The Eve of the Wars

In January 2001, the tenth issue of Robot Wars Magazine has exciting news for robo-nutcakes everywhere:

The problem is that this planned night of programming never actually happened. Maybe the BBC lost interest in theme nights overall, maybe the fan-submitted footage they were getting wasn't good enough. But did any remnants of the planned Robot Wars Night survive?

Well... not definitely. I don't have a smoking flamethrower here or anything. But there are a few curiosities floating around from around this time that might be related.

Your Number's Up

In 1982, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone popularised the gamebook genre in the United Kingdom with the first Fighting Fantasy adventure, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain -- a book authored by having Livingstone literally write the first half and Jackson the second. Jackson was responsible for the game's final puzzle, and strives to protect the book against cheaters by devising a puzzle where you have to use the numbers associated with certain items to reach sections the book does not let you access normally.

Jackson ran with this tactic by going on to use it in just about every other FF book he wrote; Livingstone also used it on occasion, but in a more... straightforward (for want of a better word) manner. The idea was also used by outside writers (who were employed when it became apparent demand for the series was far outstripping the rate at which Jackson and Livingstone could hope to write by themselves), and by the end of the series the concept was being used in extremely complex ways, in almost impossibly difficult books which were no longer really being aimed at children.

But there's a missing link in my writing on the subject, and therein lies the following question: What is the first book in the range from an outside author to utilise this concept?

Dwarfing Through the Decades

Having repeated the first two series of Red Dwarf last year -- the first full-on repeat run the show has enjoyed on its channel of origin since 2007, and the first in peak viewing hours since the Remastered episodes were screened in 1998 and 1999 -- BBC Two have picked things up in the last week with a repeat of Series III, which has required me to try and edit the old Red Dwarf BBC Broadcasts Guide without completely fucking up the coding once again.

At the moment this post is published, "Marooned" will just have finished airing -- the seventh time it's been seen on BBC Two overall, which is the joint most times along with "The End" and "Gunmen of the Apocalypse" ("Gunmen" getting two extra outings for Red Dwarf Night and a seemingly random showing in 1999, and the Remastered version of "The End" being shown twice when every other Remastered episode only had the one airing).

But thanks to "Marooned" also getting a one-off airing as part of Two's fiftieth anniversary a decade ago, the episode holds a very interesting record: it has been shown once in the eighties for its original airing, three times in the nineties and once in the noughties for various repeat runs (including in its Remastered form in 1999), once in the twenty-tens and once in the twenty-twenties, all on the same channel it originally aired on.

How many other episodes of television can claim this record?

Hyde and Seek

The Children's BBC comedy Julia Jekyll and Harriet Hyde, which starred a young Olivia Hallinan as a schoolgirl who involuntarily transforms into a monster after her chemistry project goes wrong, but was otherwise very very loosely based on Robert Louis Stevenson's original novella, ran for three series between 1995 and 1998. It manages to get the word "booze" into its first episode, as part of an admirable commitment to pushing back the boundaries of what is acceptable at quarter past four in the afternoon, as well as some genuinely cutting commentary on the education system.

Unlike its contemporary, Out of Tune, a full set of episodes is available for JJaHH on YouTube. Like Out of Tune, though, the Radio Times seems to have been a bit confused about how many episodes were in its first series. See if you can spot the issue with the original listings:

1. TX 29/09/95: A 13-part comedy series in which a girl undergoes a change of identity.

2. TX 06/10/95: Second of a 13-part comedy series in which a girl undergoes a change of identity. Today, Julia's bossy Aunt Cassandra gets more than she bargained for.

3. TX 13/10/95: Third of a 24-part comedy series in which a girl undergoes a change of identity. It's school play time. Julia is to take the leading role in Beauty and the Beast. But what will Harriet Hyde play?

Dandy 3000

The publishers at DC Thomson like any excuse for a good old knees-up. Any time one of their comics reached a landmark issue or anniversary, the entire edition would very often be given over to celebrating the milestone, usually in an epic feat involving all the different strips running at the time, and sometimes this would even extend to the anniversaries of specific strips (such as the Beano marking fifty years of Dennis the Menace with one of their occasional special stories that took up the entire issue, or Roger the Dodger's 40th by having him guest star in every single strip in the comic). These special issues would often feature cameo appearances from celebrities ranging from Ken Dodd to Adele down the years, as well as characters and strips from times gone by. The Beano is now the last of their weekly humour titles still going, and it continues this proud tradition to this day, most recently running a special six-part story to mark seventy years of the Bash Street Kids.

In early 1999, the Dandy was rapidly closing in on a perfect excuse for one of these parties in print -- its 3000th issue. But less than eighteen months beforehand, the comic had marked its 60th anniversary with arguably DC Thomson's most elaborate celebration of all; cover star Desperate Dan had gone on a six-week story arc where he struck oil and retired from the comic to enjoy his newfound wealth (and the company of the Spice Girls), only to be persuaded to return when he saw the publishers about to go bust without him. Having generated a massive amount of publicity, the storyline was concluded in the anniversary issue itself, which was twice the usual page count and printed on what was, to my mind, slightly nicer paper than usual.

