Best of 2024

Well, here we are at the end of an incredibly productive year where, barring two short holiday-related rests, I kept this very stupid blog more or less continuously updated throughout, produced some personal favourite pieces, even made a few steps towards professionalism with some tweaks such as sorting out the post tags and adding a proper(ish) "About" page, and now have a bumper selection of links to all the at-least-readable things I wrote across 2024 to share with you.

Much of the year's writing came from the perennial subject of "adventure gamebooks from the 1980s", particularly Fighting Fantasy. Right at the start of the year came a little trilogy of articles looking at the 'demo' versions of some of the books that were first published in Warlock magazine and how they compare to the full-length versions of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, House of Hell and Caverns of the Snow Witch -- a set of pieces which remain quite probably my favourite things I've ever written.

They also inspired some shorter pieces that took a particular interest in anti-cheating traps built into the books, spotlighting Starship Traveller, The Citadel of Chaos, Curse of the Mummy, Kharé -- Cityport of Traps, Masks of Mayhem and The Crimson Tide, as well as an article extensively covering how various different entries in the series included a "time" mechanic, and a comparison of Ian Livingstone's riffing on Mad Max with that of Joe Dever. For more miscellaneous gamebook writing, I also looked at the second of two somewhat lacking adaptations of The Famous Five to the format, a Choose Your Own Adventure book with a surprisingly metaphysical ending and, perhaps a little more tenuously, The Crystal Maze tie-in books.

But if there was a subject I would say I know a lot about but for whatever reason had never written a great deal about before 2024, it would be "British humour comics, particularly those published by D. C. Thomson". I more than made up for it this year, looking at how cigars were excised from Desperate Dan reprints, how the American newspaper strip Nancy was adapted for use in the Topper, how the Sparky Annual broke through several fourth walls, how the Dandy found inspiration in the prospect of an apocalyptic nightmare, how some of the digest-sized editions coped with a tight deadline, and the weird places the Beezer went to in its final years. I also got two whole posts out of photographing some things I found in some issues I bought in charity shops over the course of the year.

I also continued my work in identifying certain issues used in TV shows and photographs, covering which issue of the Beano appears in The Comic Relief Revue Book, which issue of the Beano Robert Smith of The Cure was photographed with for the Smash Hits yearbook, which issue of the Dandy Mr. Bean reads in an episode of his eponymous show, and which issue of the Beano is visible in the opening titles of the children's television show ZZZap!...

A panel from the Dandy which I couldn't find anywhere else to put, but is one of the greatest puns I have ever seen

...Which surprisingly neatly segues into the next category of "other assorted children's television shows", which covered the Maid Marian and Her Merry Men comic albums, the depiction of a dystopian nightmare on a budget in The Demon Headmaster, exactly how many episodes were meant to be in the choir-based sitcom Out of Tune, exactly how many episodes were meant to be in the metamorphosis-based sitcom Julia Jekyll and Harriet Hyde, and whatever the hell was going on with the BBC broadcasts of the Degrassi franchise. Adjacently, for my one and only Diamond Brothers-related update of the year, I made a significant breakthrough in working out what exactly is going on with the two different edits of Just Ask for Diamond.

That slightly less neatly brings us to "various other comedy shows", which was concerned with a classic case of life imitating Alan Partridge, a small piece of detective work regarding a previously unseen clip of Would I Lie to You?, some more small pieces of detective work regarding some photos taken on the set of Would I Lie to You?, a look at the average size of the guest cast in Red Dwarf, having a guess at who wrote an episode of Futurama seemingly written under a pseudonym and how British viewers saw the original Wayne's World sketches from Saturday Night Live. I was particularly pleased with how this last one turned out, as the recollections of two of the blog's regular commentators plus some outside help from someone who knows more about SNL than I do managed to reconstruct the entire picture when the official record was a little hazy.

For the sixth year running, there were also my predictions as to what Channel 4 might see fit to cut from their latest free-to-air premiere of The Simpsons, but this has not yet been followed up with my guide to what they actually did end up cutting, for a very simple reason: Not content with rocking our world by moving the show out of the 6pm slot last year, C4 forewent the usual Autumn-ish time to start showing the episodes for the first time in well over a decade (when they first got the rights to the show their scheduling of new episodes was very screwy for a time, but they eventually settled on the tried-and-tested weeknight slot around Season 17) and Season 32 did not air this year.

Wesley Mead pointed out that we were now dealing with episodes that were originally broadcast after the arrival of the entire show on Disney+ in the UK, which may mean they were subject to different agreements, and just a week before Christmas came a dramatic announcement: Not only would Disney+ become the exclusive home of new episodes in the UK, seemingly cutting Sky out of the picture entirely, but in the New Year Our Favourite Family would be moving from Channel 4 to E4, and Season 32 would begin airing then.

A few things about the show's future on British TV still seem a little unclear, but hopefully we will have a fuller picture in the New Year; on a more conclusive note (in more than one sense, it would seem), I did manage to note down the one and only oddity regarding Sky's premiere of Season 35.

Finally, for a few posts which don't fit into any of the above categories, I also looked at the British broadcasts of Twin Peaks, how the placing of a single line changed between script and screen in the final episode of Better Call Saul, and the perils of translating American English to British English when it came to The Baby-Sitters' Club.

I wonder how many other websites can boast analysis of both of those last two works. Maybe there's a fanfic out there which posits that Jimmy McGill and Stacey McGill are actually related.

I'd definitely read it.