IT’S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN [481]

Instead of always thinking about the next article, I have been persuaded to look back on my writing in the last year. Without going into all fifty-one of them, I have compiled lists of my ten most-read articles published in 2024 – fortunately, I am happy with the quality of all of them – followed by five that I think should get an extra mention.

I don’t see any deliberate connections between approach or subject matter between them, which is a good thing, as I don’t want to be tied down to a predictable formula. However, I do see that they are the products of reactions, either to personal experience or to the news. There is scope for more approaching subjects in a more creative fashion, and to go into greater depth on some subjects, so do expect some experimentation in 2025 – judging from what topped the most-read list below, I had better start exploring approaches to cybernetics, and the cyber-society in which we find ourselves.

I can see the articles listed below cover a lot of ground, which I hope is an indication of confidence. My five hundredth article will appear here during 2025, most definitely the result of perseverance from week to week. Oddly enough, it is only during this year that a couple of ground rules have made themselves known to me: aim to pass five hundred words, but hope to reach a thousand; and attempt to sum up the point you want to make in the first sentence, like how the below piece about Jaguar began: “Creativity doesn’t have to make sense to you personally, even in advertising.” I may have got that last idea from reading something about Stephen King.

Eight out of the ten most-read articles were been published in the last three months, which I have put down to my having ditched Twitter in favour of Bluesky – my handle is @leighspence.bluesky.social – which thankfully feels like the egalitarian Twitter of old. Having locked my “X” account in response to its owner’s twisting the site’s experience out of all recognition, the switch to Bluesky pretty much confirms that links to external sites from “X” were being throttled – once my local bus company stops using “X” for service updates I am deleting the app altogether. I hope to use social media more in 2025 to let people know what they can find here, now that the dust from the social media square-dance-stampede is settling.

And so, here is the list of my most-read articles published during 2024:

1. LIKE A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM (published 28/01/2024): nailing down a working definition of “cybernetics”, for when I eventually plan to write about cybernetics. With control and communication being key factors across the definitions I found of the word, I can only guess this is a subject that people found important, and not just entertaining to read about.

2. AND NOTHING TO GET HUNG ABOUT (24/03/2024): rediscovering “Seinfeld”, the sitcom that initially made no impact in the UK, having been relegated to midnight screening on BBC Two when Parliament was not in recess, and how it was my little secret before DVDs and streaming made it more accessible. Jerry Seinfeld made some controversial statements when promoting his new film “Unfrosted”, so I guess that added to the interest. 

3. YOU SAW THE WHOLE OF THE MOON (13/10/2024): why did ITV station Meridian Broadcasting use a half-sun, half-moon face to present television in the south of England? See under “things that lived rent-free in my head for years”.

4. BUT STILL THEY COME! (03/11/2024): being bombarded by “Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds” in a busy shop. I don’t think I made clear that I loved listening to the album in full, but that visceral experience in HMV in Oxford Street led me to leave the store empty-handed, hardly the outcome the staff wanted.

5. TOO BUSY DODGING BETWEEN THE FLAK (10/11/2024): Donald Trump is re-elected, but I already talked about him the last time around – unlike him, I didn’t feel like re-litigating the past so, like this list, I linked to what I’ve mentioned before.

6. WE FADE TO GREY (27/10/2024): Fiat won’t sell you a grey car, as it’s not “La Dolce Vita”. This was a case of “I beg your pardon?” upon finding out both that the favourite new car colour in the UK is grey, and that Fiat saw fit to respond.

7. LIKE SUGAR AND SPICE (20/10/2024): Coca-Cola Spiced, a short-lived drink where “spiced” meant “with raspberry”. I had bought the drink, was underwhelmed about it, and with its withdrawal being announced not long afterwards, I could understand why...

8. GONE FISHIN’  (17/11/2024): the nostalgic, Proustian delights of a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish – this one literally wrote itself, including the snap back to reality about burgers being a “sometimes” food.

9. BOYS ALWAYS WORK IT OUT (06/10/2024): constructing an article using Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” card set. This one became as much of an introspective work as this article was, and has many lessons for 2025, including: “Don’t give yourself enough time to decipher or question your methods. Ritual leads the way. Deadline is style. You are in there somewhere.”

10. I’LL CALL YOU JAGUAR IF I MAY BE SO BOLD (24/11/2024): the reinvention of Jaguar, after people stopped noticing their cars. I felt indignant about the lazy use of “woke” being used to describe a creative endeavour, regardless of it being one from a multi-billion pound company, and that made this article very easy to write.

