Timeframes II

A short while ago, I looked through some old issues of the Dandy I found in a charity shop, and highlighted some things of interest in them. As you may be able to tell from the above image, I'm now back with another selection of DC Thomson comics I found just last week; these range from around 1990 to 1992, and there's Dandys, Beanos and even some issues of Beezer and Topper.

First up, please brace yourself for quite possibly the ultimate example of a story where someone thought of the title first...

We Can't Put This in the Radio Times

In October 1990, six months after its US debut, David Lynch's seminal mystery series Twin Peaks debuts on the BBC. The show is given no small amount of fanfare: the film discussion series Moving Pictures profiles Lynch's work on Saturday 20th, accompanied by a broadcast of his 1970 short film The Grandmother, and on Monday 22nd the hopefully self-explanatory series Behind the Screen previews the show. And at 9pm on Tuesday 23rd October, 1990, Twin Peaks makes its much-anticipated British debut on BBC Two. (For reference for any non-British readers, BBC One is the "mainstream" channel, whilst BBC Two is the "highbrow" one, and had successes with US imports from The Twilight Zone to The Simpsons.)

The synopses for the episodes in the UK's premier TV listings magazine, the Radio Times, would normally be submitted by the production team at this time (with the writers of comedy shows often taking the opportunity to come up with humorous or misleading ones). It seems unlikely but not impossible that was the case here, but someone was definitely writing up bespoke listings (perhaps someone at the BBC, or someone working for the magazine itself), which we can read courtesy of the BBC Genome Project:

#1.1 "Pilot" aka "Northwest Passage"

Original US airing 08/04/90

Original BBC airing 23/10/90

Radio Times synopsis: The feature-length opening episode of David Lynch and Mark Frost's acclaimed television series. An offbeat murder-mystery drama about a small town where anyone would want to be.

Starring Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean
"She's dead. Wrapped in plastic." The body of Laura Palmer, a beautiful teenage girl, is found by the shoreline in the small lumber town of Twin Peaks, shattering the tranquillity and revealing a host of dark and twisted secrets involving drugs, illicit love, Norwegian property developers, Douglas firs and cherry pie.

Crystal Book Persuasion

Name a gameshow from circa the late 80s to early 90s which you'd guess had a large number of tie-in puzzle/game books published. You might well say Knightmare first in answer to that unwieldy question, and you'd be absolutely right. But I'd be willing to bet that The Crystal Maze would be in your top two.

The very first such book, simply entitled The Crystal Maze, was published in 1990, the same year as the first series, and a pretty early example of a tie-in book for a Channel 4 show. Internet listings say it was released the same day the very first episode actually aired, which seemed like a mistake to me at first, but Iain Weaver recalls it being advertised after the broadcast of Series 1 episodes (quite possibly including episode 1). In any case, the above is the original cover, clearly recognising the marketability of Richard O'Brien; it was later reprinted with a photographic cover depicting the Crystal Dome.

Reject All Cookies

Across the 1990s, various American mass-market monthly paperback series aimed primarily at 8-to-14-year-olds hit the United Kingdom; series such as Goosebumps, Animorphs and The Baby-Sitters' Club. The British versions had their own cover art providing a different spin to the US designs, and the books were also edited to change American English to British English: principally this would just be changing "mom" to "mum", but other modifications such as replacing brand names British readers would not be familiar with, and changing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, also happened. (Amusingly, references to Dennis the Menace were left unchanged, presumably with the line of thought that readers would assume it was the Beano character.) It was all a bit odd, since the stories were clearly still taking place in America, but I suppose understandable.

Sometimes, however, they rather missed the point.

Stories of the Choir from Hell

Out of Tune was a Children's BBC sitcom about a village choir that ran for three series between 1996 and 1998. To be blunt, in spite of featuring a distinctive title sequence and theme tune, a regular role for Nick Maloney as the vicar, and the screen debut of James Corden, plus early appearances for the likes of Charlie Brooks and Jane Danson, it does not appear to have left a huge cultural footprint; its IMDb listings are clearly incomplete, little else about it can be found on the internet, and less than a third of its episodes -- nearly all from the first series -- are available on YouTube. A bit of a shame for a show with the ambition to end its first series with the visual of a car precariously balanced on a church steeple on a children's television budget.

What does survive in full, though, are the programme's original billings in the Radio Times, courtesy of BBC Genome. So let's have a look at the ones for the first series, shall we?

1. TX 14/02/96: First in a seven-part children's comedy about a village choir. A new arrival threatens to shatter the harmony of the Little Wickton Choir.

2. TX 21/02/96: Second in a seven-part children's comedy about a village choir. Problems arise when the piano disappears.

