Dystopian Fiction/Double Feature

In 1985, the thirteenth Fighting Fantasy gamebook, Freeway Fighter, was published, the seventh entry in the range to be written by its co-creator Ian Livingstone. The book is a significant departure from the swords-and-sorcery Livingstone (and the range in general) is usually associated with, taking place in a post-apocalyptic America which clearly takes its cues from Mad Max.

Between 1988 and 1989, the four gamebooks in the Freeway Warrior series by Joe Dever were published; Highway Holocaust (published as Freeway Warrior 1 in the US), Slaughter Mountain Run (published as Mountain Run in the US), The Omega Zone and California Countdown. The series is a significant departure from the swords-and-sorcery Dever is usually associated with in his better known Lone Wolf series, taking place in a post-apocalyptic America which clearly takes its cues from Mad Max.

Digest This

The Beano and Dandy Comic Libraries were digest-sized spin-offs of the two full-size comics, which were published at the rate of four per month (two Beanos and two Dandys) from 1982 to 1997. Each one was 64 pages long and told a single, long-form story starring one or more of D. C. Thomson's main characters, often pairing them up in unusual crossovers. In 1997 the Comic Libraries were supplanted by the Fun-Size Beano and Fun-Size Dandy, which were extremely similar but featured two or three stories per issue plus a selection of other features such as puzzle pages and cut-out-and-keep guides; they continued in this format until 2010, slowly featuring more and more reprinted material, until being discontinued due to low sales.

In the days of the Comic Libraries, however, there were two spin-off ranges: the Beano Puzzle Books, which are hopefully self-explanatory, and the Dandy Cartoon Books.

The Cartoon Books were the same format as the Libraries, but with a different cartoon, usually a single frame, on each page (with the occasional two-pager); despite all being published under the Dandy banner, they featured a wide mix of characters from across DCT's humour comics, often featuring characters which had been defunct for years. They were published monthly for some seven years.

It's worth emphasising that the team putting these together would have had to come up with sixty or so different gags every month for all that time. Given that, the hit rate was surprisingly high, and it seems only fair to provide you with some of my favourites before moving on to the other side of things:

The Adventures of Some Kids Who Happen to Live on the Same Street in Toronto

Degrassi is a long-running franchise which spans several different Canadian children's television series, all broadly linked by the adventures of children or teenagers living on the eponymous street in Toronto.

The first entry in this series was The Kids of Degrassi Street, which evolved out of a 1979 standalone short film entitled Ida Makes a Movie, based on the 1974 picture book of the same name. This was followed by three more specials, which were broadcast roughly once a year, after which it became an irregular series, with four more weekly episodes broadcast from December 1982 to January 1983, another one-off in September '83, an eleven-part series shown from November 1984 to February 1985, and a final six episodes from December 1985. You may wish to consult this page for a more thorough look at the show's history, but in short, the early films were absorbed into the full series and came to be known as a single 26-episode season which makes up the first incarnation of the franchise.

On 9 July 1984, the show reaches British shores when the BBC air Ida Makes a Movie as part of their children's programming block at 5.15pm:

First of seven programmes
The adventures of some kids who happen to live on the same street in Toronto - Degrassi Street.

1: Ida Makes a Movie
Boring! That's what Ida thinks of the school holidays, until she decides to make a film...

35 on Sky

Between January 14th and June 2nd of this year, Sky Showcase brought the abbreviated 18-episode Season 35 of The Simpsons to British viewers... with one exception. Yes, for the second year running, the annual Treehouse of Horror -- number XXXIV -- was held back to Halloween, specifically October 27th at 7.30pm. I have to assume the only reason for this is, after they had no problem with airing the first thirty-two Halloween specials out of season, Sky want to make sure they'll be seen on Halloween itself or near enough. Heaven knows how they will cope with Season 36, which has two spooky specials, the usual Treehouse and "Treehouse of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes", a trilogy based around the works of Ray Bradbury.

There were two scheduled repeats: Wednesday 30th at 10pm, and Halloween itself at 7.30pm. I would be 99.9% sure that late-night repeat on the 30th reinstated all of the material cut from the earlier screenings, but in testament to my professionalism I forgot to make a recording of that one. Because, yes, there were cuts, all of which were to the second segment, "Ei8ht":

• When Nelson and Lisa enter the slaughterhouse, Nelson is killed by the unseen murderer right after his line "Hey, meat hooks, hook meat much? Haw-haw!"; in the uncut version a meat hook then bursts through the back of his head and out through his mouth, but Sky cut away just as the impact is beginning, so we see a tiny bit of blood but no more
• When Lisa plays this back on the security footage about half a minute later, a similar edit happens, so the viewer gets the gist but there is no actual impact.
• When Lisa gets thrown into Sideshow Bob's cell about a minute later, there's a montage of all the other murders she committed; Martin's death seems to be trimmed, and the Spuckler kid and Sherri's removed entirely.