...and here is my personal list of honourable mentions:

ON WITH THE SHOW, THIS IS IT (07/04/2024) and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG (14/04/2024): a work performance review leads into a two-part exploration of Bugs Bunny, the witty and fearless cartoon character and queer role model.

SAY HELLO, WAVE GOODBYE (31/03/2024): the death in March 2024 of Wave 105, a very popular radio station that served its local area until its owners realised the license could be fulfilled with less effort, reducing it to local news and ads on a national network. (Since then, two other stations in the same area, Nation Radio and BBC Radio Solent, took on nearly all of Wave 105’s on-air staff, with Nation Radio becoming a more local station in the process – where there’s a will...)

IF YOU’RE ALRIGHT, YOU CAN’T GO WRONG (18/02/2024): celebrating the career of Steve Wright, the immensely popular radio presenter, and discovering how he built the signature sound of his shows. “His public modesty about his own career is admirable, and while he never really got personal on air, you were always left with the impression that he was a thoroughly sincere and hard-working man.”

I'VE SEEN THAT MOVIE TOO (28/04/2024): although prompted by Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop-Tarts comedy biopic “Unfrosted”, the opening sentence, for a look at how Hollywood’s demise has been predicted many time, is definitely that of a film scholar: “To make your debut as a feature film director by declaring the death of the film industry is a trick that Jean-Luc Godard sadly missed.”

DID I TELL YOU EVERYTHING IS FINE (15/09/2024): defining “Pages from Ceefax” as a genre of music, taking in the nostalgia of watching, and listening, to teletext pages filling the gaps between TV programmes.

I WANNA KNOW THE NAME OF THE GAME [480]

Having owned a Game Boy for five years now I appreciate the reliable source of enjoyment and distraction it has been, and I want to keep that experience as long as I can without making any compromises.

My current console is a blue Nintendo Game Boy Pocket, made in around 1997-98. I love its robust build and frugal use of AAA batteries, but I am aware of its biggest limitation, an LCD display with no backlight that also slowly fades with age – playing the Breakout-like game “Alleyway”, I’ve often realised I can’t see where the bouncing ball is going, even when playing in a brightly lit room.

I cannot expect the console to keep working forever, so I decided to take advantage of the growing market in Game Boy clones, arising from the love of the machine, its game library, and the fact that Nintendo built it with largely off-the-shelf components – the Z80-derived processor found in the original Game Boy, Pocket, Light and Color is also found among 1980s computers like the Sega Master System, Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC range.

My first option was to buy another Nintendo console, but not their latest Switch – I already own the games I play, so I don’t need to buy them again from the Nintendo eShop. I bought a Game Boy Advance in 2021, which also plays the original cartridges, but its screen is also not backlit – the later folding Advance SP has both front- and blacklit versions, and accordingly sell at a premium, just like the Japan-only Game Boy Light. Admittedly, I had not done my research, but the Advance was later sold for more than I bought it for, a mark of increasing interest and appetite for these consoles.

My next consideration was a refurbished console. An enormous demand has grown for after-market Game Boy screens – backlit, of course, but only able to approximating screen resolutions – console shells and components. I have no aptitude for this kind of modification and assembly, especially more delicate tasks like connecting a new screen to the motherboard, but the ability to order one, encased in exactly the colour of case and buttons you wish, was very appealing. It is an ideal choice to extend the life of existing Game Boy hardware, if you can look past the age of the motherboards – the last Game Boy Colour was sold in 2003, and the last Advance SP in 2010 – but the rework usually with its own warranty.

I then decided to at all-new hardware. A company named Funny Playing makes the “FPGBC”, a Game Boy Color clone using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip to replicate exactly the original machine’s processors, largely guaranteeing compatibility with cartridges and peripherals. Like refurbishing an existing console, you can buy the FPGBC motherboard, pre-assembled with screen attached, and build your own case around it, or have one built for you. Aside from its using a rechargeable battery, this is the closest available console to the original Game Boy, the perfect choice if you simply want to play games using all-new hardware.

