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.
Back in 2017, I first wrote about the series, which I had been curious about for years: it was prominently mentioned on the "about the author" page of several of Horowitz's books, in some cases in printings published over a decade later, and was the follow-up to a well-known film, so why was it so obscure that I couldn't even find any visual evidence it existed online? Shortly after, Steve Williams scanned in his old Radio Times to provide what I believe to be the first image of the series ever posted online, and a little while later, I discovered both an extensive second-hand account of someone who had seen the original transmission and a promotional poster for the series. But 2021 was, after a period where the trail had gone cold, truly the year where this show took over the blog.
It started in March, when a reader sent in a real curiosity: evidence that the series may, in fact, have been released on VHS, but only in Spain. Shortly thereafter, actual moving footage of the series was uploaded to YouTube in the form of the opening titles, marking the first time any clips from the series were posted online.
But then in July, the story got very strange. Reader Christian Bernard-Gauci wrote in to let me know that he had an edition of the book which he, and I, quite reasonably assumed to be a TV tie-in edition. But as I looked at the images he'd sent me of it, something seemed off. I, and everyone else, had assumed that the series was an adaptation of the book. But with this new evidence, I suddenly hit on a remarkable thought: Was it actually the other way round? Was the book actually a novelisation of the TV series? Pestering Horowitz about it on Twitter seemed to indicate that yes, he did in fact write the TV series first, and I quickly tracked down the same edition of the book Christian had, to discover a litany of differences between it and later printings which seemed to further confirm that the TV series was the original, not an adaptation.
But that wasn't quite good enough for me. I wanted to know for sure if the stuff only found in the 1991 version of the book was material that was in the TV series, so I wrote to Jamie, who had uploaded the opening titles to YouTube, to see if he could help. Even though the conclusion I reached seems to have been not quite right, I still think the resulting article -- comparing the 1991 book, the TV series and the edited 1997 book, and coming up with results that were not at all what I expected -- is quite possibly my favourite thing ever posted to the blog.
The conclusion -- that the book was based on a version of the script several drafts earlier than the one that went into production -- turned out to be not quite right? Yes, because in September and November Giles and Netherlands-based reader David sent me a large number of clippings from Dutch newspapers covering the series' transmission over there, and they seemed to indicate that Horowitz was working on both the book and the script for the series simultaneously. So it's a real chicken-and-egg situation, although I believe the theory I came up with in the article linked to in the previous paragraph -- that the script was rewritten to remove some unfilmable or unnecessary set-pieces and the original version of the book is closer to some earlier version of the TV series -- is probably not totally wrong. Maybe.
Meanwhile, it turned out the 1988 film adapting the first book in the series had its own story to tell, as reader Simon Drake sent in a list of differences between the VHS and DVD edits, which I published with my own annotations, and later Giles Leigh provided some further information which allowed me to post a reasonable theory about why there are two different edits at all.
So, as we roll into 2022, there is one burning question: Will I ever get to see the series for myself? Well, I currently have several leads on copies of the series that are out there which I believe to be extremely promising (and Jamie may be able to share more footage later on, not least in the documentary about Dursley McLinden he's working on), but it is best to be discreet about them for now. I promise you'll hear more as soon as I can say.
But the Diamond Brothers were not all I wrote about in 2021. So here's my list of the best of the rest:
On the subject of alternate versions of Calvin & Hobbes strips.
How the next generation came to discover Supermarionation in the nineties and noughties.
On being in the audience for the Christmas special of Would I Lie to You? (The planned follow-up post will be written once the outtakes episode has gone out -- there's one story alluded to which I suspect will make it in there, and is best viewed as a total surprise...)
I think this is my overall favourite of the blog's three trips to broken gamebook land this year, but an honorary mention to my favourite individual fact: that the French translator of Realm of Chaos apparently took it upon themselves to write in an extra section to cover an error in the original.
For the third year running, the blog examines the terrestrial premiere of some four-year-old Simpsons episodes. (If you read this article when or a few days after it was first published, please note it's had some updates since then, to add one or two cuts I missed plus some extra information.)
I think this has been the strongest year so far for the blog overall; I got far more published than last year, with a fascinating central mystery and a wide variety of other subjects (including several I'd never written about before). I already have some pieces in the pipeline for 2022 (including two Broken Gamebooks articles which are not going to appear for quite some time because they're going to be an absolute nightmare to research) which I am really excited about, and can't wait to see where the blog takes me next. Happy New Year, and see you soon!
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