The Making Of: Bits
BITS ONCE ROAMED THE LATE-NIGHT TV SCHEDULES LIKE A FERAL ANIMAL THAT SPAT OUT VIDEOGAMES AND OPINIONS – AND ALSO HAD A BIG THING FOR DRESSING UP. TWO DECADES ON, THE PRESENTERS RECALL THOSE HEADY, ANARCHIC TIMES
Emily Booth, Aleks Krotoski and Emily Newton Dunn recall creating their anarchic videogame show
“Got no pals? Looking for luuurve? Don’t go to those personal ads, where you risk trauma and disease,” chirps Emily Newton Dunn, drawing out the word ‘disease’ into a kind of buzz.
“No!” barks Emily Booth. “What you want is a virtual friend!” In the background, a TV plugged into a Dreamcast displays the eerie image of a fish with a human face.
“Seaman is your man,” deadpans Aleks Krotoski, “…fish. Fish man.”
If you were hopping channels late at night back in the dying days of the Nineties and the dawn of the Noughties, you may well have stumbled across such joyous tomfoolery, delivered by three women who appeared to be having the time of their lives. And speaking to them some 20 years later, it turns out that they really were having the time of their lives. Bits was fun to watch partly because it was a labour of love for the presenters, and the huge workload of writing, presenting and filming a weekly show helped them to draw together in the face of adversity.
“We were in a wonderful anarchic bubble with a bunch of overtired, underpaid, young, hungry, creative people,” remembers Aleks, “so the long nights and the goo and the fake blood are good memories. We became good friends: Emily Newton Dunn and I are in a book group, so we see one another every time
I get to London, and I’m still friends with
Emily Booth, although I haven’t seen her in person in a long time.” Emily Booth agrees that there was something special about working on Bits. “We were very close. We spent a lot of time together, particularly late into the night. Emily
Newton Dunn was working full time during the week for a long time so we had to pack all our filming into the weekends. That, plus the isolation of filming in the local no-longerfunctioning psych ward, bonds you.”
Debuting in June 1999, Bits became a pillar of Channel 4’s late-night programming, which was a melange of off-the-wall entertainment loosely gathered under the banner of ‘4Later’. Bits rubbed shoulders in the TV listings with shows like Eurotika!, a programme about European horror and sex films, and The Trip, which featured NASA footage put to drum and bass. These 4Later programmes, Bits included, were meant to be subversive, weird and edgy – and in the days before the anarchy of Youtube had inveigled its way into every home, they most certainly fulfilled their brief. There was nothing else quite like it on TV.
Producer Aldo Palumbo was behind the genesis of Bits. He’d previously helmed the 4Later stalwart Vids, a series about movie subcultures that was partly inspired by the movie Clerks, and he was commissioned to come up with a show about videogames.
When it came to finding presenters for the new series, Emily Newton Dunn was one of the first people he looked up. “At the time, I was working in PR and writing game reviews for small magazines,” she recalls, “so I knew a few people in the industry. I was approached by Aldo who had asked around if there were any women who knew about games. Apparently some of the people he asked recommended me, which was nice of them. Initially it was me and another woman called Harriet who did game reviews for the Evening Standard. She dropped out, then Aldo found Aleks and an East German woman called Claudia [Trimde].”
Aleks Krotoski had gone for a presenting role on Vids not long after moving to Scotland, following the completion of her psychology degree in the United States. “I was working at the local arthouse film theatre and was being trained at the BBC for radio production,” she says. “I auditioned, but didn’t get the part.” Luckily, when the commission for Bits came in, the production company, Ideal World, quickly sought her out. “I guess I impressed them at the Vids audition, and they knew I played games, so it worked!”