The only reason I didn’t go for the FPGBC myself was seeing the price tick up when I looked at assembly options for the case and button colours I wanted, followed by the cost and time of delivery, because it pushed my expected cost towards the Analogue Pocket, a console produced in limited numbers since 2021 that, while assuming a mostly similar shape and button layout to a Game Boy, uses its FPGA chip to replicate the Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx, PC Engine and Neo Geo Pocket, although the extra cost of cartridge adaptors made this less desirable. Furthermore, its continued use of a plastic case and similar rechargeable battery like the FPGBC, while costing up to twice as much as one, soured me a bit, high-resolution screen or not – their shipping costs from the US to the UK didn’t help either.

My final option was announced in June 2024. The ModRetro Chromatic comes from Palmer Luckey, a former virtual reality headset designer who got into modifying Game Boys as a teenager, and now owns a company named Anduril, making armed drones – this fact might be a deal-breaker, but the Chromatic, advertised as a strictly limited “1st Edition”, is already sold out as of the time of publication, so it has already become moot. 

The console is built like a smartphone: a bespoke display matching the resolution and colour temperature of the Game Boy Color, rather than appropriating a screen made elsewhere, and encased by sapphire glass; durable clicky PBT plastic buttons, and a painted magnesium-aluminium alloy case seemingly doubling as its warranty, in the hope of making it indestructible. It is completely overbuilt for its purpose, and more expensive than a FPGBC that could do the same job just as well, and while you can connect a USB-C cable to capture or relay the video from the screen, do you really need that?

I pre-ordered the Chromatic four months after it was announced: I surmised that if Luckey wanted to make money from it, it wouldn’t have been made the way it had been, or would cost more than the $199 asking price – I expect future editions will be cost-reduced, and more in line with the FPGBC. 

However, the 1st Edition might be the best Game Boy not made by Nintendo themselves. I bought it in “bubblegum” (pink, with purple A and B buttons), and feels incredibly solid and well put together, although heavier than I was expecting – with cartridge and AA batteries installed, the Chromatic weights 270 grams, versus 160 for a similarly prepared Game Boy Pocket. The crisp, legible and colourful screen is a revelation – the backlight is so powerful that I have it at one level above “off”, so I expect it, and the console, to last a very long time, although my main concern is avoiding any chipping of the paintwork.

In short, buy the FPGBC to enter the world of Game Boy gaming to avoid using old hardware, and if you want a Game Boy Advance, buy a refurbished console if you can, or an Analogue Pocket. If you don’t want to compromise, learn to compromise.

GIVE THEM MOON AND CLOUDLESS SKIES [479]

from "The Simpsons" episode "Barthood", a parody of Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

It isn’t unusual to want Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson to grow up OK when you have been watching them on television for most of your own life. You hope that our real world, both reflected and created by the show, will ultimately be as kind to them as you want it to be for ourselves.

With “The Simpsons” having now run for an astonishing thirty-five years, three years away from eclipsing “Last of the Summer Wine” to become the world’s longest-running sitcom, its status quo means that, while I was younger than Lisa when I first saw the show, I am now older than both her parents. We have grown up with these characters, but they can only grow through lessons learned, fleshing out their backstory.

I fell out of watching “The Simpsons” for some time, returning upon subscribing to Disney+ to find a show that, while not having folded over itself by pandering to its audience’s nostalgia, has become playful with its own history: it began its thirty-sixth season with a “series finale” that stopped questions on how the show would eventually end, having previously broadcast a fake clip show of leaked episodes purportedly too outlandish even for later-period “The Simpsons”, and a “Treehouse of Horror” story created a “Westworld”-like theme park of the moments adopted as internet memes.

The 2022 episode “When Nelson Met Lisa” was when I realised that my favourite episodes of “The Simpsons” depict an imagined future for its characters, seeing what their experiences have made them, regardless of it being a parody of “When Harry Met Sally”. Lisa has been shown to have a crush on Nelson Muntz before, but a series of scenes across the years builds this into a mature, happy and hopeful ending, one you hope will be canonised.

By necessity, the future depicted in “The Simpsons” can’t be set in stone, because that could get in the way of a good story, but there have been elements built up on each other, then knocked down and rebuilt: Bart could become a deadbeat divorced dad, living in a Springfield Elementary converted to makeshift apartments; Lisa is successful, but marries Milhouse; and Maggie, the eternal silent wildcard, becomes the biggest noise in pop music, and the most constant depiction of her future. Thankfully, Bart and Lisa’s future has been depicted more hopefully, with Bart becoming a BMX stunt champion, artist and a repair shop owner, while Lisa will attend Harvard and have the world as her oyster. 

