For roughly twenty-five years I was haunted by a television episode that apparently didn't exist, and in February 2026, I hit a tipping point. I was compelled to post on the subreddit Tip of my tongue, where strangers (like myself) with encyclopaedic memories and heroic amounts of free time identify half-remembered media from descriptions like "a man was sad near a canal, possibly Tuesday, Scandinavian procedural crime drama".
I made a post in which I described something that sounds like a fever dream: characters travelled between the present day and what appeared to be medieval times, with the twist that the medieval times were actually hell. There was a woman with black teeth, and a calm, matter-of-fact conversation with the devil, no thunder, no contract signed in blood, just a polite exchange once the character worked out where he was. It all ended with a country house on a road fading quietly out of existence, which is precisely what the memory itself had refused to do for a quarter of a century.
My memory kept receipts but forgot the shop
My memory has always aggressively persistent so while the 90s and early 2000s were a bounty of unique and distinct series (now largely forgotten as few made the leap to streaming), certain fragments remained lodged, and some shows more than others. My brain is especially good at remembering unusual details, so for the majority of my life, I’ve carried around “the black teeth, the register of that conversation with the devil and a disappearing house on the road”, accompanied by the nostalgia of the lounge in my childhood home.
What is annoying is that my extensive memory archive often has no clear definable index. All the memories before my mid-teens, and there are a lot, are akin to millions of books with no covers. In relation to the programme, I couldn’t tell you what it was called or channel (though I had a BBC vibe). Research on autistic cognition has repeatedly pointed towards a bias for detail. Francesca Happé and Uta Frith, reviewing over fifty studies, called it a detail-focused cognitive style, a robust local bias that may be less a deficit in seeing the whole than a genuine strength in processing the parts. The evidence on memory specifically is mixed, memory science is a swamp, and I am one anecdote rather than a dataset, but the lived version will be familiar to plenty of us: superb on specifics nobody asked for, patchy on names, dates, and the shop the receipts came from.
Twelve shrugs make a verdict
Finding an obscure episode of an obscure drama in the pre-streaming wastelands meant asking people. Friends, family, the kind of pub conversation where everyone's naming old telly. And every time, the same verdict came back: no, never seen it, doesn't ring a bell, you dreamed it, you've merged two shows, you were a kid. In fact some people even seem to take offence at placing any value in a memory before I turned 18; how reliable can that memory be?
Consensus is only evidence when the other people had a chance to see what you saw. An obscure episode, broadcast essentially once, barely repeated and never streamed, produces exactly this signature: one vivid witness and universal blankness. The blankness isn't counter-evidence, it's just obscurity, and that’s often where the answer lies. But it feels identical to being wrong, and it gets processed as being wrong, which can lead to feelings of shame, guilt and like you’re wasting everyone’s time. That open loop, of a memory persisting for something that “doesn’t exist” when it actually does can feel like a rash without a salve.
If you're neurodivergent, you'll recognise this as a special case of a much larger pattern, because reporting perceptions that other people veto is not a novel experience. The lights are too bright: no they aren't. That label is hurting you: it can't be, it's just a label. The fridge is making a noise: what noise? Each time, the room votes, and the room outnumbers you, and in my experience, it has often multiplied pre-existing overload.
A stranger handed my memory back
So in February, I wrote down every fragment my brain had been curating without permission since John Major was in office, listed everything I'd already ruled out so nobody would waste their time, and let Reddit do its thing; I genuinely can’t understate how useful Tip Of My Tongue can be sometimes for closing those loops.
A stranger posted a Wikipedia link with an apology attached, sorry, I see you've already considered this one. It was Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), the 2000 revival, series one, episode six. I'd discounted it because I remembered a finale, a television event, the end of something, and this was the end of a season, but there it all was: the black teeth, the calm devil, the fading house, in one episode, real. Thirty-eight thousand people viewed that thread, and one of them handed my memory back with the label corrected.
The message I sent my partner that evening captures the register better than anything I could compose now: "this has been torturing me for YEARS". I expected to feel smug and I didn't. The feeling was much stranger and much bigger, closer to being handed back a confiscated possession. A piece of my own mind had been officially reclassified from unreliable to accurate, and the relief was completely out of proportion to the stakes, and what’s even better is another human gave me the relief.
Calibration, not vindication
It is very tempting to allow confirmation to let you think "I was right all along, therefore I am always right" but this causes the same error in the opposite direction. Being correct without the answer, means closing every loop before they’ve found their meaning. It’s very important to find the balance between ego, curiosity and meaning, while also navigating the sensitivities of your own existence. In practice, that looks like this:
- Write it down at the time. A note from the moment beats a memory of a memory, and a timestamped note beats twelve shrugs down the pub.
- Hand the internet your ruled-out list as well. It stops fifty people suggesting the obvious, and occasionally somebody apologetically re-suggests an item on it while holding the answer. Sherlock knew that deduction was the best tool for proving anything.
- Check the archive before you check the crowd. A commenter pointed me at the BBC Genome, a searchable archive of BBC listings up to 2009, which I now use recreationally. Records beat recollections, including yours and there are so many fascinating ones out there
- Don't flip the error. One vindication doesn't upgrade you to oracle, the goal is a well-calibrated memory, not a worshipped one. It’s ok to misremember!
Although, given that I absorbed the black teeth, the light in the lounge and the exact register of a conversation with the devil but somehow not the title of the programme, maybe I'd have remembered better wearing my Focus Frames. Ten-year-old me could have used the help catching the credits.
