Best of 2023

I got quite a lot of writing done this year -- by far the most since I moved the blog to an "ideally once a month" update schedule -- and some of it I'm really quite proud of.

Whilst 2021 and 2022's round-ups were mostly taken up with my quest regarding the 1991 Diamond Brothers TV series, that sort of hit a wall this year, because when I finally accomplished the goal of actually seeing it last year I was faced with an issue pertaining to the fact that episode 3 fell off-air halfway through its one and only UK broadcast: I still don't know who all of the actors in that episode are, and any further writing I want to do on the subject can't really proceed until I do. My offering from the 2022 round-up is still open: The full series is now on YouTube, and any thoughts you might have on the subject would be gratefully received. Someone must recognise those last few unidentified players...

One Foot in the Beezer

The legendary One Foot in the Grave Christmas special, One Foot in the Algarve, original TX 26/12/93: Margaret opens up the suitcase she believes to contain the bed linen they've brought from home, only to discover that, thanks to Victor failing to empty the case he brought down from the attic, it actually contains "ten years' worth of access statements and a hundred copies of the Beezer."

There are many reasons why David Renwick might have chosen that particular comic book. The Beezer is an inherently funnier name than the Beano or the Dandy, especially when said in a Scottish accent, and it isn't as comparatively obscure as, say, the Nutty. For the first twenty-five years of its run, the Beezer was printed in A3 size, making it twice as big as most of its stablemates, which might well come in handy when you're using it as a prop in a sitcom. Strips in the Beezer such as Colonel Blink, The Badd Lads and Pop, Dick and Harry, which leaned heavily on slapstick and a general ethos of things going wrong, make it a particularly appropriate one to appear in One Foot -- quite possibly it was a childhood favourite of Renwick's.

The topmost issue in the suitcase is a distinctive one: a special Christmas issue, quite probably chosen deliberately. That should make it easy enough to narrow things down to the exact issue the production used, you'd think.

31 on 4 2

"All the latest from Channel 4 News at 7 tonight, after Homer discovers an outlet for the sound of his own voice. Add Bart, and it's an algorithm for a viral sensation. Season 31 of The Simpsons starts now on Channel 4!"

-- Continuity announcement into "The Winter of Our Monetized Content"

* * *

The start of November seems to be the established time for Channel 4 to run their new-to-terrestrial season of The Simpsons, give or take a week, and Season 31 kicked off on Monday 6th November; avoiding all of that starting-on-Tuesday nonsense from last year, and also becoming the first season the station has debuted in Our Favourite Family's new timeslot of 6:30pm (and I have to say, I do find something preferable to the show leading into the news rather than Hollyoaks; between that and no longer clashing with House of Games, it just seems a nicer bit of scheduling, somehow). So, with the run having wrapped up earlier this week, just how much of it escaped C4's scissors, and how does that match up to my predictions from back in September?

Time and Relative Exhibition in Weston

There's a really quite wonderful exhibition of Doctor Who art currently on display in the Weston Museum, just a short train journey away from me, and if you can get down there before it closes I can't recommend it enough. Those of you who can't, however, will have to make do with my amateur photography.

One Foot in the Radio Theatre

In what we can only presume was late 1994, David Renwick adapted four episodes of One Foot in the Grave for the radio, which proceeded to be broadcast in 1995 in what seems a rather curious timeslot: Saturdays at 1.30pm on Radio 2, weekly from the 21st January. Perhaps because of this, these adaptations seem to have become a little obscure for some time, only receiving the most fleeting of mentions in Richard Webber's remarkably thorough book, The Complete One Foot in the Grave (noting the episodes' subsequent release on cassette and CD in the 'Merchandise' section), although the advent of BBC Radio 7, latterly Radio 4 Extra, allowed for many subsequent repeats, and they've more recently seen a special vinyl release "housed in an illustrated wide-spine outer sleeve -- complete with coffee-spilled rear".

Cub Scouting

Over the 70+ volumes and counting the series currently comprises, the Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebooks have allowed you to fight just about every type of monster you might care to think of. Since the series launched in the 1980s, it should come as no surprise that one of the most recurrent monsters that crops up is werewolves -- a staple of horror movies at the time (tip of the hat to Rebecca, whose journey through lycanthropy in the eighties inspired this post). But do they use the 'were' part to its full potential, or is that just set dressing?