Then again, Bart could also become a Supreme Court judge after missing “The Itchy & Scratchy Movie”, and Lisa could become President of the United States, having inherited “quite a budget crunch from President Trump”, although the episode “Bart to the Future”, broadcast in 2000, would not have known which Trump presidency it would be. 

Predicting the future can be futile, despite the number of times situations and jokes in “The Simpsons” replayed themselves in real life, from predicting the discovery of the Higgs boson to Disney buying 20^thCentury Fox, but imagining the future should be encouraged, except for preparing for when “The Simpsons” eventually ends – I don’t think anyone is truly prepared for that. Perhaps it could then be rebooted with an older Bart, Lisa and Maggie – it happened with "The Flintstones" and “The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show”.

WE’RE ANXIOUS TO TRY IT [478]

My screenshot is in focus, but the picture is not.

After all the anticipation, the Blu-ray has finally arrived...

Drumming, tribal or jazzy in rhythm, begins as “Vincent Price Presents” appears in a red Futura Display font on a black screen. Cut to a steaming pot on a stove, the word “Cooking” appearing over it in the same font and colour. Expectations already countered, “Price-Wise” appears in fanciful hand-cut lettering, still red, in a yellow burst on a blue background. With expectations placed on his name having been broken, and after today’s potato-based menu is shown, the man himself appears on screen, wearing an apron over his own clothes: “Hello, I’m Vincent Price. in this series of programmes, I hope to take you around the world using your cooker instead of a jet plane.”

 

So begins the first episode of the six-part “Cooking Price-Wise” series, the same opening recreated each time with variations in pot use and font size. Each of the six episodes is delineated by both the main ingredient and where the recipes come from, the UK lining up with bacon. 

 

Everything feels slightly wobbly, and slightly giddy: Price is perfectly in command of his subject and each episode’s running order, the recipes having been gathered personally during his travels, his enthusiasm and curiosity fully on display, with a “hmm?” capping sentences after making certain points. 

 

Everything may be in place to ensure that pre-prepared food is ready at the right point to continue the demonstration – Price refers to “the marvels of modern television” several times – but I don’t feel a final script was used, or indeed needed, for example when an Ayrshire roll was instructed as being cooked “at 370 degrees, or mark 4 in gas”.

 

The show itself feels it was recorded in a hurry, and in one continuous take: a zooming in on Price as he introduces one episode’s main ingredient leads to the shot going out of focus, and the shadows of people behind the camera are occasionally seen. These flaws were either not important – having been broadcast in April 1971, many might still be watching in black and white, on older 405-line sets, making them less visible – or that time was constantly against the production, the entire series having been recorded over the course of a week in July 1970, with two episodes completed on the Friday.

 

It turns out the pastry dish I couldn’t remember from last time was “Fish Fillets Nord Zee”, which instead uses mashed potato and a cake icing bag to create a border and compartments on a dish, to tell the story of Dutch history through its dykes and sea walls, with the fish and vegetables representing the sea and land. I still won’t be trying it, but I enjoyed hearing Price talking about it. At the time, chefs were more willing to give up the recipes and secrets featured in this series, something that would be more closely guarded as “intellectual property” today. There was a garlic salad that sounded rather interesting...

 

Some curious decisions are made in the presentation: an episode centred around bacon refers to a cross-section model of a pig balanced on a kitchen cabinet above Price’s head, and the history of potatoes are illustrated with cartoons by an uncredited artist. The most bizarre moment of all was the creation of a fruit cocktail crocodile, using a cucumber as a starting point  - the lights dim to make the “monster”, and the close-up of the face was simultaneously terrifying and hilarious.

 

The kitchen is incredibly 1970s in look, with patterned cookware, woodgrain cabinets and red kitchen tops. At the same time, it is a modern kitchen: among the uses of a blender, garlic press and the fridge as cooking gadgets, a dishwasher resides in the back of the shot, never mentioned. A ledge in front of the kitchen tops is reserved for the end of each episode for Price to point out, with a wooden spoon, the ingredients used in each episode, in case you were too slow writing them down - later in the 1970s and into the 80s, teletext and home video made taking notes far easier, let alone the tie-in book. 

 

The series is intimate, with no audience, Price talking directly to the viewer, both he and the kitchen backed into a corner by the cameras. It is almost a YouTube video circa 1970: it is made by an independent production company, I.D. TV, and the show is copyright of the Vincent Price estate. It was filmed using Thames Television facilities, but was at its mercy as to when it would be broadcast, just as anyone uploading a video online is subject to the rules and regulations of the host site. Even YouTubers now have more capable and portable cameras, with image stabilisation, and perhaps even the luxury of reshoots, but the same time, a YouTube video would more likely cut out any hesitation, and break each episode into one video per recipe.

