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Xenoxxx Funtime Show

To understand Mr Biffo's Found Footage, you must first understand Mr Biffo.

However, forming relationships takes time and energy, so why not settle for this blend of fun facts, stretched metaphors, and baseless speculation? Journalism joke.


If Mr Biffo's mind was the cluttered desk of inspiration, then Block Party 2016 was the indoor detonation of an outdoor firework. That October day began with a sober, technical exploration of teletext, finished with some guy in a spangly jacket presenting needlessly elaborate quiz games, and featured some disturbing homebrew video nonsense, which was subsequently re-titled the Found Footage pilot.

All of those people on stage would later appear in the main series, except for Carl Attrill, who was wisely preoccupied with pixel art. And Tim Moore, subversive to the showman, who was already in the pilot. Which leaves Violet Berlin, who needs no introduction, and Mentski, plus that nameless face which occasionally pops up in his videos.

The hands probably belong to Chris Coltrane, who gave up his comedy act shortly after appearing in the main series. There is probably a sensible explanation for this, or playing the Tea Prancer tipped him over the edge.

In 1996, if you had told Mr Biffo that he would be spending the rest of that same day with computer boys, then he probably would have dismissed the notion with a stupid reveal. It was partly his act, because though he played Dungeons & Dragons for stories, not stats, he played Dungeons & Dragons. Computer boys are just creative with numbers, you know?

It was also partly that, although teletext was originally meant to inform, it is now an irrelevance. The current practitioners have realised that makes it ripe for experimentation, something like how Digitiser used teletext in ways it wasn't originally designed for.

You can listen to the panels and watch Quiz-Me-Do! here, but video and sound alone can't quite capture what made so many of the audience join the crowdfunding campaign, which followed a few days later. By then, even the whimsical drunk was sober enough to write a lovely apology letter, so something had connected on a deeper level than alcohol poisoning. Time for some history.


Biffovision was a 2007 television comedy pilot. It currently exists in that limbo where you can find with a little searching, but any direct link I provide will probably be broken by then.

In many respects, Biffovison is the accidental prototype for Found Footage. It fleshes out previously blocky characters, like Dr. Derek Doctors, and introduces new acts, such as Sensorium Girlybox. It begins with a veneer of nostalgia, which flakes off to reveal something more dark and surreal, and there are sudden cuts from elaborate sets to living rooms.

Another similarity is that I absolutely love some parts, while others leave me cold.

It took me a while to understand that the misses are the price of the hits, that what drives one joke into the ground fires another into orbit. Attempting to contain Mr Biffo's freewheeling fancy, except in the event of dire, self-destructive emergencies, is catastrophically counterproductive.

Part of the learning process was that, although crowdfunding tears up the rulebook shared by creators and contributors, those businesses also rely on not becoming involved in defining the new rules, lest they become liable for enforcing them.


Fortunately, the vast majority of Found Footage backers appeared to be satisfied, delighted, and occasionally repulsed by the result. The pilot gave a free taster of what to expect, the campaign pitch made fairly clear that this would a strange personal indulgence, and expectations were as modest as the “television's spare change” funding target.

It also arrived close to schedule, including all the stretch goals, so you can add that fact to my heap of shame regarding the still-not-done Digitiser Game. Sorry about that.

Mr Biffo was on top form after his triumph at Block Party, having dumped much of the baggage which had kept him away from public scrutiny, but he still carried the fear of under-delivering. While being unable to fit everything on one DVD was a nice problem to have, it resulted from an overstretch of money, time, and energy that probably cost everyone in the long run.

Until then, the 2016 Found Footage Christmas Special was a giddy selection box of nostalgia, with a few dark centres. Music Chute and Goujon John aside, if this had been a broadcast signal intrusion, then I suspect that the BBC might not have noticed immediately.

The energy reserves also drove Sexy Christmas U.S.A. to be released as a charity single, including, in a move sure to confuse future archaeologists, on vinyl. If they don't smash it first, expect future reconstructions to depict hairy nudes ritually strangling drum kits with accordions.


Found Footage: The Awakening continued the silly sketch-show side with Enhance My Tarp, the most fun you can have in an open garage without quite causing passers-by to stop and call the police.

Though not The Police, because Sting had a torrent of computerised filth to deal with. Which along with Ghee Lord's squeezy package, demonstrates that Mr Biffo can't resist making his audience squirm.

The overt rudies were partly a release from children's television writing, his day job. I would lose the high ground by arguing for more subtlety in poo jokes, so I just sigh like a teletext sub-editor, and try to remember that all things must pass.

