Best of 2020

The blog has been running for four years now, and this is the first yearly roundup since I ended my target of updating once a week for as long as I could. Perhaps not coincidentally, I feel the hit rate of articles has been higher, and I had a harder time than usual narrowing them down to a list of my particular favourites. But I managed anyway.

28 on 4 2

Channel 4's premiere of Season 28 of The Simpsons began on Monday 2nd November, and wrapped up earlier this very week... so here, then, is a hopefully comprehensive guide to their censorship and other points of interest regarding the season, compared to my predictions as to those matters back in September.

A Comedy Fantasy Drama with Bite

30 December, 1998 marks the arrival of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on British terrestrial television, with the double-length pilot airing on BBC Two at 8pm, as part of a huge block of other US imports (it followed a double-bill of The Simpsons and a repeat of Star Trek: The Next Generation). Debuting in the nowhere space between Christmas Day and New Year's Day might not be the most promising of scheduling, but nevertheless the show is a success (despite also having to contend with this dreadful trailer).

Night of the Undead Franchise

Island of the Undead, as written by Keith Martin and first published in 1992, is the fifty-first title in the Fighting Fantasy series, and is one of nine titles from its original 1982-95 lifespan that was never meant to exist at all. The previous title in the series, Return to Firetop Mountain, was meant to be the last, ending the series with a milestone fiftieth title that also doubled as a tenth anniversary celebration. However, the special attention given to the series for what was meant to be its last hurrah caused sales to perk up, and Puffin Books ended up commissioning further titles in the series.

28 on 4

In the ever-changing and increasingly uncertain world in which we live, here's one thing we can rely on: at some point between now and mid-November, Channel 4 will have the terrestrial premiere of Season 28 of The Simpsons, first shown in the UK on Sky One four years ago. Last year's post predicting what episodes might be cut or even dropped together, and the subsequent comparisons of my guesswork against reality, seemed to go down quite well, so they're back for a second year running. As ever, keep an eye on the Simpsons Archive's UK & Ireland Schedules page for exact scheduling details.

Broken Gamebooks #18: Clash of the Princes

A special release outside the main Fighting Fantasy range, Clash of the Princes (published 1986) was a two-book boxset (both written by Andrew Chapman and Martin Allen). Each book could function as a solo gamebook if you didn't have a friend to play with (let's rise above jokes about the likelihood of that, please), but if you did happen to have a friend to hand, then you could play the first - and, to date, only - two-player Fighting Fantasy adventure!

Commentary on Some Commentary

So, somebody on YouTube has ripped all three and a half hours of Jonathan Pearce's commentary from the PlayStation 2 version of Robot Wars: Arenas of Destruction (functionally identical to the PC version) and uploaded it in one big video. There is a large amount of dialogue not heard in the final game amongst this, much of which points to game modes, robots and other material which was cut during development, so here's a list of everything that apparently didn't make it to the finished product:

In the Dark

Homer's Night Out, then. Not a particularly well-regarded episode from the first season of The Simpsons, perhaps, but it does feature one of the show's earliest guest stars - Sam McMurray as nightclub singer Gulliver Dark, pictured above.

But did you know that this role is actually a crossover with The Tracey Ullman Show? McMurray played the character in live action on the show where the Simpsons got their start, and at least one of those sketches survives online, specifically here.

This Be the Verse

The other day, friend of the blog John Hoare wrote this - on how he found, and indeed finds, the life force meter on Knightmare the most terrifying thing on the world. And it has prompted me to share my own traumatic memory of interactive fantasy nominally aimed at children.

A Comparison of the Radio Times Listings for the Radio and TV Versions of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

