30 on 4 2

Channel 4's terrestrial premiere of Season 30 of The Simpsons in the UK began on Tuesday 1st November. A Tuesday. I ask you.

Anyway, it wrapped up earlier this week; back in September, I predicted which episodes might be cut, dropped altogether or otherwise moved around for the fourth year in a row, and here we see how the battle of expectations versus reality panned out.

Board to Death

Circa Christmas 2000: Having already released a range of Robot Wars action figures, school supplies, multiple tie-in books, an official magazine, and just about anything else you care to think of, the latest addition Mentorn and the BBC deign to add to this already sizeable list of merchandise is a board game. And I have to give them some credit for actually coming up with a unique game, and not just slapping the logo and a bunch of publicity stills on Monopoly or Cluedo or something. But... well... trying to replicate actual robot combat in this medium is certainly a choice. Below the cut are all four pages of the rules. You make up your own mind as to how much fun the target audience for this game might have had with it.

Of Brittas and Men

Over on Ganymede & Titan, a rewatch of all 74 episodes of Red Dwarf is underway for their quinquennial ranking of said episodes from worst to best. They hit Series V this week, and I found one comment particularly intriguing: describing a certain line of Rimmer's (Chris Barrie) in the episode Holoship as "a bit of Brittas creeping in", in reference to Chris Barrie's other famous sitcom character, Gordon Brittas (Chris Barrie).

I wondered just how far apart Barrie's stints as Rimmer and Brittas, both sitcoms filmed in front of a live studio audience, were, and how recently it had been since Barrie had last played Brittas on the occasion of that episode. But whilst recording dates for every episode of Red Dwarf that played out before a live audience are easily accessible online, the same is not true for Brittas.

The Borrowers on the BBC

A question literally nobody has ever asked: How many different adaptations of The Borrowers has the BBC broadcast over the years?

Me:

30 on 4

You know the drill by now: sometime this Autumn, most likely at some point in November based on the last few years (owing to Season 29 being one episode shorter than normal due to a last-minute pre-emption, Season 30 is an episode longer, which might tip the balance slightly, especially if there's no episodes skipped which seems possible), Channel 4 are going to show a new-to-terrestrial season of The Simpsons, originally shown by Sky a little under four years ago; the 30th season of the show overall, the 19th to debut on C4, and unless something truly seismic happens, the 15th consecutive season to debut in the familiar weekdays-at-6pm timeslot. I'll be back once they've wrapped up with a list of cuts and other oddities, but for now here's a list of things worth watching out for, including any episodes that might be dropped from the 6pm slot altogether.

Dispatches from Fighting Fantasy Fest 4

A picture of Jonathan Green, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, the quality of which may explain the lack of photography accompanying this piece.

On Saturday, September 3rd, approximately 400 Fighting Fantasy fans descended on the University of West London in Ealing for the fourth Fighting Fantasy Fest. It had been three years since the last Fest, allowing this year's event to fall on the 40th anniversary of the franchise -- and to mark that occasion, two new gamebooks were launched, one of which was the first entry by co-creator Steve Jackson in the series since Creature of Havoc in 1986. It all added up to give the event a buzz you might not think possible for a convention for a 40-year-old series of childrens' books. This was going to be something special.

Yellow and Blue

In December 1990, at perhaps the peak of Simpsons Mania in the US, the show's first tie-in album, The Simpsons Sing the Blues, was released, a mixture of covers and original songs performed by the cast in-character (accompanied by several well-known musicians). The album spawned several singles, plus the music videos for "Do the Bartman" and "Deep, Deep Trouble" (the former of which was likely the introduction for several of the show's British fans, receiving an outing on Top of the Pops some years before the BBC would win the rights to the show itself), and was the inspiration for several similar albums from other franchises such as Dinosaurs.