Whilst these edits certainly reduce the amount of violence, this is an incredibly graphic segment and a huge amount of blood, gore and lingering shots of corpses were left in, with only the actual killings getting censored! This was the only episode of Season 35 Sky cut at all, with even the dreaded word "bastard" being left in on multiple occasions in other episodes that premiered at 6.30pm. Whilst Sky dealt with this specific episode pretty well, I find their red lines and approach to scheduling more than a little baffling.

Turn to 400

In 1982, the British game designer Steve Jackson is editing the first Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebook, which he has co-authored with Ian Livingstone, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. As he brings together his half of the book with Livingstone's, he notices that quite by chance, there are 399 numbered references in the adventure -- a number which is just begging to be rounded up to a nice, whole 400. So Jackson duly does so, adding an extra reference which is not accessible from any of the others and is there just to make up the numbers. The number sticks, and 400 references becomes the standard used for the vast majority of the 70+ books that will be published in the series over the next 42 years, with 'turn to 400' becoming synonymous with victory.

In 1984, though, the Fighting Fantasy range opens up to freelance writers, it having become apparent that Jackson and Livingstone cannot keep the best-selling series going on their own. The first book from an outside writer is by the American game designer Steve Jackson, a book called Scorpion Swamp. The American Jackson's book differs from what has come before in many regards, but crucially, it has multiple possible solutions owing to its premise that the player character can accept one of three missions from three different wizards before entering the titular swamp. Hence, in this book, section 400 is just a section like any other, not tied to victory or even a game over. Jackson USA would use a similar approach on the other two gamebooks he wrote for the series, Demons of the Deep (where the goal is always the same but you have multiple different options and approaches for the book's endgame) and the science-fiction based Robot Commando (which is somewhere inbetween the two, giving you complete freedom to go wherever you like and offering several entirely different ways of winning the game by defeating the invading forces).

There are a few other books where section 400 does not see you emerge from your adventure victorious, two of which were written or co-written by Paul Mason. No, not that Paul Mason.

Both of these books were published later on in the series' run, and are notable for their unusually mature writing and complex gameplay; in particular, The Crimson Tide has several unusual non-fatal endings such as giving up your quest for revenge to become a monk, although there is one 'golden' ending which is clearly preferable to all others. In both cases, Mason (or his co-author, Steve Williams, with whom he wrote Black Vein Prophecy) also appears to use the placement of section 400 to actively if lightly troll the reader.

Excellent Fun From the Noisiest Basement

The Wayne's World sketches on Saturday Night Live, chronicling the adventures of metalhead Wayne Campbell and his friend Garth Algar as they hosted a public-access television show from his parents' basement, ran from 1989 to 1994 (the character having originated on the CBC variety series It's Only Rock & Roll two years earlier), inspiring the surprise hit film of the same name in 1992 (by some distance the most successful film based on an SNL sketch) and its sequel a year later. Wikipedia's article on the sketches states the following:

In the United Kingdom, where Saturday Night Live is rarely shown, Wayne's World sketches were extracted from SNL broadcasts and individually packaged as 10-minute episodes which aired on BBC Two as part of the DEF II programming strand, simply as a tie-in with both Wayne's World movies.

But you're not happy just knowing that, are you?

DEF II was an early-evening programming strand aimed at teenagers which broadcast twice weekly between 1988 and 1994. It frequently featured American imports ranging from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to Mission: Impossible, and, yes, in 1992 the Wayne's World sketches were the first Saturday Night Live material to be seen on the BBC. Consulting BBC Genome, we can see that the descriptions of each broadcast in the Radio Times (Britain's premier TV listings magazine, for any Americans reading) were as follows:

1. 2 September 1992: The original sketches from America's famous Saturday Night Live TV series that inspired the teen film Wayne's World and countless catchphrases. It's bogus.... not!

2. 9 September 1992: More excellent fun from the noisiest basement in Aurora, Illinois. Join Wayne, Garth and a celebrity guest partying on down. It's all babelicious fun.... not!

3. 16 September 1992: More excellent fun from the noisiest basement in Aurora, Illinois. Join Wayne, Garth and a celebrity guest partying on down.

4. 23 September 1992: More fun from the noisiest basement in Aurora, Illinois.

5. 30 September 1992: More fun from Aurora, Illinois, as Tom Hanks plays Aerosmith's head roadie.

6. 7 October 1992: More fun from Aurora, Illinois. With actress Debra Winger.

7. 14 October 1992: More fun from Aurora, Illinois.

8. 21 October 1992: Mary Tyler-Moore is the new babe in the basement.

9. 28 October 1992: Last in the series from Wayne and Garth's basement.

The Edge of Forever

Several years ago, I had a little mystery regarding the 1988 film Just Ask for Diamond. You can go here for a full refresher, but in short, I am in possession of two substantially different versions of the film: the one that was originally released on VHS, and another one which has many cuts and edits, which is the one currently available on DVD.

There was also another version of Just Ask for Diamond for the American market, which retitled it Diamond's Edge, but I didn't have access to a copy of that.

