At one point, Captain Edrison Peavey Edward Elizabeth Hitler pulls out a newspaper to read.

It may surprise you to know that the "Hammersmith Bugle" is not a real paper and they never ran a headline "No News Shocker". At which point, it is time to rip off Dirty Feed's shtick and find out what that paper really is.

Sadly, Bottom has been cruelly denied a 4K remaster by the philistine bastards at the BBC, so you'll have to make do with potato-quality images from a DVD. Here's a lovely shot of the back of the paper.

Alas, "Cup Tie Chaos" isn't a particularly unique headline. As the paper flicks open there's a photo of what looks like a famous shot from Pulp Fiction.

Pulp Fiction was released in the UK in October 1994. So, again, not especially helpful except to narrow down the publication date of the paper.

As the paper flaps open again, we glimpse the sports pages.

Although something about a "enjoying a finish" doesn't help much, with a bit of "ZOOM! ENHANCE! ROTATE!" we can see the headline "Seesaw Swans hit back". A much more likely candidate for finding a unique hit!

And, indeed, a trawl of the British Newspaper Archive (courtesy of the Wikipedia Library) reveals that exact headline!

That's from the Surrey Herald, published on the 3rd of November 1994. About 9 weeks before transmission.

The other pages in the paper can be matched with their on-screen appearance.

There's also this very hard to spot headline about how "Wartime tales inspired poet":

Which can be exactly matched to page 8 of the Surrey Herald.

Case closed! Let's go home and get off with some smashing birds.

Hold The Front Page

But, that's not quite the whole story.

Let's compare the front page of the Hammersmith Bugle with that of the Surrey Herald on the 3rd of November 1994.

Ah.

The good news is that the advert for a mobile phone in the top left corner looks the same, as does the golf equipment advert in the bottom right.

The bad news is that the main photo is not the same. In Bottom, it appears to be two people reading a book or magazine. The headlines and surrounding columns all appear to be different.

You can just about see through the front page onto page 2 - there's a logo near the top, a headline just under it, and a face bottom centre. Whereas the Surrey Herald's page 2 looks nothing like that.

Fuck, shit, bollocks, pissflaps, and arse!

It doesn't look like any of the Surrey Herald's front pages from around that time.

If we go back to the "Seesaw Swans" snap, we can see a bit more of the inside of the front page.

That actually looks like the Stork Margarine logo they were discussing!

If we flip the semi-translucent shot, it becomes a bit clearer.

It says "STORK MARGARINE". Here it is highlighted in Super HD.

Was that mocked up for the show or just a happy coincidence? I think it is a mock up because, if you look a little further down, you'll see:

That's the name of the invisible character Slip Digby who won the competition.

There's a brief shot of the full page where the logo is slightly more visible:

Followed by a frame where you can see more of the page:

If you look towards the bottom of the paper, you'll see a headline about "Heady Sixties" and a small black box in the corner.

Which, I think can be traced back to page four of the paper:

I think the props team have taken the top half of the page and moved it down to the bottom - then added in the Stork Margarine content to the top.

But that still doesn't explain how and why the front page is so different.

Another search for the "Heady Sixties" headline brings back the Staines & Ashford News of the same date. Exactly the same page layout for that and a few more pages as the Surrey Herald, but the rest is substantially different. Similarly, the Sunbury & Shepperton Herald of the same day shares some pages, but the front page is completely different. It can also be found in the Staines & Egham News.

Without a clearer photo of the front page, it is impossible to search for any of the headlines on it.

Now, when I earlier castigated the BBC for not remastering the series, that was a bit of a clever lie. There's a 1080p version on the official BBC Comedy Greats YouTube channel.

That allows us to get the highest possible quality shot of the front page.

Through the paper you can just about see the face from page 4 and the "Heady Sixties" headline next to it.

On the front page, I think the two headlines I can make out are:

Elsie is 100 years young

and

FA Cup tie mix up angers Walton boss

I can see that Walton played Swansea City (and lost) on the 21st of November - and the "mix up" is referred to later in the paper under "Cup tie chaos" - but that specific headline is missing from the archives. Dear old Elsie is also absent.