	Original radio version (1978)	TV version (1981)
Episode 1	In which the earth is unexpectedly destroyed and the great hitch-hike begins. An epic adventure in time and space including some helpful advice on how to see the Universe for less than 30 Altairian dollars a day.	Arthur Dent is not convinced when his best friend, Ford Prefect, tells him that the world is about to end in 12 minutes. Should he remain lying in front of the bulldozers intent on demolishing his house to make way for a bypass? Or should he accept the offer of rescue from Ford, who reveals that he is an alien from the planet of Betelgeuse (pronounced Bee-tle-jooce), and not from Guildford after all?
Episode 2	An epic adventure in time and space. Fit the second: after being saved from certain death during the demolition of the earth, Arthur Dent now faces a hopeless choice between meeting certain death in the vacuum of space or finding something pleasant to say about Vogon poetry.	Rescued from Earth, moments before its destruction to make way for a vast hyperspace bypass, Arthur Dent and his alien friend, Ford Prefect, find themselves on board the actual demolition spacecraft in the capture of the evil, heartless, callous, slimy-green Vogons. But all is not well. They have a major decision to make! Should they face certain death by being flung into the cold vacuum of space? Or should they tell the Vogon captain how good they think his poetry is?
Episode 3	An epic adventure in time and space including some helpful advice on how to see the Universe for less than 30 Altairian dollars a day. Fit the third: after being improbably rescued from certain death in the vacuum of space, Arthur Dent and his new companions now face a missile attack and certain death.	Zaphod Beeblebrox heads the stolen spaceship Heart of Gold for the legendary planet of Magrathea in the company of his girl-friend Trillian, and the two hitch-hikers Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect. Success seems at hand, when one or two problems arise which must be solved. Will they avoid the pursuing nuclear missiles? Will they pull the ship out of its perilous downward spiral? Will Arthur Dent find any tea on board?
Episode 4	An epic adventure in time and space including some helpful advice on how to see the Universe for less than 30 Altairian dollars a day. Fit the fourth: It has been revealed to Arthur that the earth has been built by the Magratheans and run by mice. Meanwhile. his companions have been suddenly confronted by something nasty (probably certain death).	Arthur Dent is astonished to learn that the Earth was not what it had seemed, and astounded to learn that the small creatures he had called mice were not what they had seemed either. But he is quite put out to learn that they are after his brain, and that the pleasant dinner party with Ford, Zaphod and Trillian, is certainly not what it seems.
Episode 5	An epic adventure in time and space, including some helpful advice on how to see the Universe for less than 30 Altairian dollars a day. Fit the fifth: Sent to find the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe and Everything, Arthur Dent and his companion have been cornered by two humane cops who, nevertheless, have left them in a certain death situation at the Restaurant at the end of the Universe.	Having been blown to smithereens when a computer exploded on the planet of Magrathea, Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Trillian and Zaphod Beeblebrox are somewhat mystified when they find themselves in some sort of restaurant—apparently at the end of the Universe.
Episode 6	Fit the Sixth (the final): Will the Ultimate Question to Life, The Universe and Everything (to which the answer is 42) be discovered? Will our heroes be able to control their newly stolen space-ship and the enormous fleet of black battle cruisers that is following them? Will it end happily or in the certain death that has threatened them so persistently?	As a spectacular finale to 'Disaster Area's' rock concert, the megabig superstar 'Hotblack Desiato ' crashes an unmanned black spacecraft into the sun. When Arthur. Ford, Trillian and Zaphod realise that the black spacecraft they have stolen is relentlessly heading towards the sun, certain doubts arise as to the wisdom of their decision.

Listings taken from BBC Genome, as per usual.

The Phantom of Ghastly Castle and Other Killer Puzzles

The Killer Puzzles series was authored by Kjartan Poskitt, and spanned four titles released in the mid-to-late nineties. They diverged from the Usborne Puzzle Adventures and other series of around the same time in several aspects: apart from a rather twisted sense of humour, they were also extremely difficult, to the point that Poskitt received almost as much correspondence asking for help from adult readers as he did from children - because the series also did not include any answers or solutions.

Killer Puzzles also had one other selling point: if you managed to complete every puzzle in the book, then you could solve its big secret. In three of the four entries (to wit: Decode the Deadliest Joke in the Universe, Titus O'Skinty's Gruesome Gameshow and Attack of the Killer Puzzles), this was a coded message of some kind, although the specifics as to how you decoded it and how the puzzles gave you the key were very different in each book. The other book, Find the Phantom of Ghastly Castle, took a totally different approach: for one thing, it wasn't just a puzzle book, it was a sort of adventure gamebook.

And "sort of" has always been good enough for this blog.

The War Games

A comparison between Crasha Gnasha's computer game and real life versions which does not bode well.

There can have been few things more inevitable at the turn of the century than a computer game based on a hugely popular television programme about members of the public building robots and making them fight each other. In fact, no fewer than five games based on Robot Wars were released, the first popping up just in time for Christmas 2000, and the last in late 2002, shortly before the final BBC series was broadcast.

The first game, Robot Wars: Metal Mayhem, was released for the Game Boy Color. The idea that you could hope to recreate the show with any great degree of accuracy on such a platform could charitably be described as ambitious. But surely what entailed could still have been better than this. I have made several attempts to write this article before now, and each time I have stopped because I find it hard to find anything that sums up Metal Mayhem better than just linking to a YouTube video of someone attempting to play it. But let's have a go anyway.

Dennis the Obscure

The first attempt to bring Dennis the Menace, long-time cover star of the Beano, to the screen, is not one many people remember, mostly because DC Thomson seem to have done their best to erase it from existence. It aired in 1990 and 1991 under the slightly unwieldy title The Beano's Dennis the Menace and Gnasher Show, and rather than animation, it used puppets; many of the puppeteers involved have had quite distinguished careers, with most of them appearing in Jim Henson productions, and other credits including the Star Wars movies, Button Moon and Little Shop of Horrors.

Several episodes still survive, and you can see them here - that video identifies it as airing on the obscure and imaginatively titled cable channel The Children's Channel, which broadcast in the UK between 1984 and 1998, although according to Wikipedia (which does not have a source to back it up) those were repeats, and the show was originally broadcast on CITV (but it does seem worth noting that the operators of The Children's Channel were backed by DC Thomson). Something does seem a little strange about a CITV show having a parody of the BBC's Test Card F in its title sequence, though...