Until now, when someone has uploaded the whole damn thing to YouTube. I feel a bit grubby about linking to such a thing, but search for 'Diamonds Edge / Just Ask For Diamond 1988' and it should come up. We can now see the alternate title card in the opening sequence:

Crucially, though, this American edit is the short version with all the cuts, but one further difference -- the original opening theme ("Just Ask for Diamond" by the Wee Papa Girl Rappers) has been replaced with an instrumental piece, pretty much the same one used on the closing credits of the short edit. The American version also cuts one of the credit screens from the opening sequence, the one right after the title card which reads 'With ROBERT BATHURST. / GERALD CAMPION. / DONALD STANDEN.'; I can only presume this is because none of these people were particularly well-known in the US.

The version currently available on DVD appears to be this version, but with the original opening titles spliced in somehow. Is it mere accident that this one ended up on British home media in the first place? Is it possible that the DVD company got mistakenly handed this edit, someone noticed the issue with the title and they just grabbed a copy of the original opening titles to edit in and assumed that would be OK? There's still some leaps of logic here -- when they were given the original version, why would they not just use that one instead of creating this weird hybrid? -- but it feels like a significant piece of the puzzle has fallen into place.

The Eve of the Wars

In January 2001, the tenth issue of Robot Wars Magazine has exciting news for robo-nutcakes everywhere:

The problem is that this planned night of programming never actually happened. Maybe the BBC lost interest in theme nights overall, maybe the fan-submitted footage they were getting wasn't good enough. But did any remnants of the planned Robot Wars Night survive?

Well... not definitely. I don't have a smoking flamethrower here or anything. But there are a few curiosities floating around from around this time that might be related.

Your Number's Up

In 1982, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone popularised the gamebook genre in the United Kingdom with the first Fighting Fantasy adventure, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain -- a book authored by having Livingstone literally write the first half and Jackson the second. Jackson was responsible for the game's final puzzle, and strives to protect the book against cheaters by devising a puzzle where you have to use the numbers associated with certain items to reach sections the book does not let you access normally.

Jackson ran with this tactic by going on to use it in just about every other FF book he wrote; Livingstone also used it on occasion, but in a more... straightforward (for want of a better word) manner. The idea was also used by outside writers (who were employed when it became apparent demand for the series was far outstripping the rate at which Jackson and Livingstone could hope to write by themselves), and by the end of the series the concept was being used in extremely complex ways, in almost impossibly difficult books which were no longer really being aimed at children.

But there's a missing link in my writing on the subject, and therein lies the following question: What is the first book in the range from an outside author to utilise this concept?

Dwarfing Through the Decades

Having repeated the first two series of Red Dwarf last year -- the first full-on repeat run the show has enjoyed on its channel of origin since 2007, and the first in peak viewing hours since the Remastered episodes were screened in 1998 and 1999 -- BBC Two have picked things up in the last week with a repeat of Series III, which has required me to try and edit the old Red Dwarf BBC Broadcasts Guide without completely fucking up the coding once again.

At the moment this post is published, "Marooned" will just have finished airing -- the seventh time it's been seen on BBC Two overall, which is the joint most times along with "The End" and "Gunmen of the Apocalypse" ("Gunmen" getting two extra outings for Red Dwarf Night and a seemingly random showing in 1999, and the Remastered version of "The End" being shown twice when every other Remastered episode only had the one airing).

But thanks to "Marooned" also getting a one-off airing as part of Two's fiftieth anniversary a decade ago, the episode holds a very interesting record: it has been shown once in the eighties for its original airing, three times in the nineties and once in the noughties for various repeat runs (including in its Remastered form in 1999), once in the twenty-tens and once in the twenty-twenties, all on the same channel it originally aired on.

How many other episodes of television can claim this record?

Hyde and Seek

The Children's BBC comedy Julia Jekyll and Harriet Hyde, which starred a young Olivia Hallinan as a schoolgirl who involuntarily transforms into a monster after her chemistry project goes wrong, but was otherwise very very loosely based on Robert Louis Stevenson's original novella, ran for three series between 1995 and 1998. It manages to get the word "booze" into its first episode, as part of an admirable commitment to pushing back the boundaries of what is acceptable at quarter past four in the afternoon, as well as some genuinely cutting commentary on the education system.

Unlike its contemporary, Out of Tune, a full set of episodes is available for JJaHH on YouTube. Like Out of Tune, though, the Radio Times seems to have been a bit confused about how many episodes were in its first series. See if you can spot the issue with the original listings:

1. TX 29/09/95: A 13-part comedy series in which a girl undergoes a change of identity.

2. TX 06/10/95: Second of a 13-part comedy series in which a girl undergoes a change of identity. Today, Julia's bossy Aunt Cassandra gets more than she bargained for.

3. TX 13/10/95: Third of a 24-part comedy series in which a girl undergoes a change of identity. It's school play time. Julia is to take the leading role in Beauty and the Beast. But what will Harriet Hyde play?