3. TX 28/02/96: Third in a seven-part children's comedy. Street is deperate to impress Chas.

4. TX 06/03/96: Fourth in a seven-part children's comedy. The choir decides to go on a 24-hour fast for charity.

5. TX 13/03/96: Fifth in the seven-part children's comedy about a group of young teenagers who join their village choir. Street is suffering from toothache.

6. TX 20/03/96: Sixth in the seven-part children's comedy series. The choir prepares for an important conker match.

7. TX 27/03/96: Children's comedy series. The parish magazine hires a mysterious new agony aunt. Written by Rory Clark and Robert Taylor. Next episode next Tuesday.

Uh. Haven't you been pretty clear this is a seven-part children's comedy series, Radio Times? Why are you billing another episode next week on the listing for episode seven?

8. TX 02/04/96: Continuing the comedy series. Chas's driving test is looming, but will the choir from hell help her?

Because there was indeed another episode the week after, on a different day (with Rugrats taking up the Wednesday slot). A minor mistake, perhaps... if they had only been wrong by one episode. But it appears they weren't. They were out by ten.

Talk to the Hand

The Children's BBC adaptation of The Demon Headmaster ran for three series between 1996 and 1998. It's an interesting adaptation in many ways; after the first series adapted the first two books, they ran out of usable material -- there was a third book but it was impossible to realise on a film budget, let alone for children's television. Author Gillian Cross thus came up with a detailed plot outline for a new story, she went away and turned it into a book, whilst adapter Helen Cresswell wrote a television series using the same story. Those latter two series are hence broadly the same stories as the books, which were released around the same time as the shows went out, but sometimes the two authors have a slightly different take on the same idea, dialogue frequently changes (there is a noticeable change in the show's diction once it's no longer adapting Cross' dialogue verbatim), and the Headmaster is generally more involved in the TV versions, whereas the books tend to keep him as an off-stage presence a lot of the time. A full comparison can wait for another day, however, because I want to look at a few shots from the third series, The Demon Headmaster Takes Over, specifically the fourth episode. Starting with this one:

Timeframes

If you go into enough charity shops (thrift stores or opportunity shops to my non-British audience), then sooner or later you will find a box of old children's humour comics. They'll generally range in date from the 70s to the 90s, and mostly be old Beanos and Dandys, those being by some distance the longest-lived titles, with the occasional wildcard -- a Beezer, a Topper, maybe a Fleetway title such as Whizzer and Chips or Buster. It's just the way of the world.

Whilst I am always grateful for what I can find in these boxes, I do find more of interest when the comics are from the early nineties, give or take a few years each way. These are issues I was a bit too young (or a bit too not born yet) to have read at the time, but they're very similar to the ones I did read as a child, with many of the same characters and much the same tone. These are also the earliest issues to feature adverts, which makes them of even greater value as a look into the past.

Here, then, is what I got from the above stack of a dozen more-or-less consecutive Dandys from 1991 I picked up a few weeks ago.

Dwarfmatis Personae

In the first episode of Red Dwarf, David Lister awakens from three million years in suspended animation to discover he is now the last human being in existence. But he is not alone.

Exactly how alone he, the hologrammatic simulation of his dead bunkmate, the creature who evolved from the descendants of his pet cat, the ship's computer and latterly the android they found tending to a bunch of skeletons are tends to vary; common knowledge seems to have it that in the early years Lister really is alone, and the universe he inhabits tends to become rather more inhabited over time. Perhaps a series-by-series look at the number of credited guest cast would be useful?

Series I

Episode	Credited Guest Cast
“The End”	7
“Future Echoes”	2
“Balance of Power”	5
“Waiting for God”	2
“Confidence & Paranoia”	2
“Me2”	1
Series Average	3.17

The only reason "The End" -- the first two-thirds of which take place before the radiation leak kills everyone -- isn't a massive outlier is because of the flashback in "Balance of Power" which features Chen, Selby and Petersen. "Balance" was the second episode recorded, and was bumped down to third because "Future Echoes" turned out so strongly and was felt to be the most likely episode to keep viewers watching, although the only two credited guest actors in "Future Echoes" are voiceovers.

(The other two guest parts in "Balance" are a voiceover and Rimmer impersonating Kochanski, and the only guest actor in “Me²” is Captain Hollister in the video of Rimmer's death. This is before you even get into that episode being a replacement for "Bodysnatcher", which would also have only utilised the main cast and voiceovers, and Holly was also originally intended to be voice-only until after the first two episodes were recorded. Until very late in the day Lister could've been even lonelier than he is.)