But Claudia didn’t stay long, electing to leave the show at the end of the first series, which led to the arrival of Emily Booth. “The producer, Aldo, was looking for a replacement presenter when the German girl left,” Emily Booth remembers, “and I think he’d seen me in a strange, quirky film called Pervirella and seemed to think I might fit the job!” (For the uninitiated, Pervirella is a cult film by
Alex Chandon featuring a deranged Queen Victoria who seals Britain behind a giant wall. Emily Booth plays the titular Pervirella, a nymphomaniac who is overcome by lust whenever her magic necklace is removed. The film features cameos from Jonathan Ross and Mark Lamarr, and it is utterly, utterly bonkers.)
Emily Booth was working as a TV presenter at L!VE TV when Aldo approached her about
the Bits role. “I did a show called Blue Review where I rather seriously reviewed softcore,” she remembers. She got the job, but was initially worried about fitting in with the other presenters: whereas Aleks and Emily Newton Dunn were both seriously into videogames, she was much more of a casual gamer. “We became quite close,” she says, “although I must admit I did feel I had to do my very best to fit in when I first started. It was a very nerve-wracking, anxious and insomniainducing time for me, as I did not come from a gaming background, apart from playing a Spectrum with my brother, and I felt like an outsider taking over from someone! But after a while, we were all very close and supportive because when you work that closely with a team you end up living in a bubble with them, devoid of experiencing the real world.”
Emily Booth quickly found her feet, and
Bits became a ratings success for Channel 4, drawing in around half a million viewers at its peak – not bad for a show that typically went out at 1am. Still, its niche status meant that budgets were always tight – although Aleks thinks that the wonky props and abandonedbuilding sets were part of the show’s appeal. “Scarcity was the true success behind Bits.”
But despite its home-made looks, Bits was far from thrown together – in fact, it was a huge amount of work for all involved, and particularly for Emily Newton Dunn, who was also holding down a full-time job. “I continued to do PR and write game reviews during filming, and so we filmed at weekends. It was a pretty hectic schedule for me, as I used to do my regular job during the day, then go home and play games like crazy and write my reviews at night. Friday nights I’d fly to Glasgow, film all weekend and then catch the 6am flight back to London on Monday morning and go straight into work, then rinse and repeat that schedule for the however many months the series would last for. It was pretty mental.”
The presenters also got a little narked at suggestions that they were just fronts for scripts written by someone else: uninformed comments typically motivated by misogyny. “A lot of people didn’t believe that we knew what we were talking about or that we played and reviewed the games ourselves,” says Emily Newton Dunn. “Whatever.” In fact, Aleks says, the three of them had a hand in pretty much everything: “We would choose the games together, brainstorm with the director what we thought would be fun to do on-screen while we tried to remember our lines, and then write the scripts all together, with one of us driving the keyboard. That job rotated on a programme basis.”
Still, Emily Booth reckons that it took a while for the viewers to get used to a videogames show presented by an all-female team. “I think at first the largely male audience was
“A LOT OF PEOPLE DIDN’T BELIEVE THAT WE KNEW WHAT WE WERE TALKING ABOUT OR THAT WE PLAYED AND REVIEWED THE GAMES OURSELVES” EMILY NEWTON DUNN
hesitant and a bit bowled over by it, but after just a few years of constantly assuring and proving to everyone that, ‘Yes, we play each game and write each review,’ they finally accepted and became huge fans.”
And showing that women play games – at a time when most games marketing and media was aimed towards men – was one of the best aspects of Bits for Emily Newton Dunn. “The most gratifying reactions were on the rare occasions that I got recognised in the street,” she says. “It was generally women that recognised me and said that they enjoyed the show, even though they didn’t really think they were into games. At the time, the gender split in the games industry was terrible (it’s getting better, but still not 50/50) and it was something that I was keen to change. I’ve always believed that games are for everyone, so it was really encouraging to be reaching women and hopefully letting them know that yes, it was okay for women to play and enjoy games.”
The nascent interweb also gave the trio a way to connect with their growing fanbase, says Aleks. “It was strange to be part of this thing that rode the wave of the new internet – we had one computer in the whole office, and I remember looking at the totally unexpected and passionate comments on the early forums about the show. It was wild. It still is strange. I am still unable to go to the pub beyond 10pm because I am invariably approached by someone who watched the programme way back when who wants to talk at me about games I’ve not touched in 15 years! 10pm is the witching hour. It’s my party trick with new friends.”