And there, I must confess, I hit a brick wall. I looked through all the front-pages of Surrey papers in October and November 1994 - but there was nothing. Given that Bottom was filmed in Television Centre, I went through hundreds of front pages of London papers without success. I listened to the Talking Bottom podcast for the episode. I even looked through the VHS-only release of Bottom Fluff to see if the newspaper featured in any of the out-takes. Sadly not.

My working assumption is, in order of most to least likely:

• An earlier or later edition of the Surrey Herald was used, and that hasn't been archived.
• One of the Herald's sister papers was used, and is missing from the archive.
• The props team did a completely new front page using stock photos and lorem ipsum.

I was so hoping I could have closed this post with "BOTTOM STAINES!!!". But, alas…

There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which give you a good indicator of when an image first appeared on the web, and whether it was published by a reputable source.

You can use Google Books to check whether a quote is true.

You can use social-media searches to easily check the origin of memes.

There are vast archives of printed material to help you.

The World Wide Web has a million sites which allow you to cross-reference any citations to see if they're spurious.

Now, perhaps all that is a bit too much effort for someone casually doomscrolling and hitting "repost" for an instant dopamine hit. But it shouldn't be. And it certainly shouldn't be for people who write for trusted sources like newspapers.

Recently, the beloved actor Patricia Routledge died. Several newspapers reposted a piece of viral slop which I had debunked a month previously. Let's go through the piece and see just how easy it is to prove false.

Here's that "viral" story. I've kept to the parts which contain easily verifiable / falsifiable claims.

Wikpedia says that her birthday was 17 February 1929. She would have turned 95 in 2024.

Open up your calendar app. Scroll back to February 2024. What date was 17 February 2024? Saturday. Not Monday.

Now, OK, maybe at 95 she's forgotten her birthday. What else does the rest of the piece say?

In 1968, Patricia Routledge won Best Actress (Musical) at the Tony Awards - she was 39. I don't know if I'd consider appearing on Broadway as provincial stages.

Keeping Up Appearances was first broadcast in 1990. Patricia was around 60, not 50, when she was cast.

While she may have thought it would only be a small series - even though it was by the creator of Open All Hours and Last of the Summer Wine - there's no way that being the lead character could be described as a "small part". She wasn't a breakout character - she was the star.

Wikipedia isn't always accurate, but it does list lots of her stage work. She was working steadily on stage from 1999 - when she hit 70 - but none of it Shakespeare.

I was able to do that fact checking in 10 minutes while laying in bed waiting for the bathroom to become free. It wasn't onerous. It didn't require subscriptions to professional journals. I didn't need a team of fact-checkers. It took a bit of web-sleuthing and, dare I say it, a smidgen of common sense.

And yet, a couple of newspapers ran with this utter drivel as though it were the truth. The Independent published it as part of their tribute - although they took the piece down after I emailed them. Similarly The Express ran it without any basic fact-checking (and didn't take it down after being contacted).

Both of them say their primary source is the "Jay Speak" blog. There's nothing on that blog post to say that the author interviewed Patricia Routledge. A quick check of the other posts on the site don't make it obvious that it is a reputable source of exclusive interviews with notable actors.

The date on that blog post is August 2nd, 2025. Is there anything earlier? Typing a few of the phrases into a search engine found a bunch of posts which pre-date it. The earliest I can find was this Instagram post and this Facebook post both from the 24th of July - a week early than the Jay Speaks post.

To be clear, I don't think Jay Speaks was deliberately trying to fool journalists or hoax anyone. They simply saw an interesting looking post and re-shared it. I also suspect the Facebook and Instagram posts were copied from other sources - but I've been unable to find anything definitive.

I would expect that professional journalists at well-established newspapers to be able to call an actor's agent to fact-check a piece before running it. If they can't, I would have thought they'd do a cursory fact check.

But, no. I presume the rush to publish is so great that it over-rides any sense of whether a piece should be accurate.

This is irresponsible. Last week saw the BBC air an outright lie on Have I Got News For You. A professional TV company, with a budget for lawyers, fact checkers, and researchers - and they just broadcast easily disproven lies. Why? Maybe hubris, maybe laziness, maybe deliberate rabble-rousing.

