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.