The Awakening was previewed in March 2017, as part of a comedy night at the Cambridge Centre for Computing History, the same venue which had hosted the earlier teletext gathering. Mr Biffo responded graciously to my blundering criticism, and more constructive feedback from the still-quite-intimate crowdfunding crowd.

Then, he spent the rest of the working month writing scripts, and buying props with such abandon that, although his bank balance eventually recovered, the recommendation algorithms never will.


Location filming began in early April 2017, with the speedboat sequence from Manorak. Perhaps someone else can explain exactly how Mr Biffo borrowed a speedboat, but I do know that Tori and Steve Baker blagged the Royal Derby Hospital's training facility for the next day.

With a little help from the inside, I expect, because considering that SUPPORT THE NHS, you don't have to be mad to work there, but you will be once SUPPORT THE NHS.

Another wrinkle for creatives who crowdfund is providing project updates. They can be a drain, and the response is muted, because the keenest followers often avoid spoilers. However, they are very useful three years later, when reassembling the sequence of events like this.

Sketches such as Baxter's Bum Farm, a spare idea from Biffovison, were written before filming began in earnest. However, even though the grand conspiracy was settled enough for Goujon John to be on the hospital operating table, the directing left enough room for some details to take on a life of their own.

One of the best things about Found Footage is how so many people, once sucked into the whirlwind of creativity, were inspired to pitch in or spin off their own ideas. The balance was tilted towards improvisation, at Mr Biffo's eventual expense, but with enough discipline for a solid framework on which to drape the nonsense.

Towards the end of April, there was still plenty left in Mr Biffo's tank when he called for more extras, and I was very fortunate to be available for another trip to the computer museum. It's an experience that I can never hope to repeat, partly because the storage corridor used for the infiltration sequence is now jam-packed with dusty mainframes.


I used to wonder if Mr Biffo should be called Paul Rose, a question which resurfaced when my Digitiser Live guest asked if he was normally that hyperactive. I lean towards Mr Biffo, in light of his ongoing double-act with Paul Gannon, because The Two Pauls sounds cheaply derivative. But Gannon and Rose does fit the theme to Rosie and Jim, a show which could be improved by an occasional canal boat fire.

More seriously, and touching on those unwritten-for-legal-reasons creator/contributor rules, I still feel a little uncomfortable publicly referring to another one of Mr Biffo's creative partners as Sanya. Not that she minds, coming across as generally unperturbed by anything short of a small nuclear explosion, but Mr Biffo seems to require a safety net, away from the camera.

I suppose she could always lock him in a cupboard for a few hours. The Digitiser Minis already have enough production problems to accommodate some distant banging noises. And, if he does escape, then I can go with the name that he yells when the uranium starts fizzing.

Back to the computer museum. Having adjusted to being so warmly welcomed by people that I barely knew, it was the best day out since I accidentally gatecrashed Stuart Ashen's Tour of Terror because he mistook me for a member of staff.

Filming was a raucous tango between professionalism and stupidity, honed writing skills and sticky-tape set dressing, historic equipment and wet sausages. My only regrets are the angry dance party, and the loss of the angry dance party footage.


It was fun to do the video conversion work for The Ballad of Sir Clive in May and June. It has roots in a video to teletext thing which I made for Block Party, if you care about the details.

Despite rising sci-fi ambitions, Found Footage never fully broke away from that type of self-contained silliness which started it all. Not that it really mattered with music this good, and the way in which Chris Jerden-Cooke grew from camera-shy to crowd-pleaser is a fine example of how Found Footage made a lasting difference to so many people.

I didn't write the lyrics, by the way.


If you're only staying for the Found Footage retrospective which this has become, then skip to the next picture. Otherwise, read on for more about a game which one machine-translated commentator perceptively described as “some kind of mysterious crap”.

Having messed around with digitising spare Xenoxxx stickers, discovering in the process that bold designs worked well within the colouring limitations of the ZX Spectrum, I sent a loading screen recording to Mr Biffo with the converted Sir Clive vids. To my surprise, the loading screen was broadcast as a trailer the very next day.

Other people were surprised when their speakers, or if they were really unlucky, headphones, emitted the piercing square-wave screech of the pilot tone. There were gentler ways to learn that early home computers used full dynamic range for reliable loading and saving.