Around 1992, a follow-up along very similar lines was recorded, The Yellow Album... which was then repeatedly postponed and put on the shelf until it was finally released in 1998, for unclear reasons (also putting the kibosh on the idea of any more music videos, which some songs from TYA would have had had it been released as originally scheduled). Not only that, but even if you own The Yellow Album, you do not have the songs as originally intended; when it was finally released, half of them had had their tempo and pitch noticeably sped up, several others were edited in some way, and one song (the Prince parody "My Name is Bart, And I Am Funky") was removed altogether. The Simpsons Archive has a fine list of all the differences between the original test pressings and what actually made it to the shelves.

For a time, MP3s apparently taken from a test pressing were available online, but they seem to have disappeared now, leaving this "original" version of the album lost for the last few years (if not decades). I was quite surprised, then, to find this on a recent YouTube search: what appears to be an excerpt from the song that was cut entirely (it runs to 2:29, but the Archive gives the time for the full song as 4:54). If anyone in the know can confirm for certain that that video is indeed part of "My Name is Bart, And I Am Funky", that would be welcome (I realise it's difficult to see what else it could be, but absolute confirmation for sure would just be nice).

And: Do those original versions of the other songs still exist anywhere? (I've had a go with the Wayback Machine but have had no luck beyond this contemporary piece on the album's release, and discovery of the bootlegged test pressing.)

A Bit of the Radio Times Listings for A Bit of Fry & Laurie

Amusing Radio Times listings from the 80s and 90s, as written by the show's production team, before the practice sadly stopped, are great. As taken from the BBC Programme Index, then, here are the ones that concern A Bit of Fry & Laurie.

Lord Fear's Domain

Over five years ago, this post detailing everything you could possibly want to know about Knightmare tie-in adventure gamebooks was published to the blog. But as mentioned, there was one omission -- the seventh and final Knightmare book, Lord Fear's Domain, which was left out because a) it was not a gamebook, but a straightforward puzzle book, and b) presumably due to reasons of a short print run, it went for silly money online at the time and I couldn't really justify shelling out for a copy, especially when it wasn't a proper gamebook. (A few reasonably priced copies have shown up on Amazon more recently, which is going to be helpful for reasons that will become apparent.)

Imagine my delight, then, when on the date this post was originally published, I was in a charity shop and found, amidst a pile of obscure titles by well-known children's authors, a copy of the 'missing' Knightmare book in question. We are sticklers for thoroughness here at Ludicrously Niche, so here is an addendum to that original post covering Lord Fear's Domain.

130 Dates with David Mitchell

A little while ago, I promised to dredge up all of the recording dates for Would I Lie to You? from old revisions of Wikipedia (initially placed there by the admins of the excellent, and now sadly defunct, That Mitchell and Webb Fansite, and later by some sad, lonely individual with far too much time on their hands) at some point and post them here. And that point is now.

Scary Drama II

Last time on the blog, we had quite the look at the UK airdates for the 1990s Goosebumps TV series, so you'd better go and read that now if you haven't already, or this post with a few follow-up details will make even less sense than it already does.

Scary Drama

In the late nineties and early noughties, the BBC aired all four seasons of the TV series Goosebumps, adapted from R. L. Stine's infamous book series, as part of its children's' programming strand, CBBC. Well, they aired a fairly high percentage of it, at any rate; many episodes were censored for the 4.35pm timeslot, sometimes removing entire scenes, and twelve episodes were banned altogether, seemingly down to either just being too much for viewers, or concerns over imitable content.

(A baffling sidenote: several of the TV episodes were novelised under the banner Goosebumps Presents, to differentiate them from the books they'd originally been adapted from. These were published in the UK -- in the series' heyday we got pretty much everything except for a few of the short story collections released over here -- and the adaptations of the banned episodes were still released. One suspects a breakdown in communications between the publisher and the BBC, or possibly just no communications whatsoever.)

But if you were to glance at the Radio Times, you might not be aware that the series was so problematic for the censors. Because they only had a very short amount of space to provide synopses for children's programming, the RT listings didn't always provide a great summary... sometimes, in fact, a hilariously inappropriate one. Here, then, is my guide to the CBBC airdates of the show, via the medium of how they were billed in the Radio Times, as retrieved from the BBC Programme Index.

