharing a bit more did the trick. According to Moffat, writer Richard Curtis advises "put your three best jokes in the trailer. The audience don't have to be surprised when they get to the cinema, they just have to be there."

Anniversary specials

"Don’t do them!" was Moffat’s half-serious advice. Although every script is unique enough that precious few lessons can be carried forward, "Day of the Doctor" was even more of an unpredictable beast. The introduction of a new Doctor did indeed come at an extremely late point in the process. Moffat couldn’t write this sort of episode without the cast sorted but actors needed a script to see if they could safely turn down other work. Additionally, anniversary specials are a tonally tricky thing to pull off as they must be both a drama and a celebration.

Moffat still seems very engaged with his dream job all these years in and Lambon seems to have developed a good, workable view of the Doctor Who writing process. Now it’s just a wait until December to see what story idea has made it into the Doctor Who Christmas special on BBC One.