Well, if you've read the 2007 book Howl of the Werewolf, you'll already know that the answer to the question of potential is an unequivocal "yes" -- Howl casts the player as an adventurer who is bitten by a werewolf and seeks a cure for their lycanthropy before the condition becomes irreversible. Boasting a huge number of optional sidequests, locations you'll only find on certain playthroughs and different ways of fighting the book's endgame, it's about as close as a single gamebook will ever get to being a Wide Open Sandbox. Tragically, Howl was only briefly in print during the tail-end of the series' time being published by Wizard Books, and used copies now command truly ridiculous prices rising into triple figures. But do one-off encounters in earlier books bring the same problems as they do to the player character of Howl? How do the books use lycanthropy as a game mechanic when it's not the book's main focus?

Annual Is Horrible, It Is

If you are not British -- and it may interest you to learn that according to Google Analytics, slightly more than half of this blog's hits have come from outside the UK -- you may not be familiar with the concept of the Christmas annual. In essence, they're nice big hardback books produced for the holiday season, usually based around an existing property, featuring comic strips, text stories, puzzle pages and other features. They're probably most associated with anthology comics such as the Beano, but over the years ones have appeared for magazines, TV dramas, pop stars, childrens' books, game shows... you name it. (They're sometimes referred to as "yearbooks" for franchises less associated with children. As a side-anecdote, I found a bunch of Jackie annuals from the 1970s in a second-hand bookshop just the other day which had, written on their price labels, the words "CHECKED -- NO ONE DODGY".)

At some point, someone seemed to have a bright idea: Why not expand this winning formula to non-British properties that are popular over here? Well, they tried, but in a lot of cases the answer to that question is: Because you're not going to be able to produce any new content for such a book (or if you are you're going to be very limited in what you can do), pretty much all the material is going to have to be pre-existing.

And, to be fair, even then they had a stab at it: there was a regular Simpsons annual for a few years in the 2010s, which used existing Simpsons Comics strips and art from a variety of sources, plus (in the earlier ones) some newly made puzzle pages and text features such as "Homer J. Simpson Presents A Gentleman's Guide to Etiquette", again with all images being pre-existing art; I'd be hard-pressed to describe them as classics of the genre, but they do a reasonable job of not obviously looking like they just slapped together a bunch of stuff they had the rights to print. Other shows, however, were not so lucky. One annual in particular comes to mind as quite possibly the worst, most slapdash piece of officially licensed media based on a TV show ever published (at least, that I'm aware of). Before the jump cut, perhaps you'd like to guess what it is.

The Famous Five and You

I wanted to do a proper review of these because I've mentioned them as a shining example of "not very good adventure gamebook based on a licensed property" in one or two other posts discussing similar series, and also someone pointed out that their title is actually quite funny if you think about it. But I should warn you that that perhaps unintentional piece of passive-aggressiveness might well be the highlight of The Famous Five and You.

34 on Sky

Between 24 December 2022 and 4 June 2023, Sky Showcase (as the channel formerly known as Sky One has recently rebranded as) brought Season 34 of The Simpsons to the UK, at least on pay TV: "Top Goon" aired as a festive special on Christmas Eve (in spite of this particular episode's questionable links to the festive season, this has become a tradition for Sky dating back to Season 30's "'Tis the 30th Season"), and the rest of the season followed on a weekly basis from 15 January. With one exception: the annual trilogy of terror, "Treehouse of Horror XXXIII", was not aired as part of this season, and we were left waiting until the Sunday just gone, the 22nd October, for its Sky debut... which it made at 4:45pm.

Give Yourself An Incredibly Unsatisfying Role-Playing Experience

Give Yourself Goosebumps saw R. L. Stine's best-selling series collide with the solo gamebook format in a way remarkably similar to the other big proponent of US interactive fiction, Choose Your Own Adventure, for a total of exactly fifty different books (42 in the regular series, plus 8 'special editions') released between 1995 and 2000, when the franchise entered a hiatus that would last some eight years. With the nineties not being enormously kind to the gamebook genre on the whole, for many members of the generation who grew up with Goosebumps this was likely the first, and quite possibly only, series of interactive fiction books they followed.

If you were of that generation and revisited the original series of Goosebumps books more recently (and for whatever reason a hell of a lot of them have turned up in my local charity shops and second-hand bookshops lately), then they almost certainly read very differently as an adult. Whilst exactly how much of the main range Stine wrote himself still seems up for discussion, the various spin-off series -- this and the short story collections, amongst others -- are beyond debate, with multiple authors having openly stated they ghostwrote various entries. And time may well have been even less kind to the offshoots.

The Blog Author Fulfils a Childhood Dream

Alea Jacta Est!