Broken Gamebooks #21: Dead of Night

Sometimes I regret the name given to this series of articles, because Dead of Night -- the 40th entry in the Fighting Fantasy series, written by Jim Bambra & Stephen Hand and published by Puffin in late 1989 -- isn't really broken, it's basically just got two small-ish logistical errors, one of which the player can easily exploit. It's also rightly considered one of the strongest and most memorable entries in the series, owing to its pervading sense of Gothic horror, high quality of writing, innovative additions to the basic gameplay system and having multiple possible ways to get the successful ending.

But you came here for the mistakes.

Truth and Consequence

Buried deep in old revisions of the Wikipedia article for Would I Lie to You?, and the Wikipedia article for the list of episodes of Would I Lie to You?, are the recording dates for every episode except those in the first series, and one other day when I'm stuck for things to write about I'll probably stick them all up here.

Most of the time, WILTY? is recorded a while before broadcast -- ranging from Series 2 remaining on the shelf for seven months before broadcast, to Series 6 filming its final episode on 30 March 2012 and then beginning transmission just two weeks later on 13 April. But Series 7 is an odd one -- due to David Mitchell being in Turkey to shoot the short-lived comedy drama Ambassadors, it doesn't start in the same week as the return of Have I Got News for You as likely intended, but a few weeks in, and it's the only series that's still being filmed whilst it starts airing. So let's have a quick look at the order.

Weird Things I Have Found In Charity Shops

I like spending my weekends looking in local charity shops and, as the title of this post may indicate, sometimes I find some weird things in them. The image above, however, shows something I found a short while ago that wasn't just weird -- it was something I didn't even think existed.

Season 20 of The Simpsons was released on Blu-ray in America shortly after its original broadcast as a vanilla edition with no special features, to capitalise on the fact that it was the first season to contain episodes produced in high definition. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found a Region 4 DVD version of the same release in a charity shop in Bristol. Asking Wesley Mead about it revealed that only Australia and Germany got this release -- which seems a very odd thing to happen at all, given the only reason the release happened was because the episodes are in HD. My conclusion was that this set's previous owner had taken the trouble to import this from overseas. But then, if you're donating it because you've just got access to Disney+, then apart from the fact that you'd expect to find other DVDs of The Simpsons or even other Disney+ shows alongside this one (and I didn't) -- wouldn't someone who went to that length to get hold of a copy be a pretty hardcore fan, someone who'd want to hang on to this as an interesting curio? Wouldn't they be aware that just because something's available on streaming now, doesn't mean it always will be?

Anyway, this got me thinking about other similarly inexplicable (to various degrees) things I've seen or even purchased in charity shops over the years. Here's a selection of them. (Not included: a surprisingly large number of adventure gamebooks and Doctor Who novelisations from the 80s and 90s that go for upwards of £70 online and which nobody bothered to do a price check on.)

The 14 Museum

One of the most prolific adventure gamebook authors of the 1980s was J.H. Brennan. You may remember that his gamebooks were, in fact, the subject of the first ever post of this blog over five years ago. But to recap, he wrote three series of gamebooks at the height of the craze in the 80s: GrailQuest, which was set apart from most other series of the time by being incredibly funny; Sagas of the Demonspawn, which by contrast was played absolutely straight; and the Horror Classic Gamebooks, which fell somewhere inbetween those two extremes.

But, apart from the occasional cross-series reference, there was one thing which all three series had in common, and that was what happened when you died: you were directed to another section which described what happened afterwards. That section basically functioned as the gamebook's afterlife. Originating in GrailQuest as one of its many running jokes, this metatextual section was (at least in that series) always section 14, and was often referred to by the book as "the dreaded 14" whenever the player was directed there. You may think the use of the number 14 was a deliberate joke about how you'd expect the obvious number for such a section to be 13. And you'd probably be right. But if you look at how the idea was used in all three series you can, among other things, more or less prove that for certain. So here, then, are all the deep -- and not-so-deep -- hereafters that Brennan ever wrote.

