One of two links to Youtube Chieftan Mews sent out on the same day both linked Youtube videos of BBC Test Card F titled ‘BBC Test Card F (1978)’.
“The time now very nearly 3 o clock, the next program on bbc1 Songs of Praise follows at 3.15 after a trade test transmission…”
A Youtube commenter names the piece of music as ‘Finally, swing-time’ by Pit Fontana’s New Sound. According to TestcardCircle.uk that song was used during the 2nd half of 1978 to early 1979.
Mew’s tweeted a 2nd Testcard after this one ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6SmOBxP9-g ; Test 2 ), however the second tweet was not deleted until the 20th of March 2012. You can read more about it, and the history of Test Card F here.
Songs of Praise is a weekly religious program first broadcast in 1961 early on Sunday mornings. Consisting of church hymn’s it still runs today and is broadcast in a number of countries.
In 2007 Adam Buxton uploaded a parody of Songs of Praise providing his own subtitles to the program with amusing results:
Adam Buxton is British DJ and Comedian who in 2007 helped Radiohead with their Thumbs_Down webcast to celebrate the release of In Rainbows.
A fan of the band he wrote a nice long detailed blog post about the whole thing here on his website, and later in 2008 entered his own (rather hilarious) remix for the Reckoner remix competition:
On the 29th of November 2011 Adam Buxton ran a live BUG Music Video’s special evening focusing on Radiohead’s career, during which he screened some behind the scenes footage of the recording of Thumbs_Down, Previous video clips from the band and a interview with Jonny and Colin. Described as a ‘one off’ Adam repeated the event in Los Angeles on February 2nd 2012.
A Silly Blog carries a nice review and description of the event Here.
One of the most interesting bits of trivia from the program refers to a In Rainbows Scrapbook mentioned in the Bug Program notes as a ‘proposed but ultimately unreleased DVD ‘scrapbook’ from the In Rainbows period’.
(Source: Attributed to Ian Davies by Auntie Nubbins of A Silly Blog )
Adam Buxton is on twitter as AdamRealBuxton and is one of the accounts Chieftan Mews follows on Twitter.
@ChieftanMews: At 0:36 I appear in the Zigg only to disappear and reflect to the dark side of the moon. http://t.co/Qw0PTnn stuck help #10 of 10
@ChieftanMews: #10: Please @ 1 song that makes you feel energetic & write about it in 1 sentence. (1 answer only, #10 expires August 11, 2011 at 00:00 GMT)
On Facebook this read as:
#10: Please message me 1 song that makes you feel energetic. Write about it in one sentence. (1 answer per person or disqualified/blocked. #10 expires August 11, 2011 at 00:00 GMT)
Chieftan Mews first tweets a link to a video Servo posted to Chieftan Mew’s Facebook wall on August 1st:
Screenshot of Mew's Reply to a question on Facebook, August 1st, 2011.
Servo took the video loop from www.the-ziggurat.com and posted to Youtube on July 31st 2011. The link takes you to 0:36 in the film where a head can be seen to the bottom left of the picture outlined in green and blue.
On the 3rd of August Chieftan Mews replied to the video with:
My face emerges at the 30 second mark at the lower/central portion of the screen and then disappears a short time later. Please call a plumber or a lumberjack immediately.
The Dark Side of the Moon is the title of Pink Floyd’s eighth album released in 1973, a album compared to OK Computer it also happens to show a prism separating a rainbow out of white light on it’s cover. In Rainbows being the band’s previous album for which the moving rainbow blocks video where made.
( Original cover for Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of The Moon – Source : Wikipedia )
Similar to the Ziggurat film was a videoclip for Videotape made for the end of the 2007 Thumbs_Down webcast featuring Thom Yorke’s face turning into a mess of coloured blocks.
Thom ended up uploading the video to Dead Air Space on the 12 of February 2008 with the following message:
RED BLUE GREEn +
had a niggling feeling that this never really got seen much.
Its a kind of video thing to go with Videotape using lots of wierd techniques we were messing with.
Nigel and I really enjoyed making it at the end of last year.
It appeared at the end of a webcast which i think was lost due to transmission problems.
So here it is (roughly) for you to see again.
x
Thom
The original video on DAS is gone but you can still watch it on Citizen Insane.
The #10 of 10 suggested that there was a series of 10 tweets to come, this proved to be correct as it was followed by the first of ten weekly questions asking for fans to respond with their own answers.
Fan’s where given a choice between responding on Facebook or Twitter, two of the most popular Social Networks as of 2011.
@ is a symbol used to direct a message on Twitter therefore requesting fans to tweet him directly with @ChieftanMews.