Translating into English as "the die is cast", if you didn't know, Alea jacta est! was a four-volume series of adventure gamebooks starring the famous indomitable Gauls published in France in 1988, with three of the entries being translated into English a year or two down the line; the original Latin title remains on the cover, but each book is also billed under the rather less imaginative heading of "An Asterix Game Book". The books boasted a full combat and inventory system, and directly mashed together the appearance of a regular Asterix comic album with the functionality of an adventure gamebook, using a mixture of text sections and puzzles based around illustrations. The English translations were done by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge, who so brilliantly translated the original comics, which gives these versions a great sense of authenticity. And the series might very well be one of the most successful marriages of an existing property to the adventure gamebook format. But given such a category also includes Give Yourself Goosebumps, The Famous Five and You and Dick Tracy: A Catch-a-Crook Adventure, that doesn't seem like a terribly high bar to clear. So, what's it like?

The Unofficial Complete I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue Official Stage Tour Dates

My own souvenir programme from the 2020 Bristol show

These have been removed from the show's Wikipedia article by some tosser who reckons they're "not of encyclopaedic value", and I compiled them from 2020 onwards (plus I have some additional notes on the earlier years I found out whilst double-checking some things), so consider this my contribution towards preserving comedy history -- absolutely every date in the history of the ISIHAC stage tour.

31 on 4

Between 29 September 2019 and 17 May 2020, Donald Trump was impeached for the first time, the United Kingdom held a general election to decide who out of the two worst people eligible for the position would become Prime Minister, then went on to leave the European Union, the primaries for the 2020 US election got underway, that actress from Casualty referred to Greta Thunberg as "Sharon" on Celebrity Mastermind, and then the COVID-19 pandemic shut down most of the planet.

With all that going on, you'd be forgiven for forgetting that between those two dates Fox aired the 22 episodes that make up Season 31 of The Simpsons, which began airing in the UK on Sky One on 24 December 2019, and then weekly from 17 January to 29 May 2020... although there are a few little footnotes on those broadcasts we'll get onto in due course. At some point this autumn, Channel 4 will bring those episodes (or at least nearly all of them) to free-to-air television; the twentieth season of the show they've premiered, and almost certainly the sixteenth consecutive one to debut in the tried and trusted early evening slot on weekdays -- but that looks like it might be changing just a bit, as the scrapping of the terrestrial broadcasts of Hollyoaks means that from Monday 25th September, Our Favourite Family moves back half an hour to 6.30pm. Time will tell if this is a permanent change, I suppose.

For the fifth year running, then, I present my guide to possible cuts, censorship and outright cancellations to watch out for; as ever, I advise you to keep an eye on Wesley Mead's UK Scheduling Information page at The Simpsons Archive for news of when exactly these episodes will arrive on C4, and I'll be back with a full list of edits and whatnot after they do.

My Scintillating Observations on the Recording Order of the First Series of Red Dwarf

The first series of Red Dwarf was originally scheduled to be recorded and broadcast in the following order:

1. "The End"

2. "Bodysnatcher"

3. "Balance of Power"

4. "Waiting for God"

5. "Future Echoes"

6. "Confidence & Paranoia"

However, before the episodes could be recorded, an electrician's strike at the BBC put paid to the planned filming dates in early 1987. The series was eventually remounted towards the end of the year, but as the story famously goes, during the hiatus, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor took a second look at the scripts and decided to drop the planned second episode, "Bodysnatcher". They rewrote the ending of "Confidence & Paranoia" so, instead of successfully resurrecting Kochanski as a hologram, Lister unwittingly brought a second hologram of Rimmer online instead, and wrote a new finale, "Me²", following on from this. The episodes were thus recorded in the following order:

1. "The End"

2. "Balance of Power"

3. "Waiting for God"

4. "Future Echoes"

5. "Confidence & Paranoia"

6. "Me²"

(7. Reshoots to "The End")

"Future Echoes" turned out so well that it was bumped up from fourth to second, giving a broadcast order as follows:

1. "The End"

2. "Future Echoes"

3. "Balance of Power"

4. "Waiting for God"

5. "Confidence & Paranoia"

6. "Me²"

The story of "Bodysnatcher" getting dropped is a pretty well-known one to any Dwarf fan, but the changing of "Confidence & Paranoia" seems to be a less-discussed one -- had Grant Naylor already changed their minds about this ending when they decided to drop "Bodysnatcher"? Were the two decisions made in tandem? Was the originally planned ending a consequence of deciding to bump all the episodes after "Bodysnatcher" up one and write a new finale, rather than write a new second episode?

Our Roboteers in the North

In August 2000, at the conclusion of the filming of the fourth series of Robot Wars, five special episodes were filmed, to go out as Christmas specials. Two of these promised to be the most destructive episodes imaginable: the Annihilators, where six robots fought until one was immobilised and eliminated, then the remaining five returned for the second battle, and things carried on until only one was left. The two Annihilators were split into the Northern and Southern groups, with one half of the geographical divide represented by each show.