Dandy 3000

The publishers at DC Thomson like any excuse for a good old knees-up. Any time one of their comics reached a landmark issue or anniversary, the entire edition would very often be given over to celebrating the milestone, usually in an epic feat involving all the different strips running at the time, and sometimes this would even extend to the anniversaries of specific strips (such as the Beano marking fifty years of Dennis the Menace with one of their occasional special stories that took up the entire issue, or Roger the Dodger's 40th by having him guest star in every single strip in the comic). These special issues would often feature cameo appearances from celebrities ranging from Ken Dodd to Adele down the years, as well as characters and strips from times gone by. The Beano is now the last of their weekly humour titles still going, and it continues this proud tradition to this day, most recently running a special six-part story to mark seventy years of the Bash Street Kids.

In early 1999, the Dandy was rapidly closing in on a perfect excuse for one of these parties in print -- its 3000th issue. But less than eighteen months beforehand, the comic had marked its 60th anniversary with arguably DC Thomson's most elaborate celebration of all; cover star Desperate Dan had gone on a six-week story arc where he struck oil and retired from the comic to enjoy his newfound wealth (and the company of the Spice Girls), only to be persuaded to return when he saw the publishers about to go bust without him. Having generated a massive amount of publicity, the storyline was concluded in the anniversary issue itself, which was twice the usual page count and printed on what was, to my mind, slightly nicer paper than usual.

Not only was that still pretty fresh in the memory, but just a few weeks away was a nonstandard celebration: With its 3007th issue, the Dandy would become the longest-running comic in the world, surpassing the 3006 issues of Comic Cuts that were published between 1890 and 1953. Perhaps because of all this, for the big three-treble-zero the comic decided to go in a very different direction to the traditional star-studded big bash, seeking inspiration from an unlikely but highly topical source: Y2K.

Yes, following a few weeks of foreshadowing on the front cover, when issue 3000 hit the shelves in May the comic was hit by the Dandy Bug, which rampaged through the issue bringing doom and despair to all the regular characters. I have scanned in this entirely unique edition beneath the jump cut (barring a few pages which are just adverts), with sometimes not particularly relevant commentary. (All pages can be clicked on for larger versions.)

Wanted Poster

Looking around a charity shop in Bristol today, I find a cardboard poster tube on which is written the legend 'THUNDERBIRDS POSTER'. It's only £2.99, I'm already buying a book, what the hell, I buy it without looking at it and hope it's not from the 2004 movie.

Upon getting home, I discover it's actually really nice, and after I put it up I notice from the copyright dates at the bottom it was seemingly printed in 2015. I Google 'thunderbirds poster 2015' and... ah.

Well, that's a hell of a find.

A Carolyn Premish Mystery

The second episode of the Comedy Central run of Futurama, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela", is credited to a writer called Carolyn Premish -- someone who has no other writing credits, in any medium, before or after this episode, or seemingly any kind of presence anywhere in the world. A further layer of interest is added by the fact that this is one of the three episodes of the show for which Matt Groening receives a writing credit, for coming up with the story with Premish.

Obviously in the years since the episode's broadcast, the phantom nature of the author has led to various theories and mutterings that 'Carolyn Premish' is a pseudonym. That mystery remains unsolved; it appears that late last year a member of the animation crew said on the r/futurama subreddit that 'Premish' was long-serving producer and writer Ken Keeler, but they subsequently retracted their claim and deleted the relevant post, saying they'd got some wires crossed.

The most recent episode of the current Hulu/Disney+ run, though, is "The Futurama Mystery Liberry" -- an anthology episode featuring three shorts done in the style of classic children's mystery literature. The first segment parodies Stratemeyer Syndicate stories such as Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. This segment is credited to David X. Cohen -- and Cohen getting a writing credit isn't nearly as unusual as Groening (he generally has one episode per production season to his name), but it's still notable when it does happen. It'd seem reasonable to assume that nostalgia for those stories runs deep at a high level on the show.

The pseudonym 'Carolyn Keene' was, and is, used for ghostwriters on the various Nancy Drew series and other Stratemeyer series. Using a pen name is a Carolyn Keene style premise. Or a Carolyn premise, if you will.

Look, it's just a theory, don't go putting it on Wikipedia or anything. (I'm not even suggesting that Cohen specifically is the real writer.)

32 on 4

In the autumn of 2020, television production crews all over the world were beginning to cope with a new normal. Whilst non-scripted series were starting to return to our screens with socially distanced sets, reality show contestants in social bubbles and Perspex barriers in place, fiction was another matter, and production on prestige series including Better Call Saul, Stranger Things and Succession was only just starting to spin up again.

Animated shows, however, were a third kettle of fish. Many cast members of The Simpsons had already been recording their lines remotely for some time before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and animators were able to continue working on the show from their homes. If anything, production got a little ahead of schedule, and the 22 episodes that made up Our Favourite Family's thirty-second season -- including the landmark 700th episode -- hit US screens as normal between 27 September 2020 and 23 May 2021, with British viewers treated to a similarly familiar schedule by Sky One: the festive episode "A Springfield Summer Christmas for Christmas" was aired as an, er, Christmas special on 24 December, with the remainder of the run following on a weekly basis from the 15th January.

