G&TV Special: Swirly Thing Alert Features Posted by Ian Symes on 23rd April 2025, 12:15 Previously on G&TV, we looked at Smegheads in Seattle, a 1998 production by KCTS 9, Seattle's local PBS station. They'd arranged a visit from Craig Charles and Danny John-Jules, who came over to be interviewed, take part in pledge drives and meet the show's many fans in the north-west corner of the US / the south-west corner of Canada. But Smegheads in Seattle was actually the second such programme produced by the station, a sequel of sorts to 1997's Swirly Thing Alert, which featured much the same content but with Craig joined by Robert Llewellyn instead. Taking place over the 26th and 27th May to coincide with a Series VII marathon, highlights from the weekend's events were packaged together into a whopping two hour compilation. Both specials were originally posted to YouTube by a user named Harlz, but they seem to have deleted them both within the last year or so. So we're now hosting them on our own channel, as well as on the Internet Archive. And if you've not seen Swirly Thing Alert before, there is much to unpack. Join us below the embed for analysis and a watch-along guide to some of the highlights (and lowlights). Read more →
G&TV Special: Smegheads In Seattle Features Posted by Ian Symes on 22nd September 2019, 15:24 Here's an incredible find that was first brought to our attention by Tom Selway on Twitter at the start of August, just a few days after it surfaced on YouTube. We immediately sprung in to action, opening our to-do list and pencilling it in for September's G&TV. Which would have been fine if things like TORDFC's newsletter and reddwarf.co.uk didn't exist, both of which have featured it in the meantime. Nevertheless, it's well worth sharing in case those two passed any of you by, as it's not every day you get to see a fully-fledged broadcast programme all about Red Dwarf. Before Comedy Connections and The Making of Back To Earth, but after Red Dwarf Night, there was Smegheads in Seattle. Produced and broadcast by KCTS, a local PBS affiliate serving Seattle and Tacoma in Washington, it features Craig Charles and Danny John-Jules on a visit to the eponymous city in May 1998. It's a compilation of material from various sources: one main interview by KCTS's Ken Vincent, another interview with Danny solo, viewer Q&As from two separate pledge drives for the station, at least two different convention appearances, plus a couple of specially-shot sections, which we'll come to. After it initially aired, it did the rounds as a bootleg VHS for a while, along with another show from the same station, Swirly Thing Alert, but then disappeared and slipped from the memory, until now. Read more →