And if you look at the Southern Annihilator, all seems fine: Bournemouth residents Razer, Hemel Hempstead natives Behemoth, Essex boys Spawn of Scutter, Bedford's Onslaught, Vercingetorix of the Isle of Wight, and finally Atilla the Drum hailed from Southampton. One or two of those actually stray into the East of England, not the South East or South West, but all seems fine here.

Turning our attention to the Northern Annihilator, we start off perfectly acceptably with Chorley residents Spikasaurus. Then we've got Dominator 2 of... Cambridgeshire? Suicidal Tendencies from... Derby? Stinger, residents of... Lincoln? Killerhurtz, native to... Oxford? And Chaos 2, residing in... Ipswich?! This is a very odd definition of "the North" we've got here, isn't it? What's going on?

Bottled

Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds was the fourth of the nearly twenty different point-and-click adventures released by Humongous Entertainment between 1992 and 2003, and was the first of their titles to use randomised plot elements on each playthrough -- every time you played the game the messages in bottles you had to find would be in different locations. I covered this before, the last time I went insane, but just to recap:

• The first bottle will appear at either the Old Whale Bones, near the beach, or by the volcano
• The second bottle will appear at either the Deep Canyon or in the junkyard
• The third bottle will appear at either the King's Castle or in one of the three caves

As you can see from the previous article, later Humongous games would find more and more ways to experiment with random elements on each playthrough, but as the first game to use the idea, The Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds perhaps doesn't take full advantage of the idea. But there's one other element of the game that changes on each playthrough... and it's a strange one, which comes in the penultimate cutscene of the game.

Broken Gamebooks #23: Talisman of Death

Talisman of Death was only the eleventh book in the original Fighting Fantasy series, and one of the earliest (the second, in fact) to be sourced from an outside writer after it became apparent that the range's creators, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, could not possibly hope to write quickly enough to meet the huge public demand the books generated. The writers in question were Jamie Thomson and Mark Smith, who took the book outside of Allansia to set it on a fantasy world called Orb, which they would later use in their own gamebook series, The Way of the Tiger, effectively making Talisman a sort of pilot for that series (which came from a totally different publisher).

Thomson and Smith went on to write many more gamebooks -- apart from two other Fighting Fantasies, Thomson's credits range from two early-nineties offerings based on The Crystal Maze to co-authoring Can You Brexit?, an adventure casting the reader as the Prime Minister in the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, whilst Smith's CV is shorter but he also collaborated with Thomson on the highly ambitious Duel Master series and the sci-fi Falcon books, aimed at a slightly older audience than most gamebooks -- and from playing Talisman, their very first foray into interactive fiction, it's not hard to see why. Talisman is a well-designed, well-written tome impressive in its scope and scale, with its authors coming up with several innovations new to the range at that point... which unfortunately leads to one of its most memorable errors!

Taker of Photographs

Here we have some photos I took during my visit to the Game of Thrones studio tour in Belfast when I was on holiday in June; this is mostly just a way of keeping the blog updated whilst freeing up some space on my phone.

Fantastic Advertising Opportunity

Having been alerted to the fact that "Cwickham" sounds like the name of a brand of microwave ham dinners, I would like to inform any executives from Findus that I will consider any and all offers regarding this blog's URL

"...Which is Definitely Going to Make the Edit"

The two episodes of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue recorded at the Bath Forum that I was in the audience for were broadcast on 10 and 17 July, they're still up on BBC Sounds for a few weeks here, here's some stuff that didn't make the edit, and so on and so forth.

Robin and the Three Hoods

Maid Marian and Her Merry Men -- Tony Robinson's take on the legend of Robin Hood as a sitcom for children, running for four series on Children's BBC between 1989 and 1994 -- was in many ways a direct sending-up of Richard Carpenter's Robin of Sherwood. (Nowhere is this more apparent than in the episode "The Whitish Knight", where the mysterious knight has his own song which is clearly a specific reference to RoS' theme music.)

However, you can draw a straight line -- like an arrow, if you will -- from Sherwood, to Marian, to later adaptations of the legend. The character of Barrington, the Rastafarian Merry Man in the latter, was a reference to Sherwood having a Saracen (Nasir) join the ranks of the outlaws, and may be what really popularised the idea for later adaptations; is it even possible, however unlikely, that Robinson parodying the idea is part of what led the writers of the 1991 Prince of Thieves film to believe Nasir was not a character solely created by Carpenter, but the idea went back much further, forcing them to change the name of their own Saracen to Azeem mid-shoot when they found out?