The media have comprehensively failed us. They will repeat any tawdry nonsense as long as it keeps people clicking. It's up to us to defend ourselves and our friends against this unending tsunami of low-grade slurry.

I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. It doesn't require anything more than an Internet connection and a curious mind. If you see something online, take a moment to check it before sharing it.

Stopping misinformation starts with you.

Over time, the branding faded and GU.com became a URL shortening service. Tiny URls like gu.com/abc could be printed in papers, sent via SMS, or posted on Twitter. They made a huge fanfare about how it would help with analytics.

You can read some of the history of the shortner to understand why it was created.

Rev Dan Catt

@revdancatt

Niche twitter thread time. I'm raising a glass to the end of the @guardian's URL shortener gu.com, which is now on sale for £2.5 million.

Back when twitter was only 140 chars & didn't shrink url links itself, making short URLs a whole important thing.

1/8 pic.x.com/wu9joo3vkw

---

And now, for reasons best known to themselves, The Gaurdian have stopped the service and put GU.com up for sale.

The starting price is TWO AND HALF MILLION DOLLARS!

Look, if I had an asset that valuable and was looking at declining revenue, I'd sell it.

But breaking that URl comes with a problem. I've written before about why URl shortening is bad for users and bad for the web. I've even helped publish government guidance about it. But all of those were based on the premise that the shortener was a 3rd party service. I never thought someone would be as daft as to switch off their own service.

Here are some of the problems this sale causes.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Whoever buys the gu.com domain will effectively get to rewrite history.
They can redirect links like these - and change the nature of the content being commented on.

Joyce Alene

@JoyceWhiteVance

The Steele Dossier asserted Russian hacking of the DNC was "conducted with the full knowledge & support of Trump & senior members of his campaign.” Trump's war against the FBI & efforts to obstruct make sense if he thought they could prove it. gu.com/p/axa7k/stw

---

---

Is there a tweet somewhere of a future politician saying "I support this 100% GU.com/...."? Redirect that to something horrific and you have a potential scandal on your hand.

There are lots of academic papers with gu.com shortened links. Those are all now dead.

Millions of links around the web - including many on the Grauniad itself - are all now broken.

The Guarrdian could fix this by publishing a list of all the shortened URls. That wouldn't stop links breaking, but would make it possible for researchers to reconstruct the original destination.

For decades, we've tried to remind people that "Cool URls Don't Change". We'll just have to hope that the people of the future find a way to decipher all these obsolete links.

For the last 3 years, The Times' articles have been (mostly) behind a paywall. People have been predicting its demise for just as long, but it shows no signs of going away - no matter how few people pay for content.

The overall thrust of The Times' argument is that they would rather have a low number of paying customers than a large number of freeloaders.

"What have we really lost? A long tail of passing trade, many from overseas, many popping in for only one article, referred by Google or a social media link, not even aware they are on a Times or a Sun website, wholly anonymous.

This reach doesn’t generate any meaningful revenue, and the pursuit of it undermines the piece of the business that does make money. If your purpose contemplates still being here in five to 10 years’ time, then the choice seems clear: it is better to sacrifice reach and preserve sustainable profitability."

News UK CEO Mike Darcey

Personally, I would like a large number of paying customers. But I'm old fashioned like that.

This leads me to the question - why does The Times make it so hard for me to give it money?

Here's a typical user journey.

"Oh! Hey! This looks like a pretty neat story that one of my Twitter friends has shared. Let's check it out!"

"Hmmm, I've been presented with a crappy desktop experience - despite being on a mobile. That doesn't happen with the Telegraph, FT, Guardian, Mirror, or Independent. They're smart enough to give me content formatted to my device."

"There's no link to view this story on mobile. I'll search for the mobile front page. I bet that's a good experience!"

"Still, running a image resizing proxy is pretty hard work. I'm glad I saw these error messages!"

"Ok, let's click on the story. I bet I can read the teaser content which has been available on the main site since 2012."

"No. Nothing. Oh well. Their reputation for hard hitting journalism means I certainly wish to subscribe."

"Wow! They really don't want my money. You know what, I'll try to get to their subscribe page on my phone anyway."