Part of the enduring appeal of Bits is its chaotic irreverence. “We were basically encouraged to smash shit up,” as Emily Booth puts it. She says the anarchic feel of Bits was initially dreamt up by Aldo, but it was up to the presenters to deliver that “kind of post-punk, slightly ladette TV culture”, adding that she thinks Bits captured the feminist mood of the nation at the time. “We came off the back of that culture depicted by The Girly Show, God’s Gift, The Word – that kind of thing. So in a way it was a part of feminist TV at the time, but we didn’t want to overtly make that point, obviously – it was just a gaming show that wanted to be fun as opposed to nerdy and boring!”
Not being nerdy and boring meant avoiding long and potentially dull gameplay clips: a trap that Emily Newton Dunn thinks other programmes fell into. “I think a lot of shows about videogames have been rather dry and just use the footage provided,” she says. “I actually used to think: ‘Who wants to watch someone else playing games, surely you’d rather be doing it yourself?’” Emily Booth agrees that the raison d’etre of Bits was to give an interesting look to videogames on TV, “We had to find ways to make the gaming footage engaging to watch because actually it’s pretty boring visually to just watch someone playing games and then reviewing them. So we brought each game to life with our scripts, sets, props and just having that sense of the bizarre, the ridiculous – we loved taking the piss out of ourselves, and I loved the humour of it.”
That humour often took the form of fancy dress, notes Emily Newton Dunn: “We did a lot of sketches dressed up as grannies, which was always fun.” And the silly props and scenarios became more elaborate as the shows went on, recalls Emily Booth. “I remember having to jump out of a huge fake birthday cake,” she says. “I just loved how inventive it was and the effort the art directors went to! We had entire sets built just for certain game reviews.”
Bits lasted for five series of 12 episodes aired between 1999 and 2001 – and the punishing schedule meant that the show’s demise was almost a relief, says Aleks. “I think we were so exhausted at that point that we all just wanted to sleep!”
Still, Emily Booth has fond memories of the final wrap party. “We were all treated to champs and had a party in the office and dinner afterwards. Me, Alex and Emily [Newton Dunn] made an exclusive album of all the photos we’d collected, and I think there’s only five of them – I have one, Aldo got one and Louise the director, and I think Em and Alex also have one. They’re all the behind-thescenes photos – mainly of us asleep on set in between takes at 2am!”
Afterwards, Aleks went to work on Thumb Bandits and Emily Booth took on various other roles, while Emily Newton Dunn continued in her full-time job. And there was never anything quite like Bits on TV again. “I think post-bits maybe [videogame TV] had to go down a more ‘sophisticated route’,” says Emily Booth. “Bits is one of those things that belongs to its own era – its zeitgeist like that and won’t be repeated.”
Aleks thinks that the rise of the internet helped to hasten the demise of shows like Bits: “By 2002, the web had become the place to go to get games reviews and content, and the mono-media landscape had moved on.” And whereas Emily Newton Dunn once thought there wasn’t any point to watching other people play games, she now admits to watching people play on Twitch all the time. In fact, she thinks that streaming might be the natural successor to the irreverence of the show she worked on 20 years ago – and in some ways is even better. “Like Bits, successful streams have people presenting them with lots of personality and a strong take on whatever they’re playing. And now you have the live element so you can interact with the host, which is cool and means you go on the journey with them.”
“I JUST LOVED HOW INVENTIVE IT WAS AND THE EFFORT THE ART DIRECTORS WENT TO! WE HAD ENTIRE SETS BUILT JUST FOR CERTAIN GAME REVIEWS” EMILY BOOTH “I REMEMBER LOOKING AT THE TOTALLY UNEXPECTED AND PASSIONATE COMMENTS ON THE EARLY FORUMS ABOUT THE SHOW. IT WAS WILD. IT STILL IS STRANGE” ALEKS KROTOSKI