Black and Grey

Here's something that really does live up to this blog's name. I was looking through the archives of the newsgroup alt.tv.simpsons -- an amazing history of contemporary fan opinion on the show, stretching back to 1990! -- when I came across this post by Matt Garvey, regarding a 2012 repeat of "Simpsons Roasting On an Open Fire" on Fox:

At around 12 minutes, when Homer asks when he gets paid, the Santa school instructor barks "not a dime till Christmas Eve!" In the version just broadcast tonight, there's a funny cloudy coloring over that line (see some of the original takes for 7G01), and the right arm is noticeably lighter, with the suit close to black. The entire suit snaps to the lighter gray in the same shot as he gathers himself and continues. On the DVD, it looks like a retake, perhaps from a later (1989-90-91-93-94, though I'd suspect 89 or 90) repeat... it seems unlikely to have been done at the DVD stage. The only other copy of the episode I have is from a tape of unknown origin (full-length, possibly an airing or the retail VHS), and it does have the glitchy take. I don't know about syndication.

I am able to go one better than Matt's description, and provide visual comparison of the two. This is from the DVD version of the episode:

And this is the erroneous version, taken from the old The Simpsons Collection UK VHS from 1992 (the one with "Bart Gets an 'F'" on the same tape):

The GrailQuest Bestiary: Part III

If you've just joined us, over the previous two articles of this series I've been listing all the monster encounters in the GrailQuest gamebooks of the 1980s; Part I and Part II can be found in those links I've just made, and this concluding article starts off with the last two books in the series.

A Brief Thought About an Obscure Simpsons Clip

On 30 April 1992, the Simpsons episode "Three Men and a Comic Book" was aired for the third time on Fox, up against the last ever episode of The Cosby Show -- and hence, presumably, it might be an overstatement to say that practically no-one watched it (the Cosby finale drawing an audience of 44.4m viewers), but surely it would've attracted a significantly smaller audience than usual, especially since it started halfway into its hour-long opposition. However, the repeat featured a new scene paying tribute to Our Favourite Family's rival (the decision to shift The Simpsons into direct competition with Cosby for its second season in 1990 generating great controversy) at the end (between the executive producer screen and the rest of the credits).

It seemed lucky enough to me that one copy of this scene survived... but it seemed amazing to me to find a second, clearly different off-air of it. As I thought about it, though, it seemed less unlikely -- it's quite possible, if not probable, that the addition of the Cosby tribute would've been trailed in advance. And even back then fans would've known to hold on to something unique like that (even if not every rarity from the show's early years is so fortunate).

The GrailQuest Bestiary: Part II

Last time, I set out to write a complete guide to all the monsters and foes you could face in J. H. Brennan's GrailQuest solo fantasy gamebooks, but it quickly became apparent I would have to split it up into multiple parts; Part I includes a recap of how the combat system worked (as well as, courtesy of Ed Jolley, one of the greatest comments ever left on this blog), and here comes the part of the Bestiary covering adventures four through six, kicking off with Voyage of Terror -- which, owing to Merlin's Net Spell going wrong, sees a sideways move from Camelot to Ancient Greece, a consequence of which is that all your usual magic and equipment (including Excalibur Junior) are not available to you...

A Short Post On the 1990s Dennis the Menace TV Series

In 1996, having been appearing in the Beano since 1951, Dennis the Menace and his faithful Abyssinian wire-haired tripe-hound Gnasher made the transfer to television for a series called Dennis the Menace, which ran on Tuesday and Friday afternoons on CBBC for two series until 1998, then managed to survive in repeats until the start of 2009, when it was supplanted by a rebooted version. And yes, over here it was called Dennis the Menace, at least at first.

There was a version of the show retitled Dennis and Gnasher, but that was solely for the United States, to avoid confusion with their own Dennis (who infamously happened to make his debut on the exact same day as the British Menace). The belief that it was always called Dennis and Gnasher probably arises because later Region 2 DVD releases used the ...and Gnasher versions; perhaps this was so they could also be released in Region 1 with minimum fuss, or perhaps because by this point the 2009 reboot, which was always called Dennis and Gnasher, was a thing and they wanted to be able to advertise both series under one banner (by this point the comic strip itself had also been retitled, perhaps to avoid the negative connotations of the word 'Menace').

The GrailQuest Bestiary: Part I

Whilst J. H. Brennan's GrailQuest solo adventure gamebooks were principally meant to be a more comedic take than usual on the idea, he also came up with one of the best combat systems I've ever seen for an RPG -- simple to understand, but allowing for a diverse range of encounters. Unlike other series of the time, in fact, a complete guide to all the monsters and villains you could fight across the series' eight titles would probably make for quite fun reading. So here we go.