One major change this season, however, was made in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests: In June 2020, it was announced that white actors would no longer voice non-white characters, with several new recurring voice artists brought in as a result. The most prominent of these is Alex Désert, who has gone on to appear in the majority of episodes since then as Carl Carlson, Lou and other miscellaneous roles, but other new voices in this season include Eric Lopez as Bumblebee Man, Kimberly Brooks as Lewis (and other parts including Janey Powell in later seasons), Tony Rodriguez as Julio and Jenny Yokobori as Kumiko, whilst Kevin Michael Richardson, already a semi-regular, took over as the voice of Dr. Hibbert, and occasional guest star Dawnn Lewis took a more prominent role as his wife Bernice.

At some point this autumn, Channel 4 will bring these episodes to free-to-air TV: the twenty-first season of the show they've premiered, and almost certainly the seventeenth consecutive one to do so in the tried-and-true weekday early evening slot. Last year our world was rocked as the scrapping of the terrestrial broadcasts of Hollyoaks meant The Simpsons moved back half an hour in C4's schedule to 6.30pm, and more recent developments make you wonder how much longer the model to which the show's UK broadcasts have adhered to for so long will last. But for now, it's business as usual, including this, my sixth annual forecast of what might not be seen on C4 when these episodes reach it; as ever, keep an eye on Wesley Mead's scheduling page at the Simpsons Archive to know exactly when that happens.

Nichekeeping

Just a quick housekeeping post to note I have (hopefully) significantly improved the labelling system. A few posts from the ill-defined "miscellaneous" category have been moved into their own thing, including the new "miscellaneous children's tv" label, but the big update is in posts about adventure gamebooks.

Previously there was one tag for the "Broken Gamebooks" series and another for everything else; if this was useful in 2017 when the blog was so much smaller, it certainly isn't now, so the latter has been split up and we now have a dedicated Fighting Fantasy category, a dedicated J.H. Brennan category, and several others you may discover if you go through the blog's archives. Hopefully this makes it much easier to find everything, but please let me know if you have any feedback.

Things We Learnt at Fighting Fantasy Fest 5

On Saturday 7th September, for the fifth time in the last decade, several hundred Fighting Fantasy fans descended on a venue in Ealing for Fighting Fantasy Fest, with much to celebrate: a new book in the series by Ian Livingstone, The Dungeon on Blood Island, the new book celebrating the series' art Magic Realms, and Jonathan Green's new fully updated, revised and now interactive edition of his exceptional history of the series, You Are the Hero. Further excitement was generated by the return of the legendary Iain McCaig in person, after he'd Zoomed into the previous event from his home in Canada. On an entertaining day of talks and queuing for autographs, here are some of the things we leant:

• Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson submitted a proposal for a book where the player character would be a vampire seeking to drink Abraham van Helsing's blood, which they suspect was rejected because of the first sequence, where the player killed a young woman.
• White Dwarf magazine used three or four different pseudonyms to cover up the fact that most of the articles were being written by Dave Morris.
• The fact that in Black Vein Prophecy you have to fail a stat check to get an item you need to win the game was entirely deliberate, and was inspired by authors Paul Mason and Steve Williams' stint as editors of Warlock magazine where much of the reader correspondence was about how the books should be as difficult as possible.
• When Marc Gascoigne took over as editor of the magazine he found boxes containing literally thousands of reader-submitted mini-adventures in the office.
• The magazine was cancelled by Penguin in spite of selling in excess of twenty thousand copies per issue.
• Marc started working at Games Workshop two weeks too late to be there when David Bowie walked into the store to buy a Dungeons & Dragons set as a birthday present for his son, but was there when Dave Lee Travis entered the store to buy the same product a short while later.
• Iain McCaig was once so late with an illustration for Deathtrap Dungeon that he had to complete it in the offices of Penguin Books, and looked up from finishing it to find that everyone had gone home and he was locked in the building.
• Darth Maul's horns are actually meant to be feathers bound to his head, and are the result of someone misinterpreting Iain's concept art.
• Ian Livingstone does not enjoy the music of Cliff Richard.
• In spite of Ian's repeated comments about its quality, he still managed to sell a copy of the Nintendo DS adaptation of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain for over £100 at the charity auction. Again.
• One of the other items at the auction was one of the original promotional posters for the series, which inexplicably used a giant photograph of Ian and Steve Jackson up a tree.
• Owing to a hilarious screw-up on my part, I now own a copy of Black Vein Prophecy signed by Paul Mason twice, two years apart.

Cityport Knocking

In 1982, the British games designer Steve Jackson co-writes the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. His masterstroke is a puzzle requiring three numbered keys you have to find to unlock the Warlock's treasure chest; use the wrong keys and unlocking the chest is impossible, or even fatal!

Jackson has an interesting -- not to mention highly ambitious -- tactic of cheat-proofing his gamebooks like this by requiring the player to take options that are not directly given by the text. He went on to use a not dissimilar puzzle, but with intergalactic coordinates, in Starship Traveller. He put a secret room in House of Hell. Appointment with F.E.A.R. has multiple possible solutions depending on which superpower you choose to play with. He throws the literal kitchen sink at Creature of Havoc, with multiple examples of reference modifiers to allow the reader to take a nonstandard action, and even going so far as to make up a cipher which all English language directed at the player is initially given in, which the player can't decode at first.

