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...