"Well, after searching the page for the smallest link imaginable, I've finally found something which looks like a mobile formatted page!"

"Finally! Take my money!"

What a load of rubbish! How is this a good way to take money from the billions of mobile users on the planet?

Here's how it should work....

1. User clicks a link from Twitter.
2. She sees a mobile friendly page, with teaser content, and a link to buy.
3. Buy link takes her to a mobile payment gateway.
4. User subscribes.
5. That's it.

Using a service like ImpulsePay The Times could create a link which charged their £2 access fee directly to the user's phone bill (if they were in the UK). It's true that there's a lack of global mobile payment options - but considering their payment page is already mobile friendly, they could just link directly to that.

It's all very confusing. They have a reasonable mobile payment system - they don't link to it. They can take advantage of direct mobile billing to the majority of users - they don't. They could provide a beautiful and compelling mobile experience to detected devices - they can't be bothered.

What's going on? Don't The Times like money?

The first time was after I called a particularly nasty company "twunts" over a dispute I'd had with them. I'll be the first to admit that it wasn't a particularly mature reaction - but I'm not sure it warranted taking a screenshot of the tweet, threatening to show it to the CEO of the company I worked for, then continually calling the company to complain about me. I was a private citizen, not tweeting on behalf of his employer. Luckily, my employers were very good about it and supported me. There is no small measure of schadenfreude when I read about my blackmailers current protracted legal difficulties.

The second time was rather different - and in many ways nastier. I was at a private function and twitpic'd a photo of a (very) minor celebrity. I was immediately contacted by his PR team saying "please don't tweet anything he says - it's a private event." Not a problem for me, I emailed back saying I'd keep schtum. A few weeks later, I got hauled over the coals and threatened by his "team" for "invading his privacy" and "endangering him by revealing his location." All over a blurry twitpic which, if they'd asked at the time, I would gladly have removed. Again, threats were made to me about the consequences of my tweets.

Both tweets have now been deleted.

All of which has left me with a rather sour outlook. I now think twice before I tweet anything. Who knows what innocent, flippant, or satirical content can be taken, twisted out of context and then used against you?

#welovebaskers

All of which brings me, in a round about way, to a cause célèbre on twitter - @Baskers. I've met her a couple of times at social occasions, but I wouldn't say I knew her well. Even though enough has been written about her to fill a book, but I'd like to add my tuppenceworth.

It would be the height of egocentricity to claim my experiences were anything like hers. I've neither been pilloried in the press nor caused my employers publicly defend me.

But there is a similarity. We are both victims of bullying. It took me a little while to realise this but, since doing so, it has made the world a lot clearer.

@Baskers was the victim of a vicious and petty bullying campaign in two national newspapers.

Perhaps she got picked on because she's a smart and successful woman. Bullies hate those more successful than themselves. Was it because she is witty, intelligent, and able to eloquently express her opinion that lead her to be despised by talentless hacks?
Or, as is so often, was she a victim of someone who can only make themselves feel good about their pathetic and wretched life by randomly lashing out at a weaker target?

Whatever the reasons, it's abuse. Using a position of power to bully someone who can't respond on the same scale is disgusting - especially from papers which claim to be against bullying.

What Should We Do About Bullying?

I was told by countless teachers that you should ignore bullies and eventually they go away. That may well be true for some childhood scrapes - but removing oneself from the vengeful eye of the gutter press isn't just as simple as closing the curtains and hoping they go away - as Zoe Margolis found out.

So, can we go down the "official" routes to complain? Sadly, the game is rigged.

In the case of the UK's legal system - the costs are prohibitive, the players all work against you, the rules are obscure, and even if you win - you're still tainted by association and may not recover your costs.

In the case of the the Press Complaints Commission the game is so one sided that you stand virtually no chance of success.

• The body you complain to is populated with senior members of the UK's newspaper industry - so very little chance of a fair or impartial hearing.
• The PCC limit the scope of the complaints you can make about their members.
• If a newspaper doesn't like the way the PCC timidly pursues it - they can simply leave the PCC and have all cases against them dropped.
• The chair of the PCC, on the basis of this BBC interview, is unrepentant in her stewardship of such an obviously incompetent authority.