Without really meaning to, I have written about nearly all these elaborate puzzles Jackson came up with to ensure that only someone playing the book fairly could beat it.

Except for one.

Bright Spark

The above is a typical example of We Are the Sparky People, a strip which appeared in the DC Thomson comic Sparky for around two thirds of its 1965-77 run. Drawn by Jim Petrie (better known as the artist for 2,000 editions of Minnie the Minx in the Beano), WAtSP was a metafictional workplace comedy based around a fictionalised version of the Sparky office staff; other fourth-wall-breaking strips where the characters would interact with the comic's writers and artists would appear before and after this in various DCT comics, but the Sparky People were unique in depicting the ongoing adventures of the people actually putting the comic together.

The Sparky People also appeared, of course, in the annual Sparky Christmas book. The annuals would always be dated with the year ahead, so the Sparky Book 1976, pictured above, was published in mid-to-late 1975. They were also in a near-constant state of production and had extremely long lead times, each book typically being finished a whole year ahead of schedule -- so the 1976 Book would actually have been completed by around summer 1974. This would cause the occasional oddity; it wasn't unusual for a strip which had been dropped from the weekly comic to show up in the annual quite some time later. (I understand that these days, the Beano and Dandy annuals are no longer produced quite so far in advance.)

And this particular book contains, via the Sparky People, perhaps the only joke ever made in one of these annuals about their long lead times.

Coda

This post marks the end of a quite remarkable period of almost seven months where I managed to keep this very stupid blog updated on a weekly basis; I figured I'd leave more in-depth analysis for the end-of-year roundup, but just wanted to note that golden age is now over, especially since this post coinciding with two weeks' holiday and the release of Kingdom Rush 5 means it may be a little while before you hear from me again.

But I think I kept a very high standard, and whether you are just discovering the site for the first time or think you might have missed something, please do go back and see what I've written so far this year. (Whilst I promised just one paragraph ago to go into more detail at the end of the year, I will point you in the direction of the trilogy of articles from the start of the year on the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, House of Hell and Caverns of the Snow Witch and their alternative versions published in Warlock magazine, which are quite possibly my favourite things I've ever written.)

I'm sure you'll find something that's worth your time.

Timeframes II

A short while ago, I looked through some old issues of the Dandy I found in a charity shop, and highlighted some things of interest in them. As you may be able to tell from the above image, I'm now back with another selection of DC Thomson comics I found just last week; these range from around 1990 to 1992, and there's Dandys, Beanos and even some issues of Beezer and Topper.

First up, please brace yourself for quite possibly the ultimate example of a story where someone thought of the title first...

We Can't Put This in the Radio Times

In October 1990, six months after its US debut, David Lynch's seminal mystery series Twin Peaks debuts on the BBC. The show is given no small amount of fanfare: the film discussion series Moving Pictures profiles Lynch's work on Saturday 20th, accompanied by a broadcast of his 1970 short film The Grandmother, and on Monday 22nd the hopefully self-explanatory series Behind the Screen previews the show. And at 9pm on Tuesday 23rd October, 1990, Twin Peaks makes its much-anticipated British debut on BBC Two. (For reference for any non-British readers, BBC One is the "mainstream" channel, whilst BBC Two is the "highbrow" one, and had successes with US imports from The Twilight Zone to The Simpsons.)

The synopses for the episodes in the UK's premier TV listings magazine, the Radio Times, would normally be submitted by the production team at this time (with the writers of comedy shows often taking the opportunity to come up with humorous or misleading ones). It seems unlikely but not impossible that was the case here, but someone was definitely writing up bespoke listings (perhaps someone at the BBC, or someone working for the magazine itself), which we can read courtesy of the BBC Genome Project:

#1.1 "Pilot" aka "Northwest Passage"

Original US airing 08/04/90

Original BBC airing 23/10/90

Radio Times synopsis: The feature-length opening episode of David Lynch and Mark Frost's acclaimed television series. An offbeat murder-mystery drama about a small town where anyone would want to be.

Starring Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean
"She's dead. Wrapped in plastic." The body of Laura Palmer, a beautiful teenage girl, is found by the shoreline in the small lumber town of Twin Peaks, shattering the tranquillity and revealing a host of dark and twisted secrets involving drugs, illicit love, Norwegian property developers, Douglas firs and cherry pie.

Crystal Book Persuasion

Name a gameshow from circa the late 80s to early 90s which you'd guess had a large number of tie-in puzzle/game books published. You might well say Knightmare first in answer to that unwieldy question, and you'd be absolutely right. But I'd be willing to bet that The Crystal Maze would be in your top two.

The very first such book, simply entitled The Crystal Maze, was published in 1990, the same year as the first series, and a pretty early example of a tie-in book for a Channel 4 show. Internet listings say it was released the same day the very first episode actually aired, which seemed like a mistake to me at first, but Iain Weaver recalls it being advertised after the broadcast of Series 1 episodes (quite possibly including episode 1). In any case, the above is the original cover, clearly recognising the marketability of Richard O'Brien; it was later reprinted with a photographic cover depicting the Crystal Dome.