Keep it Light

I was in the audience for last night's recording of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue at the Bath Forum, which saw Rory Bremner and Marcus Brigstocke locked in combat with Tony Hawks and Pippa Evans. I was going to wait until the two episodes aired (which will be on the 10th and 17th July) to try to do my thing of remembering as much about what didn't make the edit as I can, since ISIHAC is a difficult show to write spoiler-free notes on, but I do have one or two things that definitely won't make the edit or can be suitably vague about now.

One of the biggest laughs of the evening came when Jon Naismith was introducing the panel: whilst he was describing the first panellist Tony started to walk on and was halfway to his chair when he realised Jon was actually talking about Rory, and hurriedly ran back behind the curtain before Jon noticed him!

There was a tense moment at the top of the second show: Jack Dee got a few lines into his opening monologue when there was a power cut, which was followed by a uniquely funny yet worrying few minutes of ad-libbing (and Jon making some perhaps-only-semi-joking remarks about already having enough material for two episodes from the first one) from the darkened stage.

There was one new round which will be interesting to see if it makes the edit or not for reasons I can't really get into; I can't think of much else to say that doesn't cross the line into spoilers, the relatively new game of Songstoppers seems to be a permanent fixture now, and one of them brought the house down.

Oh: Watch out for a moment in Pick-Up Song that reduced everyone, including the rest of the panel, to literal tears of helpless laughter.

Broken Gamebooks #22: Battleblade Warrior

And suddenly the roar of battle ceases, and the ranks of warriors part. Atop a mound of human bodies, right at the centre of the fighting, is the Lizard Man Champion. Nearly three metres tall, four-armed and splattered with gore, the immense creature is swinging a barbaric war-axe and a huge knife larger than your own sword. The Champion howls insanely, drunk with blood-lust, calling on any brave warrior to challenge him to a fight. Will you step forward to take him on (turn to 26), or take advantage of the distraction to break through the lines (turn to 213)?

So section 333 of Battleblade Warrior sets the scene for the only notable error in the thirty-first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, originally published in 1988... an error if, were it not for the fact that I find it quite funny, might not be covered here.

Mirror Man

The second episode of Would I Lie to You? I was in the audience for, with guests Henning Wehn, Michelle Visage, Simon Gregson and Chizzy Akudolu, was recorded over a year ago, and I've been patiently waiting not only for the episode itself to air, but also for the outtakes show to go out, so I can go into more detail about anything I can remember without spoiling anything that might make the edit. (There's a second outtakes show next Friday, but the description indicates there's nothing from this episode there so I should be on safe ground publishing this now.) And here we are.

Caption Captured

Okay, if you're reading this, by this point I'm going to assume you know the whole deal this blog has with the 1991 TV series The Diamond Brothers: South by South East at this point. If not, why not start at the beginning, then come back here? I'll wait.

Welcome back. Anyway, the exciting news here is that I have been made aware of the existence of another off-air recording of the sole UK broadcast in 1991, this one the property of Paul TG of theTimeVault podcast. And this one has slightly more of the transmission error that afflicted episode 3.

Paul shared a few videos with me on Twitter, confirming what I already believed to be the case: the 9 April interrupted broadcast cut off just after the Diamond Brothers leave the guest house, and the following week's one-third-episode began over the long panning shot of the railings. Most thrillingly of all, though, he shared with me the caption added to the beginning of the 16 April portion of episode 3:

See here for the crucial video of the beginning of "Episode Three Cont..."; Paul also shared with me videos of the end of the 16 April recommencement and the point at which his recording of the 9th April cuts off, which are nice to have but I don't think show anything that isn't on the existing YouTube upload of Neil James' copy. (Paul did mention that his original VHS recording captured the whole breakdown, including the entirety of Tommy Boyd and Neil Buchanan's dead air, but unfortunately the person who transferred it to DVD for him cut it out and the original tape is long since broken!)

Anyway, this is going to be tremendously useful when I finally get round to writing my episode guide on the show (still pending my finding out what the cast list for episode 3 should have read, so do get in touch if you have any thoughts on that).

Revision Quest II

A few weeks back, I compared the 1997 and 2011 editions of an obscure adventure gamebook called Egyptian Quest, the latter of which was self-published by the author and contained several intriguing additions compared to the original printing.

I had a hypothesis for those additions -- specifically, that they were written for the nineties edition but that had to be pared back to hit a strict word count -- and I had also intended to cover Egyptian Quest's sibling, Aztec Quest, in the same post. However, it turned out that there were far more changes than I was expecting, and I was able to make a much stronger case for my theory than I was expecting to from just the first book. So, like some weird DVD extra nobody asked for or watched, here are a selection of the changes between versions of Aztec Quest.