Just Ask For The Guest Cast For Episode 3 Of South By South East

As you may recall, when I last left you on the subject of The Diamond Brothers, I had finally managed to see their 1991 TV series for myself -- but that threw up a brand new mystery. I'd already known that episode 3 had been interrupted by a technical fault, but getting to see the show added something significant: the net effect of that fault, and the way ITV dealt with it, meant that any actor who was only in the affected episode was not credited onscreen at all. So I had seven characters in search of an actor.

I included screenshots of all seven in that post, and after spreading it far and wide, I'm happy to report that four have been identified. So where are we now?

Christmas in April

The Would I Lie to You? Christmas special I was in the audience for went out on the 20th December (and is still on iPlayer here), but I've been waiting for the outtakes show to go out before I do my follow-up post detailing various things that didn't make the edit. So here you go.

Fight Time!

Here's a really interesting piece of Robot Wars ephemera to surface. On the show's reddit, someone has uploaded a filming schedule for 1 September 2001:

Truth, Lies and Videotape II

On Sunday evening, I was once again in the audience for a recording of Would I Lie to You?; having been watching the show from a cinema next door on the previous occasion, we had a priority note from SRO for future recordings. The show has moved from Pinewood to Elstree Studios this time, but I must say that once again we had nothing but a positive experience with the staff; once we'd shown our tickets and proof of negative LFTs, we were very professionally moved from the queue to a waiting room and then to the studio itself. As we were walking down a long corridor decked out with publicity pictures of Strictly, Holby, EastEnders and, er, Dimensions in Time, someone ducked out from a door at the side to ask if there was a group of three available, and my party took up this offer and ended up being escorted over to the audience seating right down by the set, the part you can actually see on TV. There is a good chance of there being a shot of the back of my head in the finished product.

I Shall Just Ask For South By South East No More

It was over four years ago now that I used the blog to ask a question that had been puzzling me for over a decade before that: Why was the television adaptation of the third Diamond Brothers novel by Anthony Horowitz so obscure that no visual record of it existed?

I'd hoped I could find some listings, maybe some continuity relating to it. I didn't know how likely it was that I'd be able to see all six episodes in their entirety, but as the saga went on and on, turning up more and more mysteries in its wake -- most notably the question of whether the series was an adaptation of the book or the book was a novelisation of the series -- I grew more and more confident that there was a copy out there I'd be able to see some day.

And then, in December 2021, Neil James got in touch to let me know that in his attic he had a VHS recording he'd made of the original (and only) CITV broadcasts from April 1991. Retrieving it, he found out we were in business -- it was in pretty good condition for an off-air recording that was approaching its 31st birthday. All he needed to do was digitise it, and I suggested Simon Drake, who had previously provided me with a digital copy of the extended VHS cut of the 1988 movie that preceded the television series, might be able to help out.

We then discovered a truly bizarre coincidence. Although he didn't know he was interested in the Diamond Brothers, Neil already knew Simon. In fact, the day before, they'd been to the cinema together... which certainly made things much simpler.

The VHS was digitised. Simon smoothed out some picture and audio glitches. Yesterday, he sent over copies of all six episodes, and at last I was able to see this TV series I'd been banging on about for so long, and I cannot begin to tell you how grateful I am to Neil and Simon for making that possible.

And in the process, some mysteries were solved, but a few more cropped up. I am working on a longer piece, which I plan to take the form of a comprehensive episode guide, but let's tackle some of the questions we can now answer, and the new ones that we can't just yet.

The Falcon's Proofreader: Part Two

When they were republished by Walker Books in the mid-to-late nineties, all three of the original Diamond Brothers books by Anthony Horowitz were rewritten for various reasons -- outdated and offensive content, trying to bring certain elements originally written in the mid-1980s up to date, because one of them was tying in with a TV series and thus contained material which was originally in that series but didn't translate well to prose. My two, arguably three, previous efforts have covered the differences between the different versions of The Falcon's Malteser and South by South East (plus a follow-up to the latter, comparing the two different editions to the TV series, here); now we finish things off with the second entry in the series, Public Enemy No. 2 -- the only one of the three original entries not to be adapted for film or TV, which has been put down to its violent nature and unfilmable climax involving a bomb, the River Thames and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's abandoned first attempt at the Thames Tunnel.