 

Shot today, “Cooking Price-Wise” would undoubtedly have a much larger budget, while also sending Vincent Price back to the places from where he found those recipes, making it as much a travelogue as an instructional cooking show – think Keith Floyd or Rick Stein. However, that would sacrifice the intimacy of one person enthusiastically sharing the knowledge they have gathered, which was my main takeaway from a TV show I have waited years to see.

THE MIDNIGHT HOUR IS CLOSE AT HAND [477]

I have anticipated this for a while, but I will need to continue anticipating for a few more days.

I was intending to discuss Vincent Price’s “Cooking Price-Wise”, a series made for Thames Television, and released on Blu-ray by the British Film Institute for its first public view since its original broadcast in 1971. I have only seen a few seconds of this show, played in another TV show from over twenty years ago, but I have been given a copy of the tie-in book, expanded and reissued by the Price family in 2017, subtitled “A Culinary Legacy”. I was looking forward to discovering what kind of experience is created when watching a cooking show hosted by an icon of horror cinema.

However, I ordered the disc via Amazon.co.uk, where messages of the package being out for delivery were replaced by an apology for its having been sent to Leeds, two hundred miles away from me. Therefore, I am taking the opportunity, created by misplaced logistics, to explore why I anticipate watching Vincent Price cook a turkey.

I don’t know if Vincent Price was typecast by his appearance in horror films, in both the United States and the UK, or by how effective his voice was in a horror context. To be absolutely honest, he was also so much of an Anglophile that I didn’t realise he was American, proving my apparent inability to place his accent – in an appearance on Thames’ “Today” discussion show in 1972, Price tells Eamonn Andrews that he is a great fan of British food, like steak and kidney pie, and beans on toast, “because I don’t have to eat it all the time!”

But Price had almost a parallel career as a gourmet cook, releasing three books of recipes in the 1960s with his then-wife Mary Grant Price. Like The Monkees’ Michael Nesmith’s mother inventing correction fluid, Price’s grandfather, Dr Vincent Clarence Price, invented baking powder – the expanded “Cooking Price-Wise” featured a few pages from this Vincent Price’s own cookbook, reminding you to “Use Dr Price’s Phosphate Baking Powder” at the top of each page. In the same interview with Andrews, Price said the aim of his series the previous year was “to tell the British housewife that there are very common things, like potatoes, that can be done superbly, and with just as little effort as they put into it ordinarily”.

In 1971, cooking shows were more on the fringes of TV schedules than is expected today – no landmark series with Delia Smith, no combined travelogues with Keith Floyd or Rick Stein. Confined to a kitchen set, the likes of Fanny Cradock will present instructional series that will be found on weekend mornings, alongside similar programmes on woodwork or learning a language, or just as TV channels reopened in the late afternoon, or before they closed down for the night. Cradock did have primetime series as early as 1968, but on the more deliberately specialist BBC Two – repeats on BBC One were again at the fringes of its schedule. “Cooking Price-Wise”, despite its presenter and its aim, was therefore relegated to about 11.15pm or 11.30pm on a Tuesday on Thames for six weeks in April and May 1971, again before closedown – I could not find any evidence that the rest of the ITV network ever showed it outside of the Greater London and Home Counties area.

I have never cooked a recipe from “Cooking Price-Wise”, but then I own a copy of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “The Futurist Cookbook”, and I have never wanted to cook anything from that either. Perhaps it was that one clip of the TV show I have seen, which was of Price filling several pastry pockets with olives and other ingredients – I have been unable to find the clip since seeing it, or the TV show that included it. 

Time might be the problem, as British tastes have developed in the decades since the show was made – olive oil doesn’t have to be bought in a chemist anymore, and wine and hummus are actually consumed here now. What doesn’t help is the pictures provided of some recipes, practically screaming that they were from another time, when things were done differently – it may be that hearing and seeing someone explain them to you will make them more palatable. I will have to try one of them now – my copy of the book keeps opening at the minestrone for some reason, but Sardinian Gnocchi may be worth a go.

I hope watching “Cooking Price-Wise” will be as rewarding as I have built it up to be, when my copy of it arrives.