A Slightly Convoluted and Badly Told Anecdote About Armstrong and Miller I Have Just Remembered

Back in 2010, I attended the first night of The Armstrong and Miller Tour at the Bristol Hippodrome. And it proved to be significant that it was the first night.

The show was predominantly live, but there was a pre-recorded series of animated inserts where Armstrong, Miller and the sole other member of the cast, Katherine Jakeways, voiced characters in an MMORPG (basically not unlike the later E4 sitcom Dead Pixels)... except for most of the show, the screen wasn't working, and only the audio was played in. And nobody seemed to notice; perhaps the audience were too polite to try and bring it to their attention, but nobody on the crew picked up on it, and the cast certainly didn't!

Eventually -- possibly this is a false memory, but it was before the very last insert was played in, certainly after quite a few of them had been -- Ben and Xander broke character to say, slightly embarrassedly, that we should have been able to see things as well as hear them in the bits where they and Jakeways were off-stage, but the projector wasn't working, and they managed to get things fixed in time for us to see the last one. Suddenly having visuals did make that one sketch much funnier, at the cost of basically ruining every other one... and the punchline to the whole thing, where the cast came back on stage dressed in the same ridiculous costumes as their MMORPG characters, who had agreed to meet up in real life, which had far less impact as a result.

Although it strikes me just now that we potentially missed out on something even funnier if nobody had noticed anything was wrong until that point...

Appointment with Susan

I have written about Steve Jackson's Appointment with F.E.A.R., the seventeenth entry in the Fighting Fantasy series, before. But to recap, it departs from the series' usual swords-and-sorcery based books to provide a superhero adventure heavily influenced by the Golden Age of Comic Books, and provides unparalleled replay value by hiding the information you need to find the titular meeting in different places depending on which of four superpowers you choose to play with.

One thing Appointment also contains is this encounter, at section 410:

You arrive at Parker Airport and ask the nearest security guard whether anything is happening. "The Silver Crusader!" he gasps. "Thank goodness you're here! Follow me. I'll take you to the Control Tower." You follow him up into the Control Tower where you find the place buzzing with activity. The Air-Traffic Controller greets you nervously. "Have you heard? No? The police are on their way. Some guy calling himself 'the Tormentor' has hijacked a DC10 full of passengers to London. He's mad! No demands; nothing. Says he'll crash the plane. Blames it all on 'Susan'. We don't know what to do. A complete nutter! Is there anything you can do?"

Ghost in the Magazine

On 4 October 1996, Have I Got News for You returns for its twelfth series. For some reason, several listings magazines incorrectly report the guest panellists will be David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, which the show feels compelled to address, showing the above clipping with the following joke:

"Good evening and welcome to 'Have I Got News for You', and we apologise to the millions of viewers who have tuned in expecting our guests to be the two stars of the hugely popular series 'The X-Files'. This information appeared in several newspapers and magazines, and yet no-one seems to know quite how it happened."

My purpose here today, however, is not to find out how that happened. (I don't think Anderson or Duchovny were even in the country at the time!) Two weeks later, for the third episode, the following call-back happens:

"Good evening and welcome to 'Have I Got News for You', and apologies to the millions of viewers who may have read that this week's guests were to be Lord Lawson and Mark Little, as I'm afraid they are."

One week later, the fourth show opens thusly:

"Good evening and a special hello to those of you who may have read in the current edition of TV Quick that this week's guests are Father Christmas and Rupert the Bear. So, welcome to the show, I'm Jemima Puddle-Duck."

Putting aside the revelation that HIGNFY only had one publicity image to use at the time... surely this is someone at TV Quick trying to keep the joke going for another week? (That might seem the obvious conclusion, but it's never mentioned on the show.) I wondered what the Radio Times listing for this episode said... and it doesn't mention either guest, indicating that information was not yet known and the editors of TV Quick weren't actually leaving that out just for the sake of the joke, they just decided to do the joke in absence of actually having the information available. Thereby creating a very odd non sequitur to anyone not watching old repeats in sequence, or who just happened to read the listing in isolation.

Revision Quest

Adventure gamebooks, as I have discussed on many previous occasions, were massive in the 1980s, but then towards the end of the decade the market for them apparently suddenly tailed off. Whilst a few of the hardier ranges straggled on into the 1990s, and the genre has been revived several times in the following millennium, many of their authors ended their careers in interactive fiction around then. One such example is J. H. Brennan, who authored several series of gamebooks, most of which had their tongue firmly in their cheek, between 1984 and 1986.

