Bigger Than the Whole Sky

This seems like news worth bringing to the widest audience possible: as reported by friend of the blog Wesley Mead, it appears that Sky One will no longer be broadcasting The Simpsons at all as of the 1st November. This leaves E4 (plus the occasional weekend lunchtimes on Channel 4) as the only place to see Our Favourite Family on linear television in the UK going forwards.

It's not been the noblest of ends to the channel's 36-year relationship with the show, losing the rights to first-run episodes two years ago and being stuck with repeats from a slowly dwindling pool of seasons, but the final episodes will be a Treehouse of Horror marathon, which seems like as good a way to go out as any.

One would assume that sooner or later, E4 will be able to show more or less everything bar the season currently premiering on FOX (plus of course the Disney+ exclusive episodes); it seems likely to me that Seasons 34 and 35, the only two seasons left that originally premiered on Sky and are yet to air on E4, will be subject to the same conditions as before, and we'll see similar scheduling to this year (where Season 36 got its free-to-air run at the start of the year, immediately followed by E4's first run of Season 33). I'll continue to keep an eye on E4's new airings.

Vampire Time

At 33 seconds into the above video of BBC Two continuity from the 29th October 1999, we get a trail for something rather interesting: the first late-night showing of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, airing at 11.10pm on Sunday, which was a repeat of the episode premiered the day before at 6.45pm (season 2, episode 6 "Halloween", original US TX almost exactly two years beforehand on 27/10/97).

The early-evening showings had been subject to heavy censorship, whereas obviously these post-watershed airings would be completely intact. Although the trailer starts with the words "after dark" and offers an opportunity to "see [Buffy] in a completely new light", with the announcer also branding it as "late-night Buffy", the trail has a slight air of skirting around what it actually is. It feels a little euphemistic, as if the BBC did not want to admit that the earlier showings were being heavily cut; even the Radio Times listing for the premiere refers to the late-night airing as an "extended repeat" (although later on they would drop any such pretences and expressly brand them as 'uncut').

The Case of the Phantom Comic Library

The back page of Dandy Comic Library #53 (published around early 1985) advertised the next two issues that would be on sale the following month, one of which was scheduled to be Violent Elizabeth in "Very Cross Country Runner".

If you remember my look at Plug, you'll probably recall Violent Elizabeth was one of the stars of that comic; the Dandy Comic Libraries often featured interlopers from other titles, even ones that had been defunct for quite some time. However, when Comic Library #56 was published the following month, she was not to be seen.