The News Quiz That Never Was

Saturday 6 September 1997, 12.25pm. The third episode of the latest series of The News Quiz is scheduled to air on BBC Radio 4 at this date and time. Look, here's the listing in the BBC Genome and everything. According to the listing for the Monday 6.30pm repeat, the panel was scheduled to include Alan Coren and Alan Hamilton (probably a corruption of Andy Hamilton).

Let us move from that listing to the fantastic resource that is Ben Newsam's News Quiz archive. Whilst most of the show's first 13 years are missing, from the early 90s most episodes are present and correct... but the 06/09/97 one is not. It is the only missing episode from its series. In fact, it is the most recent missing episode of the show.

Maybe the British Comedy Guide's episode guide can shed some light on this? No, because "No detail is known for this episode" - again making it the odd man out in its series.

If all this seems rather curious to you, then maybe consider the fact that six days before that episode was due to go out, Diana, Princess of Wales died. Indeed, if you listen to the previous week's (30th August) episode, there is a round about Princess Diana which was apparently excised from the repeat, which would have been the day after Diana's death.

Does it not seem terribly likely that, rather than the episode being missing, the recording for that week was cancelled altogether? There's no mention of it on the 13 September episode (or indeed any mention of Diana at all), but in the circumstances perhaps that's not surprising... although perhaps Jeremy Hardy's comments on the topical nature of the show in the first question aimed at him are a reference to the previous week's cancellation, presuming that is what happened?

Broken Gamebooks #17: Voyage of Terror

We covered the fact that several of the later adventures in the GrailQuest suffered from major playability issues and a serious lack of proofreading in some of the very earliest Broken Gamebooks articles. But let's go back to the fourth book in the series now, to look at an interesting, albeit small, design flaw.

See the Fog Lights

This is largely pointless, but the blog has a long and proud history of reporting on pointless TV edits, especially those concerning The Simpsons, and I'm damned if it's going to stop now.

In "Treehouse of Horror X", there is a running gag about the Super Sugar Crisp jingle. You know the one - Homer sings the jingle, then he sings the line "Guess I forgot to put the fog lights in!" to the same tune. Later on, in a flashback, we hear the "fog lights" line again... only when the episode was first broadcast in 1999, apparently there was some kind of rights issue with using the tune more than twice. When Homer sings the line in the flashback in the original version, the line has been re-recorded and now sounds different. The rights were sorted out at some point - probably but not definitely when Fox repeated the episode - and the flashback line now matched the other two uses.

Although the DVD has the version where the tune matches in all three instances, the alternate line has now resurfaced courtesy of the Internet Archive's VHS Vault, as the episode was released on one of those old 4-episode 'themed' VHS tapes, and the copy used there was the original (in keeping with VHS using the original but the DVD going for the revised version should any change exist). So if you'd like to hear the different tune, go here and skip to 10:55.

Pointless, yet satisfying, isn't it? (There are a couple of other of old Simpsons VHSes - some official releases, some off-airs - on the VHS Vault which may be worth checking out, not least their copy of the 1991 release of "Simpsons Roasting On an Open Fire", and several Season 1 & 2 off-airs which appear to be the premiere airings.)

Scheduling Twists

Whilst looking through the BBC Genome for potential oddities I could get a post out of, I spotted something interesting about their original broadcasts of the deeply disturbing Australian childrens' series Round the Twist...

...And it turns out there's already a perfectly good article about that elsewhere on the Internet. But I can add a couple of things to said perfectly good article going by the Genome.

You Say Potato, I Say Potatoe

On the 15th June 1992, then-Vice President of the United States Dan Quayle, on the campaign trail for that year's presidential election, visits Muñoz Rivera Elementary School and commits one of the most famous political gaffes in history when he "corrects" a 12-year-old pupil's spelling of 'potato' to 'potatoe'.

Ten days later, Fox airs a repeat of The Simpsons; appropriately enough, the episode is "Two Cars In Every Garage, Three Eyes On Every Fish". The blackboard joke in the opening sequence is usually "I will not xerox my butt", but for this repeat, a new joke is hastily added: "It's 'potato', not 'potatoe'". (On the 18th June there was a repeat of "Bart the Lover", which uses a shortened intro with no blackboard gag; presumably nobody had thought of the joke at that point, it was deemed too much work to completely re-edit the opening, or there wasn't enough time to do so.)

Humongous Replay Value

"Play again and again. New puzzles, new friends and new challenges await each time you play!"

Those words, or something along those lines, appeared on the covers of the large majority of Humongous Entertainment's point-and-click adventure games for children (latterly known as the Junior Adventures range), released between 1992 and 2003. But just how much replay value was there to be had? How many times could you hypothetically play the same game and not get the same set-up twice? How many unique configurations did each game have? Shall we go through each game and find out?

Edit Wars #13

7 - 13 August 2000: The main competition part of the fourth series of Robot Wars is filmed.

14 - 15 August 2000: Various specials and side tournaments for the same series are filmed. This includes the Sumo Basho tournament, which will be broadcast across the first eight heats.

The fact that the non-competition stuff is filmed after all the fighting, but most of it broadcast first, would not be a problem... were it not for this.