Once ears had stopped ringing, some people were already hooked enough on the conspiracy teasers to fruitlessly search for clues in the header information. This was only possible if, like Paul Dunning, they attempted to load the video on real hardware, or an emulator. To my further surprise, the data survived whatever the audio compressor had done, so that was the prompt to plan a more ambitious broadcast.

For context, I was working on another ZX Spectrum game at the time, which by then had an engine ideal for cobbling together digitised pictures and bumf. That game is still not finished over two years later, a small consolation that my project mismanagement is not specific to the Digitiser game. Sorry.

Also, credit is due to Mel Croucher who, as explained in his book, which I reviewed in the article most likely to have influenced Mr Biffo to stop accepting reader submissions, was broadcasting home computer entertainment before there was a market for it. Perhaps those two minds will meet on the Digitiser channel, where Mr Biffo can feel young again, and Mel can be reminded of the times when the way to make a small fortune in entertainment was to start with a big fortune.


You can explain most of Found Footage as a sketch show experiment that got a bit out of hand. The Trojan Arse Protocol, the grand finale to the series, wasn't so much the next level, but Mr Biffo stumbling upon the entrance to warp zone.

Sensibly (for once), he realised the magnitude of this discovery enough to, at start of July, ask for more money. More typically, he had already booked the former nuclear bunker for two days, but enough people pledged to save him from complete financial ruin. I would feel worse about how much it cost him, if he wasn't also having the time of his life.

I have previously compared the filming experience to an extended episode of The Crystal Maze, with the best team ever. Now you can hire the maze for corporate events, one day costing more than the entire budget for the The Trojan Arse Protocol. You don't even get Richard O'Brien.

I'd still like to visit the maze, but doubt that it would beat cavorting with a shopping trolley full of rubber bums and crisps - a scene sadly omitted from the final cut of Threads - then going out to get the sandwiches with one-third of Bad Influence!

The big names didn't matter, in the traditional sense, because you had to be awfully keen on the concept to sign up for two days of damp darkness. It was bustling, with an ambitious schedule, but never tense, as everyone lost themselves in the process of making the best thing possible. Not that anyone quite knew how to do that at the start, not even Mr Biffo. Nobody pretended otherwise, so anyone could throw ideas around without fear, and everyone won.

That said, I think that Andy Wear and Violet Berlin both played perfectly against expectations, not that Yiannis Vassilakis and Jesse Ross ever let the side down. Well, except for that scene running away from the bum monsters, where Yiannis is suddenly a bit limp and skinny, though he seems to have recovered for Ashens and the Polybius Heist.

Stuart Ashen also bestowed Chris Bullock upon the production, won Best Screaming for his role as Sparkles McDuff, and tirelessly alienated his followers in promoting Found Footage. Others were equally generous with their time, which was essential, because the per-minute budget made Ashens and The Quest For The Gamechild seem a bit flash.


Those days underground were the main drive for making the Xenoxxx Funtime Show, and its role as a teaser ensured that it was out before the finale. The ideas came from the vast tunnels, and the evolving story of sinister corporations, subversives, and technological intrigue.

There was also more inspiration from Bad Influence!, aside from robotising Andy Crane. Do you remember when they blasted out information at the end of each show, which could only be read by freeze-framing a video recording? Ofcom wouldn't have noticed for weeks, if at all.

I'm proud of the Xenoxxx Funtime Show, and believe it or not, I would be even further behind with my current projects if I hadn't taken that first step of actually releasing something. It's not much of a game, because the events never change, but it seemed to work for the accidental audience of the original loading screen broadcast.


The Xenoxxx Funtime Show wouldn't have been half the teaser without the help of another person drawn into Mr Biffo's multiverse. Fittingly, the link to the ready explanation has long expired, leaving a patchy trail of references which, if you weren't there at a time, you can now follow to get a feel for the puzzle that ran parallel to filming.

Unfortunately, even if you do unmask the secret liaison between myself and Brannigan's Vortex, you will never get to play Sweetboy 5000 in Rabbit Ruckus. But then, in a real sense, aren't we all Goujon John?

Back to 2017. Mr Biffo spent most of August editing the series, and even filming new sections. This work continued beyond the September premiere at Harrow Arts Centre (which would later host Digitiser Live), so my timeline now becomes even more speculative.

Creatively, the results were uneven. If everything had worked perfectly, then Found Footage would have been a formula, not an experiment. What mattered was that, though Mr Biffo flew high on fumes at Harrow, the public reaction eventually brought him down with a bit of a bump.

I'll let you know when in the episode-by-episode breakdown.