With Facebook it seemed he wished to receive the replies as Private Messages, of which he would take only 1 per person on threat of banning them so they could no longer send him messages or view his Facebook page.
The difference has to do with a design limitation that on Twitter you can only send messages to people who follow you. This means that while Chieftan Mews was able to send Direct Messages (DMs) to fans following him they would not be able to reply or send their own without Mew’s following them first.
While ’1 answer per person or disqualified/blocked.’ on Facebook seems to suggest a competition to date there’s been nothing suggesting that Mew made direct use of the answers offered to him by fans, or that there was any organized prize for answering his messages correctly.
Though he has been known to Directly Message or reply to peoples Facebook Posts on his wall from time to time it’s unknown if Chieftan Mew’s replied to any of the suggestions given to him in response to his questions.
Test 2 takes you to a Youtube Video of BBC Testcard F featuring the instrumental piece ‘Voy, Voy, Voy’ from BBC2 cia 1971-1972. The video is 10 minutes long and contains a number of pieces of music and features Carole Hersee and Bubbles the Clown who together have been shown on television for about 70,000 hours (That’s 8 years!). Test Card F traditionally appeared during dead air on BBC1 and BBC2.
Test Card F is a test card that was created by the BBC and used on television in the United Kingdom and in countries elsewhere in the world for more than four decades. Like other test cards, it was usually shown while no programmes were being broadcast, but was the first to be transmitted in colour in the UK and the first to feature a person,[1] and has become an iconic British image regularly subject to parody.
The central image on the card shows eight-year-old Carole Hersee, playing noughts and crosses with a clown doll, Bubbles the Clown, surrounded by various greyscales and colour test signals needed to ensure a correct picture. It was first broadcast on 2 July 1967 (the day after the first colour pictures appeared to the public on television) on BBC2.
The card was developed by a BBC engineer, George Hersee, father of the girl in the central image. It was frequently broadcast during downtime on BBC1 until that channel went fully 24 hours in November 1997, and on BBC Two until its downtime was replaced entirely by Pages from Ceefax in 1998, after which it was only seen during engineering work, and was last seen in this role in 1999.
Posts in the comments on Youtube state that the harmonica track is titled ‘Johanna’ and performed by the Guy Luypaerts Orchestra.
Interestingly enough ‘Testcard Girl’ was portrayed in a rather Chieftan Mews-ish role as a character in the original BBC series of Life on Mars broadcast in 2006-2007 where she appears first inside the television and then in visions providing the main character with comments relating to his life and things that where going to happen.
She also repeatedly taunts him and occasionally scares him out of his wits with quotes such as “You don’t like me and my clown, I can see I make you frown. When on earth will all this end? I’m you’re friend, you’re only friend.”
You can read more about Test Card F on Wiki here including links to download your own copy of Test Card F if you feel so inclined. While it’s tempting link to Testcard Girl’s role in Life on Mars I’d suggest hunting up the entire series instead to avoid spoilers. It’s well worth the effort.
@ChieftanMews: If @nigelgod deletes my scenes from the final cut, I will gladly show him a new way down the staircase! ␄
On June 21st 2011 Phillip Selway announced on Dead Air Space that Radiohead had filmed a episode of From The Basement, in addition to the news was a HD quality Youtube video of a new song titled Staircase (Previously known to fans as ‘A Walk Down the Staircase’ from Thom Yorke’s solo shows and tour with Atoms For Peace in 2010).
Mew’s addresses this threat to Nigel Godrich the mastermind behind From The Basement. Started in 2006 as a Podcast From the Basement is a music program that focuses entirely on a performance doing away with the traditional format of a host and live audience. Thom Yorke performed on the first episode and Radiohead featured in a full length episode for In Rainbows – Live From The Basement.
Chieftan Mews who made his name hosting The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time clearly is not pleased with this idea and later takes revenge by withholding the footage of Supercollider performed during the set.
As usual Mews signs off with EOT (End of Transmission) to mark the final tweet for the day.
Mew’s current status image on Twitter and Facebook is a inverted screenshot of him from the Thumbs Down Webcast in 2007 titled afp.jpg
Returned to it’s original form it looks like:
It’s not the first time Mew’s has toyed around with his display picture.
afp is the initials of Atoms for Peace the band formed by Thom Yorke, Nigel and Flea from The Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Nigel was reported to be mastering their album over the holidays.
I always thought this to be a original Mews quote from the end of the Thumbs Down Webcast
It turns out that the phrase “Life is the name of the game, and I want to play the game with you” belongs to the intro song of a cult BBC TVGameshow from the 1970s named The Generation Game.