Unsurprisingly, the PCC once again looked after their members' interests.

Revenge?

But what can we do? How do we stop these hideous cyber-bullies?

It's tempting to think of revenge. It's a basic human instinct. I'm salivating at the thought of extracting retribution - both on my behalf and by proxy for @Baskers. I'd love to set a pack of ravenous paparazzi on the editors of those newspapers and hound them until they couldn't take it any more. I'd love to fill the pages of other newspapers with a long exposé of their reports weird sexual habits (as an aside, subscribe to Private Eye and read Street of Shame - they're the only paper which reports on other papers). I want to set up website detailing every miss-step a journalist has ever made - and SEO it so that when potential employers search for them, all they find is the very worst. I want parody twitter accounts dedicated to making them a laughing stock.

I'd love to watch newspaper editors and journalists in utter despair as their children come home weeping because of what the other kids are saying about their mummy or daddy.

And that's why revenge is wrong. It's morally wrong to stoop to their level. Hurting other people just traps you in a cycle of violence. Revenge is usually indiscriminate and hurts far more than the target. Besides, as they say, "never fight with a pig. You both end up covered in shit - but the pig likes it."

I'm not saying we should passively resist them. We can't let them beat up our friends and hope they get tired and go away. We can't simply watch bullying ruin life after life. We can't close our eyes and wish for the best.

What Can We Do?

I'm a hippy. I think it's up to us to take a stand in what we believe in. To be the better person. Ultimately, to forgive and show the bullies that there is a better way.

I'm inspired by Michael Lapsley - my wife's uncle - and the work of The Forgiveness Project. Michael, and the others on the site, have managed to find forgiveness for those who have done them dreadful wrongs. I can't even begin to compare Michael's horrific and permanent injuries to the next-day's-chip-paper assaults on members of our community. Although I do know the mental scarring from bullying can be as painful as anything which can be done to our bodies.

Reading through the stories on the site one thing becomes clear. It's important for both parties to understand each other. To understand where the pain comes from and why it was dished out so callously.

I don't know how we make this happen. I don't know whether it's as simple as inviting Quentin Letts out for a drink. Chatting with him and letting him see what pain he has wrought. Is it a case of "adopting" a journalist and showing them how twitter works - and helping them make friends?

How do we reach out to these bullies? How do we show them that they don't need to fear us? How do we make them understand that their words have consequences? How can we make them see that picking on people isn't big, and it isn't clever?

I don't want (some) newspapers and (some) blogs trying to ruin the lives of those who have caused them no harm. Is that really an impossible task?

Every so often, I spy something that reminds me just how far they need to go in order to fully "get" the web.

This latest example is from the Financial Times. I have huge admiration for the FT. Their reporting is usually spot on, their website is mostly excellent and their mobile site is very credible. But take a look at the bottom of this story.

See Page 2

Those words "Network Envy, Page 2 - BT Under Pressure, Page 16" aren't hyperlinks. They are just scraps of text telling me to turn to a separate page in my paper to read the story.

This tells us several interesting things about the FT.

• Their web and mobile content comes from the same back-end as their print content.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but...
• Their back end system has no understanding of the web (or the writer for this particular story doesn't understand it)
• There is no specific editor for the (mobile) web edition of the paper.  Allowing mistakes like this slip through shows a disregard for your readership.
• The mindset of the writers and editors aren't focused on the web.  This may be the tools they have at their disposal or it may be their training.  One thing is for certain - this is a print story which has been thrown with very little consideration on to a different medium.

Think what they could be doing.  The first mention of a company could be linked to all the news stories they have.  Given this is the FT, why not stick a live stock price after every company's name?  When a CEO is mentioned - link to their profile.

The power of hypertext is that it is so much better than regular text.  Not only more expressive, but more useful.  It can be dynamically generated and updated.  It can grant the joy of serendipidous discoveries to your readers.

Ignore the hype about blogs, comments, sharing, and twittering - it's links which make the difference.  Links are what drive the web and make it better than newsprint.  They connect your content - making it greater than the sum of its pieces.

It's your content - but better.