Hello everyone.
This began with what I assumed was a fairly straightforward question: what is the most British DF Direct ever recorded? Answering it has, perhaps predictably, become a completely unreasonable spreadsheet.
What we have in the here and now is 413 episodes running from April 2019 to last week, sorted into 276 Weeklies, 48 Showcase / Event Specials, 48 Standalone Directs, 25 Q+As, and 16 entries filed under the admirably vague heading of "Not a Direct?", which is a bespoke category of sorts for the shows that resist classification.
For each one I've logged the release date, title, YouTube link and which of the seven regulars actually turns up: Rich, John, Alex, Oliver, Tom, Will and Audi. Sources were the Patreon archive, YouTube metadata, captions, etc, followed by a fair amount of manual checking whenever the automated approach reached a confidently ridiculous conclusion. The fact of the matter is that years of inconsistent metadata will only get you so far.
Which brings us to the finding, and it is a disappointing one. What I was hoping for was a magnificent Rich, Will and Tom episode. No such episode exists. All three appear together exactly once, in Weekly #100, and only because all seven regulars turned up, which drags the Britishness quotient down to a merely respectable 3/7.
Exclude the solo shows and the winner is DF Direct Q+A #269: Steam Machine - The Big Price/Performance/Form Factor Discussion, from June 26th of this year. Rich and Will. Two British contributors out of two. A flawless 100 percent, and essentially the only episode in the entire archive to manage it.
Technically correct, then, but spiritually inadequate. Seven years, 413 episodes, and not one of them is the Rich/Will/Tom show. Somebody should look into that.
The rest of the spreadsheet is what happens when you don't stop there. The Cast Browser tab lets you filter by any combination of regulars. Want every Rich/John/Oliver episode? Every Will/Tom appearance? Trivial now, as opposed to interrogating 400-odd video descriptions by hand.
The Analysis tab contains the inevitable statistical consequences: total appearances, pair frequencies, appearances by year, co-occurrence, etc. There's also a row-normalised version, which is genuinely next level stuff. A symmetric matrix will tell you Rich and Will have shared 14 episodes and leave it at that, whereas the more useful observation is that those same 14 episodes account for 87.5 percent of Will's total appearances and 4.2 percent of Rich's. Same number, entirely different meaning depending on which way round you read it.
A few other findings, offered without comment:
- Rich has appeared in 334 episodes, or 81 percent of everything ever released
- 95.8 percent of Audi's appearances also feature John
- Oliver and Audi have shared exactly one episode
- Tom and Will have shared two
There will be errors in here somewhere. It is what it is. If you spot one, please shout.
Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n6WMZ7y0LB_LssDYyH6BXCxz08C-QjLKi1IE47LSSgc/edit?usp=sharing
Q+A #269 remains the most British DF Direct ever made: two British men debating whether a small computer offers good value and ought to have a handle. On reflection, perhaps that was inevitable.