Not only was that still pretty fresh in the memory, but just a few weeks away was a nonstandard celebration: With its 3007th issue, the Dandy would become the longest-running comic in the world, surpassing the 3006 issues of Comic Cuts that were published between 1890 and 1953. Perhaps because of all this, for the big three-treble-zero the comic decided to go in a very different direction to the traditional star-studded big bash, seeking inspiration from an unlikely but highly topical source: Y2K.

Yes, following a few weeks of foreshadowing on the front cover, when issue 3000 hit the shelves in May the comic was hit by the Dandy Bug, which rampaged through the issue bringing doom and despair to all the regular characters. I have scanned in this entirely unique edition beneath the jump cut (barring a few pages which are just adverts), with sometimes not particularly relevant commentary. (All pages can be clicked on for larger versions.)

Wanted Poster

Looking around a charity shop in Bristol today, I find a cardboard poster tube on which is written the legend 'THUNDERBIRDS POSTER'. It's only £2.99, I'm already buying a book, what the hell, I buy it without looking at it and hope it's not from the 2004 movie.

Upon getting home, I discover it's actually really nice, and after I put it up I notice from the copyright dates at the bottom it was seemingly printed in 2015. I Google 'thunderbirds poster 2015' and... ah.

Well, that's a hell of a find.

A Carolyn Premish Mystery

The second episode of the Comedy Central run of Futurama, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela", is credited to a writer called Carolyn Premish -- someone who has no other writing credits, in any medium, before or after this episode, or seemingly any kind of presence anywhere in the world. A further layer of interest is added by the fact that this is one of the three episodes of the show for which Matt Groening receives a writing credit, for coming up with the story with Premish.

Obviously in the years since the episode's broadcast, the phantom nature of the author has led to various theories and mutterings that 'Carolyn Premish' is a pseudonym. That mystery remains unsolved; it appears that late last year a member of the animation crew said on the r/futurama subreddit that 'Premish' was long-serving producer and writer Ken Keeler, but they subsequently retracted their claim and deleted the relevant post, saying they'd got some wires crossed.

The most recent episode of the current Hulu/Disney+ run, though, is "The Futurama Mystery Liberry" -- an anthology episode featuring three shorts done in the style of classic children's mystery literature. The first segment parodies Stratemeyer Syndicate stories such as Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. This segment is credited to David X. Cohen -- and Cohen getting a writing credit isn't nearly as unusual as Groening (he generally has one episode per production season to his name), but it's still notable when it does happen. It'd seem reasonable to assume that nostalgia for those stories runs deep at a high level on the show.

The pseudonym 'Carolyn Keene' was, and is, used for ghostwriters on the various Nancy Drew series and other Stratemeyer series. Using a pen name is a Carolyn Keene style premise. Or a Carolyn premise, if you will.

Look, it's just a theory, don't go putting it on Wikipedia or anything. (I'm not even suggesting that Cohen specifically is the real writer.)

32 on 4

In the autumn of 2020, television production crews all over the world were beginning to cope with a new normal. Whilst non-scripted series were starting to return to our screens with socially distanced sets, reality show contestants in social bubbles and Perspex barriers in place, fiction was another matter, and production on prestige series including Better Call Saul, Stranger Things and Succession was only just starting to spin up again.

Animated shows, however, were a third kettle of fish. Many cast members of The Simpsons had already been recording their lines remotely for some time before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and animators were able to continue working on the show from their homes. If anything, production got a little ahead of schedule, and the 22 episodes that made up Our Favourite Family's thirty-second season -- including the landmark 700th episode -- hit US screens as normal between 27 September 2020 and 23 May 2021, with British viewers treated to a similarly familiar schedule by Sky One: the festive episode "A Springfield Summer Christmas for Christmas" was aired as an, er, Christmas special on 24 December, with the remainder of the run following on a weekly basis from the 15th January.

One major change this season, however, was made in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests: In June 2020, it was announced that white actors would no longer voice non-white characters, with several new recurring voice artists brought in as a result. The most prominent of these is Alex Désert, who has gone on to appear in the majority of episodes since then as Carl Carlson, Lou and other miscellaneous roles, but other new voices in this season include Eric Lopez as Bumblebee Man, Kimberly Brooks as Lewis (and other parts including Janey Powell in later seasons), Tony Rodriguez as Julio and Jenny Yokobori as Kumiko, whilst Kevin Michael Richardson, already a semi-regular, took over as the voice of Dr. Hibbert, and occasional guest star Dawnn Lewis took a more prominent role as his wife Bernice.

At some point this autumn, Channel 4 will bring these episodes to free-to-air TV: the twenty-first season of the show they've premiered, and almost certainly the seventeenth consecutive one to do so in the tried-and-true weekday early evening slot. Last year our world was rocked as the scrapping of the terrestrial broadcasts of Hollyoaks meant The Simpsons moved back half an hour in C4's schedule to 6.30pm, and more recent developments make you wonder how much longer the model to which the show's UK broadcasts have adhered to for so long will last. But for now, it's business as usual, including this, my sixth annual forecast of what might not be seen on C4 when these episodes reach it; as ever, keep an eye on Wesley Mead's scheduling page at the Simpsons Archive to know exactly when that happens.