Over a decade later, however, Brennan returned to the genre for an imaginatively titled series called Adventure Gamebooks. The four titles in this series were Egyptian Quest, Aztec Quest, Greek Quest and Roman Quest, and, as you might be able to guess, all four featured a player character who either travelled back in time or already lived in that time. These were significantly shorter than Brennan's 80s gamebooks, aimed at a younger audience, and were largely a genuine attempt to educate readers about the history of the period.

In 1997, Egyptian Quest and Aztec Quest were published in England. The other two titles, for whatever reason, never were; Greek Quest and Roman Quest only saw physical releases in France (a country with a very large role-playing scene, and where Brennan already had an existing fanbase), a few years later in 2000. Over a decade later, however, Brennan self-published all four titles as eBooks.

Now, comparing the eBook editions of the latter two titles is probably going to be beyond me, unless a bilingual French gamebook enthusiast happens to come across this blog. But I can compare the 1997 and 2011 editions of Egyptian Quest and Aztec Quest -- because Brennan's self-published versions had some significant differences compared to the ones released fourteen years earlier.

Just Ask For A Massive Headache Related To 30-Year-Old Television Listings

So, last week I wrote about a little mystery: How did ITV cope with Children's ITV lasting seven and a half minutes longer than usual on 16 April 1991, owing to a transmission error the previous week stopping them from finishing broadcast of episode 3 of The Diamond Brothers: South By South East? And looking at the TV listings for episode 1, and then episode 3, seemed like it had the answer:

Comparing those two, I came to a conclusion that, in my defence, wasn't entirely unreasonable: ITV just scrapped the cartoon at 5pm to account for the extra running time.

Just Ask For The ITV Schedule For 16 April 1991

15/01/23 Update! Please see here for a version of this piece that, er, isn't totally wrong after the third paragraph.

So, I'm once again talking about a subject which has become what this blog has become best known for over the last few years: the deeply obscure Children's ITV serial The Diamond Brothers: South By South East. If you are new to the blog, you may wish to acquaint yourself with the whole saga before reading on.

But the most important thing to know here is: On 9 April 1991, ITV attempted to broadcast episode 3, but partway through there was a technical fault they couldn't fix. One week later, on 16 April, they picked up episode 3 from where they left off, then showed episode 4. This resulted in a fair amount of oddities, which you can read about on the link above, but one thing I still didn't know even after the series resurfaced was where exactly the cut-off was, as when Neil James -- who provided me with his copy -- was recording the series back in 1991, he managed to pretty successfully splice the end of the 9 April interrupted transmission and the 16 April chunk.

However, the Twitter account Glad You Remember noted that they had a memory of where it might have happened from watching the original broadcast. If you go and look episode 3 up on YouTube, then the line they cite happens about 16 minutes in. Early on in the next scene, at just after 16:30, there is a sudden jump which, once you're looking out for it, doesn't look like tape damage, but a different recording cutting in. So I am happy to consider that particular matter closed: that is indeed where the transmission fault happened. (A previous post on the matter noted that the 16 April recommencement had a hastily added title card reading "EPISODE 3 CONT."; this is not on the extant copy, but it's easy to imagine it appearing during the long pan across the railings at the top of the scene.)

But then, on 16 April, airing that missing section would have resulted in the Diamond Brothers' timeslot being seven and a half minutes longer than usual. Can we work out exactly how they would have coped with that?

Best of 2022

It was exactly one year ago today that my round-up of everything vaguely readable posted to this blog in 2021 was posted, meaning that that post technically qualifies for inclusion in this, my round-up of everything vaguely readable posted to this blog in 2022. That's some Inception-level stuff there.

But also, that post effectively served as a round-up to a story that had taken over the blog in 2021, having spent the previous three years as an occasional running thread: my quest to track down The Diamond Brothers: South by South East, a television series that, despite being written and directed by a hugely successful and prolific novelist and featuring an all-star cast, had fallen into such obscurity as a result of airing exactly once and never being repeated or released on home media that not so much as a single still image from it was available online at the time. And obviously the big story of the blog this year is that, in March, thanks to the hard work of Neil James and Simon Drake, I was finally able to see it for myself, and discovered a new mystery: what the cast list for episode 3 should have been, given that it was affected by a transmission error that, in short, meant it was broadcast without any end credits.

I had a follow-up on that enigma in April, where I'd been able to fill in most of the cast list but still had a few gaps left. And before I write any more, I want to find out if I can get the missing names at the very least (as well as a few other things, such as where exactly episode 3 cut off during its failed transmission). And this is where you come in. Possibly.