Reject All Cookies

Across the 1990s, various American mass-market monthly paperback series aimed primarily at 8-to-14-year-olds hit the United Kingdom; series such as Goosebumps, Animorphs and The Baby-Sitters' Club. The British versions had their own cover art providing a different spin to the US designs, and the books were also edited to change American English to British English: principally this would just be changing "mom" to "mum", but other modifications such as replacing brand names British readers would not be familiar with, and changing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, also happened. (Amusingly, references to Dennis the Menace were left unchanged, presumably with the line of thought that readers would assume it was the Beano character.) It was all a bit odd, since the stories were clearly still taking place in America, but I suppose understandable.

Sometimes, however, they rather missed the point.

Stories of the Choir from Hell

Out of Tune was a Children's BBC sitcom about a village choir that ran for three series between 1996 and 1998. To be blunt, in spite of featuring a distinctive title sequence and theme tune, a regular role for Nick Maloney as the vicar, and the screen debut of James Corden, plus early appearances for the likes of Charlie Brooks and Jane Danson, it does not appear to have left a huge cultural footprint; its IMDb listings are clearly incomplete, little else about it can be found on the internet, and less than a third of its episodes -- nearly all from the first series -- are available on YouTube. A bit of a shame for a show with the ambition to end its first series with the visual of a car precariously balanced on a church steeple on a children's television budget.

What does survive in full, though, are the programme's original billings in the Radio Times, courtesy of BBC Genome. So let's have a look at the ones for the first series, shall we?

1. TX 14/02/96: First in a seven-part children's comedy about a village choir. A new arrival threatens to shatter the harmony of the Little Wickton Choir.

2. TX 21/02/96: Second in a seven-part children's comedy about a village choir. Problems arise when the piano disappears.

3. TX 28/02/96: Third in a seven-part children's comedy. Street is deperate to impress Chas.

4. TX 06/03/96: Fourth in a seven-part children's comedy. The choir decides to go on a 24-hour fast for charity.

5. TX 13/03/96: Fifth in the seven-part children's comedy about a group of young teenagers who join their village choir. Street is suffering from toothache.

6. TX 20/03/96: Sixth in the seven-part children's comedy series. The choir prepares for an important conker match.

7. TX 27/03/96: Children's comedy series. The parish magazine hires a mysterious new agony aunt. Written by Rory Clark and Robert Taylor. Next episode next Tuesday.

Uh. Haven't you been pretty clear this is a seven-part children's comedy series, Radio Times? Why are you billing another episode next week on the listing for episode seven?

8. TX 02/04/96: Continuing the comedy series. Chas's driving test is looming, but will the choir from hell help her?

Because there was indeed another episode the week after, on a different day (with Rugrats taking up the Wednesday slot). A minor mistake, perhaps... if they had only been wrong by one episode. But it appears they weren't. They were out by ten.

Talk to the Hand

The Children's BBC adaptation of The Demon Headmaster ran for three series between 1996 and 1998. It's an interesting adaptation in many ways; after the first series adapted the first two books, they ran out of usable material -- there was a third book but it was impossible to realise on a film budget, let alone for children's television. Author Gillian Cross thus came up with a detailed plot outline for a new story, she went away and turned it into a book, whilst adapter Helen Cresswell wrote a television series using the same story. Those latter two series are hence broadly the same stories as the books, which were released around the same time as the shows went out, but sometimes the two authors have a slightly different take on the same idea, dialogue frequently changes (there is a noticeable change in the show's diction once it's no longer adapting Cross' dialogue verbatim), and the Headmaster is generally more involved in the TV versions, whereas the books tend to keep him as an off-stage presence a lot of the time. A full comparison can wait for another day, however, because I want to look at a few shots from the third series, The Demon Headmaster Takes Over, specifically the fourth episode. Starting with this one:

Timeframes

If you go into enough charity shops (thrift stores or opportunity shops to my non-British audience), then sooner or later you will find a box of old children's humour comics. They'll generally range in date from the 70s to the 90s, and mostly be old Beanos and Dandys, those being by some distance the longest-lived titles, with the occasional wildcard -- a Beezer, a Topper, maybe a Fleetway title such as Whizzer and Chips or Buster. It's just the way of the world.

Whilst I am always grateful for what I can find in these boxes, I do find more of interest when the comics are from the early nineties, give or take a few years each way. These are issues I was a bit too young (or a bit too not born yet) to have read at the time, but they're very similar to the ones I did read as a child, with many of the same characters and much the same tone. These are also the earliest issues to feature adverts, which makes them of even greater value as a look into the past.

Here, then, is what I got from the above stack of a dozen more-or-less consecutive Dandys from 1991 I picked up a few weeks ago.

Dwarfmatis Personae

In the first episode of Red Dwarf, David Lister awakens from three million years in suspended animation to discover he is now the last human being in existence. But he is not alone.