Dream Drawings isn't my favourite episode, but I find it to be the most consistently entertaining. The introductory crawl text and Goujon John recap seem oddly redundant, after The Awakening has scared most passing viewers away. That aside, the silly, sometimes disturbing songs and sketches, seasoned with blurry glimpses of the underlying story, are all good for me.

My favourite part is Funtron 8. I love the deliberately crap compositing, and the way in which this infomercial doesn't so much take a sinister turn as follow a gentle, sweeping bend. Also, the machine, by accident or design, is a perfect proxy for an equally popular comedian from the teletext days: The Man's Daddy.

The lovelorn robot, though hysterical as it happened live, hit the limitations of the lo-fi conceit. That was perfect for hiding the rough edges of affordably-dressed sets, when believability mattered, but took the shine off some wonderful costumes and lucky location strikes.

Haireater was, aside from Goujon John, the first of many parts built on fake teletext-styled adverts. I think the gag (not the gag reflex) worked better for the acoustic treatment. Though Puckles The Cuckold is too tragic to wholeheartedly enjoy, everybody loves Tea Prancer.


We need to talk about Pudsey.

When Mr Biffo cautiously returned to the public eye in 2016, one of his opening gambits was that he had written the script for Pudsey the Dog: The Movie.

The critics, which even then, meant anyone with a smartphone, saw this as the perfect opportunity to maul Simon Cowell. Which would have been fine if, like Terminator backwards, killing Pudsey had prevented Britain's Got Talent from happening, thus averting the wholesale strangulation of amateur creativity.

Except, Simon Cowell wasn't that involved, so this mostly harmless children's diversion became the sacrificial proxy. Mr Biffo was lucky to leave with nothing worse than a good anecdote.

However, the catch with playing up the critical reaction to Pudsey the Dog: The Movie, is that idiots like me then expect even the most ill-considered feedback on Found Footage to be no sweat compared to the critical reaction to Pudsey the Dog: The Movie.

The truth is that, like all but the most fortunate or wise people, Mr Biffo carries baggage from the day job. For example, I only worked at a certain high-street retailer for a few weeks, but still cherish the decline of their share price, and the sweet release that their death will ultimately bring to those trapped in a target-driven hell masquerading as customer service.

Not much baggage, all considered, but until the cloning process is perfected, there's only one Mr Biffo, and he would rather be making stuff than suffering fools. Which is a shame, because though sarcastic and snappy responses were part of the old teletext act, you would never settle for that after seeing the sweet, infectiously generous Mr Biffo behind the scenes.

Of course, it's great fun when Mr Biffo is sarcastic and snappy with those he loves, and his kindness should never be taken advantage of. It's a hard balancing act, further complicated by his affinity for other misfits struggling to follow social norms, social norms which themselves are often broken enough to demand his attention.

No wonder crowdfunding sites take their cut and run.

Anyway, I'm not that keen on Advanced Strangulation. Armstrong Wong, though deranged as Goujon John, lacks his opening lure of respectability, and The Human Orchard just doesn't do much for me. Even The Ballad of Sir Clive isn't my favourite song in the series.

Which only means that I disinterestedly flick through to the bits that I like. After the first twist on introductory crawl conventions, obviously. So, Mime Talk, and my favourite late addition, A List of Reasons Why (I Love You). The setting is a bonus - it's the pairing of talent and catastrophe which makes it the perfect distillation of Mr Biffo.


The titular Whimsy Rodgers is one of the few toffees in my favourite episode, but the only hard one with no chocolate-coating is Otterlick Cave. I preferred Dirty Chaps on teletext, where half the joke was getting away with it on a public broadcasting service, and though the vector clip-art pig feels too modern in Blubber Johnny, the song grew on me.

Now, much as I love the star of the Traditional Olde English Goujon Shoppe, contender for my favourite twist on the original bird-flesh delivery promise, the location is simply too clean for the Xenoxxx universe. Curse your pleasant neighbourhood and your five-star hygiene rating, Dean!

Which leaves five different things that I absolutely love, one dragging on painfully if you hate it.

The theme tune to Do You Remember This? could be straight from a weekday morning in 1993, except that the vocals clip just enough to hint that something is amiss. My favourite aspect, though, is the subtler adjustment on each repetition. Yeah.

The Funtron 8 Comedy Hour doesn't actually last for an hour, but if you don't like absurdist jokes, then it might feel that way. The decline in production values (already debased by the concept) and the decaying canned laughter add more, but not enough to overwhelm the jokes. Which is a plus or minus, if you love or hate them.