The picture at the top of this post is the original 1987 cover; only one subsequent UK reprint featured the original version of the text, the obscure 1991 Lion Books edition. In fact, those 1991 editions (reprinting the first two books in the series and publishing South by South East for the first time, tying into the broadcast of the SBSE TV series) were so obscure that, as far as I can tell, this blog has been the first place on the Internet ever to post images of what they look like. For our third and final exclusive, then, I am very proud to present the cover of the 1991 edition of Public Enemy No. 2:

So, then, if your copy of the book looks like either of those you have the original text. All Walker Books editions, published from 1997 onwards, feature the revised version... and here comes my comparison of the two.

The Falcon's Proofreader: Part One

In 1986 and 1987, two of Anthony Horowitz's earliest novels, the first two Diamond Brothers books, were published by Grafton Books (with paperback editions later printed under their Dragon imprint) -- The Falcon's Malteser (pictured above with its original cover), and its sequel Public Enemy Number Two.

In 1988, The Falcon's Malteser was adapted as a film, retitled in the UK as Just Ask for Diamond, and Lion Books published a new edition of the book tying in to the movie. The following picture of that edition was provided by Giles Leigh:

In 1991, a third book featuring the Diamond Brothers, South by South East, was published, at the same time as a TV serial that was either an adaptation of the book, or the book was a novelisation of the TV series (I haven't entirely worked out the relationship between the two yet, but you can read all about my attempts to do so here) began its one and only UK transmission. In any case, Lion Books also published the original version of that third book, and it looks like this (I have thanked Christian Bernard-Gauci for first putting me onto the existence of this original version before, but let's do so again, especially since it's his picture).

At the same time, Lion also reprinted the first two books in the series. Thanks to Jonathan Craig and his brother, who dug out their old copy for me, I am able to provide what I believe to be the first ever picture on the Internet of what the 1991 reprint of The Falcon's Malteser looked like:

Then, in 1995, the books were taken up by a new publisher, Walker Books, who continue to print the series to this day. But when the books were reprinted by Walker, all had some significant alterations made to them. If you have any of the older copies pictured above, then you have the original version of the text (thanks to Giles and Jonathan, I have confirmed that there are absolutely no differences whatsoever between the '86, '88 and '91 versions -- all three are even typeset the same). If you have any Walker edition, then you have the revised version.

(Note that I do not know anything about non-UK editions of the books, but if you have any information you'd be willing to volunteer about them it would be welcome. There is one other pre-1995 version of the book published in the UK not mentioned above: this, which appears to be an omnibus of four children's adventure books from different authors that were all published by Lion. I see no reason to think that the version of The Falcon's Malteser contained therein is any different, but if you have a copy then I would be grateful for absolute confirmation.)

I have already given an overview of the differences between the original and updated versions of South by South East here, as part of my quest to learn as much as possible about the TV series. But doing that post prompted me to track down the original versions of the first two books -- I'd always been curious about the two copyright dates in the Walker editions indicating there was a different version originally published -- and here we have the differences between the 1986 and 1995 versions of The Falcon's Malteser, with Public Enemy Number Two to follow at some point in the not-too-distant future. As with the earlier SbSE comparison, this is not an exhaustive list of changes, just the salient ones -- pretty much everything not covered here is minor changes to punctuation and removing hyphens from the middle of words.

The Livingstone Art Museum

When I heard that Ian Livingstone -- co-creator of Fighting Fantasy, co-founder of Games Workshop, and without whom this blog would very probably have never been started -- was to receive a knighthood in the New Year's Honours, I thought I should probably come up with something to pay tribute to the great man. And what I came up with was this: a guide to the various times Sir Ian cameoed in the illustrations of his own adventure gamebooks.

Best of 2021

In a way, there were two types of post on this blog last year: one about an extremely obscure CITV series from 1991 that was never repeated or released on home video, and everything else. So when making a list of the best posts, I sort of have to split it in two... but let's begin with a full recap of the remarkable story of The Diamond Brothers: South by South East.