Exactly how alone he, the hologrammatic simulation of his dead bunkmate, the creature who evolved from the descendants of his pet cat, the ship's computer and latterly the android they found tending to a bunch of skeletons are tends to vary; common knowledge seems to have it that in the early years Lister really is alone, and the universe he inhabits tends to become rather more inhabited over time. Perhaps a series-by-series look at the number of credited guest cast would be useful?

Series I

Episode	Credited Guest Cast
“The End”	7
“Future Echoes”	2
“Balance of Power”	5
“Waiting for God”	2
“Confidence & Paranoia”	2
“Me2”	1
Series Average	3.17

The only reason "The End" -- the first two-thirds of which take place before the radiation leak kills everyone -- isn't a massive outlier is because of the flashback in "Balance of Power" which features Chen, Selby and Petersen. "Balance" was the second episode recorded, and was bumped down to third because "Future Echoes" turned out so strongly and was felt to be the most likely episode to keep viewers watching, although the only two credited guest actors in "Future Echoes" are voiceovers.

(The other two guest parts in "Balance" are a voiceover and Rimmer impersonating Kochanski, and the only guest actor in “Me²” is Captain Hollister in the video of Rimmer's death. This is before you even get into that episode being a replacement for "Bodysnatcher", which would also have only utilised the main cast and voiceovers, and Holly was also originally intended to be voice-only until after the first two episodes were recorded. Until very late in the day Lister could've been even lonelier than he is.)

Inside UFO 54-40

In February 1982, the twelfth Choose Your Own Adventure book, Inside UFO 54-40, was unleashed upon preteens all over the world. Written by Edward Packard, who not only created the CYOA range but arguably the entire genre of interactive fiction (with the originally standalone book Sugarcane Island, written in 1969 but not published until 1976, and later subsumed into the CYOA range as #62 in the series), the book's plot revolves around the search for Ultima, the fabled planet of paradise. And herein lies the book's big secret, which less generous readers may describe with quite a different word.

The Man With a Tadpole Stuck Up His Nose

Between 1989 and 1994, Tony Robinson wrote and starred in four series of the hugely popular Children's BBC series Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, reinventing the legend of Robin Hood as a sitcom for children which posited that Marian was the true leader of the outlaws, and the foppish Robin of Kensington was little more than a vain incompetent whose greatest contribution to proceedings was designing the gang's costumes.

Robinson very much did not stop at the small screen, however; eight MMaHMM comic albums, adapting the TV episodes, were published between 1989 and 1992, with two being released simultaneously every year. The first two batches coincided with the broadcast of the first and second series, but after the Autumn 1990 transmission of Series 2 the show took an extended break until January 1993, and the third and fourth sets of books were released in the interim (with the final two books actually being published well before the Series 3 episodes they adapted were broadcast!)

If you were writing a sitcom or a children's television serial around this time, then a novelisation was still pretty common, but Maid Marian (a show slap bang in the middle of that particular Venn diagram, and hence more or less obligatory) might be a unique example of an albumisation. It seems like these adaptations were a real passion project of Robinson's, but it's hard to imagine the show translating so well to text (one other book based on the show was published, which contained the playbook for the stage musical based on the show that Robinson wrote with two of the series' cast members, Mark Billingham -- yes, that Mark Billingham -- and David Lloyd).

The artwork for the albums was provided by Paul Cemmick (also responsible for the show's animated end credits, as well as original illustrations for the musical's programme when it was staged by the Bristol Old Vic in 1996, which you can see at the bottom of this page), who worked from Robinson's original scripts (in the earliest cases before he'd even had the opportunity to see any of the show itself, with the only visual references he had being photos of the cast taken at the initial readthrough). A total of nine episodes from across the first three series were translated to print in total; the first two books adapted the first two episodes, which form a loose two-parter, but after that they go all over the place, with the eighth and final volume, "Driving Ambition and Keeping Mum", adapting two episodes in a single book. There was also a serialisation (with the panels modified or redone totally to fit) in the Daily Telegraph's imaginatively titled supplement for younger readers, the Young Telegraph.

A sitcom written by Tony Robinson, aiming to get demographically inappropriate humour in wherever possible, is a very funny show indeed. But such a sitcom adapted into a format that has no need to worry about what's feasible on a children's television budget is something else entirely. There are at least seven examples on any given page of this, so I decided to narrow things down to one in particular.

The Camera Never Lies

If you search for "would i lie to you" on Shutterstock, you will be met with around 500 images related to said comedy panel show, most of which were taken on set during the fourth and fifth series. Quite a few of these actually depict moments that didn't make the edit of the final programmes. In some cases, the exact context is lost to time.

This particular photo might not seem remarkable at first; it's David Mitchell reading out a story which didn't make the cut. But back in the day there was a very good fan forum, That Mitchell & Webb Fansite, which reported back from each recording from Series 3 up to partway through Series 7 with, among other things, a full list of stories from each show, but not whether they were true or not. Sadly, only the Series 3-4 ones are still online (the forum having closed and gone offline very abruptly), having also been posted, and still preserved, at this LiveJournal community.