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.

Scary Drama II

Last time on the blog, we had quite the look at the UK airdates for the 1990s Goosebumps TV series, so you'd better go and read that now if you haven't already, or this post with a few follow-up details will make even less sense than it already does.

Scary Drama

In the late nineties and early noughties, the BBC aired all four seasons of the TV series Goosebumps, adapted from R. L. Stine's infamous book series, as part of its children's' programming strand, CBBC. Well, they aired a fairly high percentage of it, at any rate; many episodes were censored for the 4.35pm timeslot, sometimes removing entire scenes, and twelve episodes were banned altogether, seemingly down to either just being too much for viewers, or concerns over imitable content.

(A baffling sidenote: several of the TV episodes were novelised under the banner Goosebumps Presents, to differentiate them from the books they'd originally been adapted from. These were published in the UK -- in the series' heyday we got pretty much everything except for a few of the short story collections released over here -- and the adaptations of the banned episodes were still released. One suspects a breakdown in communications between the publisher and the BBC, or possibly just no communications whatsoever.)

But if you were to glance at the Radio Times, you might not be aware that the series was so problematic for the censors. Because they only had a very short amount of space to provide synopses for children's programming, the RT listings didn't always provide a great summary... sometimes, in fact, a hilariously inappropriate one. Here, then, is my guide to the CBBC airdates of the show, via the medium of how they were billed in the Radio Times, as retrieved from the BBC Programme Index.