About

Ludicrously Niche was born in December 2016, when someone on the social media website then known as Twitter asked me about an obscure adventure gamebook from the 1980s and I needed a slightly bigger platform to answer the question. (At that point it wasn’t called Ludicrously Niche, but had some other name I only intended as a placeholder until I thought of something better. As you can see, I proceeded to change the name in spite of the fact I completely failed to think of anything better.)

Having finally received the impetus I needed to start a blog, since then LN has become a repository for many more articles about obscure adventure gamebooks from the 1980s, but also old television listings, sitcoms and sketch shows, British humour comics, other strips ranging from Asterix to Calvin and Hobbes, children’s TV from the nineties, weird things I’ve purchased in charity shops, point-and-click adventure games, television and radio recordings I’ve been in the audience for, cuts and edits to books, films and TV, robotic combat in a post-apocalyptic world, and whatever the hell else I feel like. Including, on occasion, The Baby-Sitters’ Club.

By far its most notable accomplishment, however, was to successfully track down a television series called The Diamond Brothers: South by South East, which was only screened once in 1991, never repeated, and sunk into a level of obscurity so deep that no visual record of its existence was on the Internet until I came along. This mission took four and a quarter years, becoming increasingly more complicated for various reasons as I learnt more and more about the show, and I highly recommend scrolling back to the first post here and working your way through the whole remarkable story.

If you want to dive into the rest of the stuff I've written: For the first three years I strove to keep the blog updated on a weekly basis, and lurking amongst the archives for 2016-19 are a fair few pieces which were quite obviously only done to meet that goal (in particular I tried to write TV reviews for a while and eventually realised that is not my forte at all); the hit rate has increased considerably since I stopped keeping this target in 2020. If you’ve just discovered this blog for the first time, I recommend going to the “meta” tag, which houses all my annual round-ups of the best things I’ve written in the past year amongst other things.

If you wish to contact me for any reason, my email address is available on my Blogger profile here, or you can leave a comment on a post. As far as social media goes, I do have a Bluesky account but am trying to use even that in moderation, so it's best to use one of those first two options to make sure I'll see it ASAP. If you happen to see a copy of the Beano in an episode of a TV show and want to know exactly which issue it is, or are trying to remember the name of an adventure gamebook from your childhood, or anything else, I would genuinely be delighted to help, so please don't be shy about getting in touch!