2001 : A Space Odyssey - The Animated Series is like Scranton K from Biffovision, but with Mr Biffo doing all the drawing himself. It's a stretch from the animation nostalgia perspective, but once you imagine a universe where Filmation were even cheaper, you're there. So, the writing, the voice acting, and the meticulous murdering of the original movie soundtrack do the heavy lifting, such that it works splendidly for the tiny overlap of people who get both angles. Like me.

Dancing Masters is where I feel that the improvisation between Paul Gannon and Ian Lee really pays off, even though Whistler's Father was robbed. The ending could have been plain nasty, but that little wave to the camera on the way to the vortex makes it funny, and more disturbing.

A Song For Boys Only is my favourite song of the series. Sorry, Chris. In two minutes, it goes seamlessly from aspirational platitudes to true message, then back again. Sublimely sinister.


“Ideally, I want those who watch Found Footage to either hate it with a passion, or love it, and feel it was made just for them. I'm going to make something that I find really, really funny - and hope you will too.”

By Manorak, Mr Biffo had already more than fulfilled his crowdfunding promise of one hour of video funnies. Though some people dearly love Manorak, the inner episode, perhaps Mr Biffo wasn't prepared for individual parts of Found Footage to be polarising, rather than the whole.

Manorak makes more sense having seen Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). It's a fun concept, but glossy action-adventures don't come cheap, so it might suffer from being filmed first, when Mr Biffo was still working out how to make the tiny budget shine. Or maybe the overt jokiness doesn't feel right in a series which tends towards more subtle, persistent, twisting of nostalgia.

I can more easily explain why I don't like Superhuman Resources Department. Though probably fine as a standalone sketch, especially the biscuit-eating technique, it goes against the world in which Xenoxxx have already replaced comedians with Funtron 8.

Goujon John and his followers also get ahead of the story, operating openly enough to suggest that Xenoxxx have fallen hard, two episodes early. Perhaps his imitators needed Manorak to themselves, but there was no time to explore that in the rush of editing overlapping with filming.

Mentski would be my favourite imitator by far, but I'm not entirely sure if he is an imitator, a follower, or differently broken. I hope that those distant screams were dubbed on afterwards.

So, Manorak is a bit of a dud for me. That would be easier to say if fewer people tuned out as the series went on, something that frustrated Mr Biffo. I can understand that frustration, because he put gruelling amounts of time, money, and energy into Found Footage.

However, experiments are gambles. Sure, it would have been nice if this one had paid off immediately, but it rightly began with nothing more than a hope that other people would find it funny. Which itself was risked by going off on the sci-fi tangent, but in the long term, I think that Found Footage did find an audience big and devoted enough to support more experiments.


Having given up the dream of a perfectly interwoven conspiracy, though Brown Mirror doesn't push the story forwards, it keeps it satisfyingly snug with the comedy.

In fact, the only parts which fall flat for me are Baxter's Bum Farm, and Benson's Brown Honey, which I preferred in teletext form where it was funnier to fill in the details myself. True, Goujon John was also a teletext original, but one transformed by Voiceover Pete's performance.

The news sections are entertaining, thanks to Benji Coleslaw, but can't resolve the contradiction of Xenoxxx being totalitarian menaces and eccentric bumblers. Cheese Holes, however, does bring incompetence and malice together, along with things that defy rational explanation but seem funny at the time. Through Their Flaps is one long joke, told well, and Kenny and Yuri's daddy could well be one of many unexplained disappearances in the Xenoxxx multiverse.

Embellish My Trellis is almost perfect, pairing the dejected Newport Strangler with the exuberant DJ Trendy Peanut. Larry can't play straight, bless him, so is the natural vocalist for Brownaround, but the transition between the two segments is, by accident, deeply revealing.

Found Footage, even before it expanded from one to three hours, had a tiny per-minute budget. It's remarkable how far that stretched, but ingenuity can only go so far, and Mr Biffo's failure to accurately convey a subject so close to his heart - explosive diarrhoea - strongly suggests that it was often stretched past breaking point. He couldn't even afford to reshoot the projectile pose which shook the Newport Strangler from her torpor.


Goujon Day is almost defined by the glitches and snippets from the fall of Xenoxxx, though there are conventional sketches, such as Sting's best game ever. Elon Musk feels too modern in the '90s-and-before scheme of things, but some Fleetwod Mac fans prefer his song to the original. Good for them.

I used to worry more about Power Player, until I geared up for a sensitive discussion with the musician, then they dismissed it first as “the song no-one likes”. There is still one part that I find seriously problematic, but trite observation first: it was a downer in a wacky video series.

There is more to Power Player than, for example, the serious-face public information films that punctuated Tarrant on TV laughing at crazy foreigners. The subtle first half is drowned out by the revulsion of the second part, and what some of that revulsion taps into is problematic, but overall, it still demonstrates more consideration than the average response to the news story.

Besides, though I think that it was self-destructive for Mr Biffo to break the mood of the series, he had long since delivered what was promised. There was absolutely no obligation left for him to do anything to please anyone but himself.

I received a passing bottom pinch on one school trip. I felt uncomfortable enough to remember, but the mindless, regular peer-on-peer humiliation from people I knew that day was worse. The stranger wasn't a celebrity anyway, as is the grubby norm, so it's not a big story.

I can see the funny side now. It was hard to laugh when someone that I know spent a night in custody, following false accusations, but the punchline to their abusive partner phoning to inform us of their death was excellent - as the bemused publican explained, when someone thought to call their local, they weren't dead at all!

Mr Biffo was past caring about viewing figures anyway, so I wish that he had chosen to make the sentiments of Power Player a more integral part of Found Footage. We can laugh, uneasily, at Xenoxxx, and that takes away their power. There's far, far more to deconstruct in sexual abuse, and society's attitudes towards it, but it's still fundamentally about power.

All that I find problematic in Power Player is how revulsion mixes with prejudice. One inspiration is currently answering criminal charges, but another celebrity has already been convicted, and it turns out that they were pioneering for minorities in a most unwelcome respect.

Sick people will abuse any power that society gives them, no matter how well-intentioned. It's comforting to think that the problem is confined to any particular group, but dangerous.


Found Footage ends on a high with The Trojan Arse Protocol. Which is quite an appropriate name, because the contents have gone largely unnoticed.

On the surface, with much credit due to digital effects wizard AJ Jeffries, it's hard to tell apart from a deranged episode of Doctor Who.

It seems like a natural progression, the runny butterfly emerging from the lo-fi cocoon. Perhaps one unavoidable catch is that, once something looks like television, viewers expect it to be funded like television. If you didn't know the production story, then it would be easy to mistake this for one of many good pilots that went no further, like Biffovision.

Whatever the reasons for the subdued reception, Mr Biffo was disappointed. Though not bitter, and keeping the brave public face probably helped him to bounce back by Christmas, with another gift from Sensorium Girlybox.

I also feel disappointed that The Trojan Arse Protocol hasn't reached a wider audience, so far. However, even if only one tenth of that production atmosphere comes across on screen, then it's guaranteed to get there eventually.


Digitiser: The Show is over, and my feelings are still raw. The easy part is that, thanks to the tireless work of Chris Bell, the daddy of Digitiser preservation, you can read past editions and remember that it wasn't good because of the video games coverage. I was part of the two-for-one hype before the realisation that, actually, they were best served as a side dish to the lunacy.

The difficult part was coming to that realisation. People who cared said that something wasn't working, indelicately, and Mr Biffo told them to go away. Certainly not in two words, but sharply enough for me that watching the series was no longer fun, so I stopped.

It might help Mr Biffo to know that, though Found Footage was a gamble, all his efforts to stay gracious while burning himself out were an investment. They were the startup capital for Chunky Fringe, which as it happened, helped others in the community to repay some of their own gratitude.

As for Digitiser Live, it obliterated all of my disappointment with the video series, and made quite clear that Mr Biffo is happiest with an audience.

Even if that audience keeps nagging him. You see, I thought that Mr Biffo was in his happy place again with the Digitiser Minis, where it really was a bonus if anyone was watching. Then, he snapped at somebody who said, indelicately, that something wasn't working for them. It's probably alright now, but still, it wasn't just goodwill that paid dividends in the past.

I appreciate that being Mr Biffo can be more hassle than it's worth. If he does decide to step away from public view, on his own terms this time, and take his ideas to somewhere that pays enough to justify being told what to do - that would be a shame, but I'll remain sincerely grateful for Found Footage, and more.

However, if and when he is prepared to see through another experiment, begin with humble expectations, and hope for success, but be ready to keep smiling through failure, then I'll be on board.

It would be nice if that experiment returns to the Xenoxxx universe. More importantly, the first stretch goal should be a proper holiday. Or at least location filming with Voiceover Pete. In Disneyland.


Email: comments at arbitraryfiles.com.

Revised 27-09-2019.