Best of 2023

I got quite a lot of writing done this year -- by far the most since I moved the blog to an "ideally once a month" update schedule -- and some of it I'm really quite proud of.

Whilst 2021 and 2022's round-ups were mostly taken up with my quest regarding the 1991 Diamond Brothers TV series, that sort of hit a wall this year, because when I finally accomplished the goal of actually seeing it last year I was faced with an issue pertaining to the fact that episode 3 fell off-air halfway through its one and only UK broadcast: I still don't know who all of the actors in that episode are, and any further writing I want to do on the subject can't really proceed until I do. My offering from the 2022 round-up is still open: The full series is now on YouTube, and any thoughts you might have on the subject would be gratefully received. Someone must recognise those last few unidentified players...

One Foot in the Beezer

The legendary One Foot in the Grave Christmas special, One Foot in the Algarve, original TX 26/12/93: Margaret opens up the suitcase she believes to contain the bed linen they've brought from home, only to discover that, thanks to Victor failing to empty the case he brought down from the attic, it actually contains "ten years' worth of access statements and a hundred copies of the Beezer."

There are many reasons why David Renwick might have chosen that particular comic book. The Beezer is an inherently funnier name than the Beano or the Dandy, especially when said in a Scottish accent, and it isn't as comparatively obscure as, say, the Nutty. For the first twenty-five years of its run, the Beezer was printed in A3 size, making it twice as big as most of its stablemates, which might well come in handy when you're using it as a prop in a sitcom. Strips in the Beezer such as Colonel Blink, The Badd Lads and Pop, Dick and Harry, which leaned heavily on slapstick and a general ethos of things going wrong, make it a particularly appropriate one to appear in One Foot -- quite possibly it was a childhood favourite of Renwick's.

The topmost issue in the suitcase is a distinctive one: a special Christmas issue, quite probably chosen deliberately. That should make it easy enough to narrow things down to the exact issue the production used, you'd think.

31 on 4 2

"All the latest from Channel 4 News at 7 tonight, after Homer discovers an outlet for the sound of his own voice. Add Bart, and it's an algorithm for a viral sensation. Season 31 of The Simpsons starts now on Channel 4!"

-- Continuity announcement into "The Winter of Our Monetized Content"

* * *

The start of November seems to be the established time for Channel 4 to run their new-to-terrestrial season of The Simpsons, give or take a week, and Season 31 kicked off on Monday 6th November; avoiding all of that starting-on-Tuesday nonsense from last year, and also becoming the first season the station has debuted in Our Favourite Family's new timeslot of 6:30pm (and I have to say, I do find something preferable to the show leading into the news rather than Hollyoaks; between that and no longer clashing with House of Games, it just seems a nicer bit of scheduling, somehow). So, with the run having wrapped up earlier this week, just how much of it escaped C4's scissors, and how does that match up to my predictions from back in September?

Time and Relative Exhibition in Weston

There's a really quite wonderful exhibition of Doctor Who art currently on display in the Weston Museum, just a short train journey away from me, and if you can get down there before it closes I can't recommend it enough. Those of you who can't, however, will have to make do with my amateur photography.

One Foot in the Radio Theatre

In what we can only presume was late 1994, David Renwick adapted four episodes of One Foot in the Grave for the radio, which proceeded to be broadcast in 1995 in what seems a rather curious timeslot: Saturdays at 1.30pm on Radio 2, weekly from the 21st January. Perhaps because of this, these adaptations seem to have become a little obscure for some time, only receiving the most fleeting of mentions in Richard Webber's remarkably thorough book, The Complete One Foot in the Grave (noting the episodes' subsequent release on cassette and CD in the 'Merchandise' section), although the advent of BBC Radio 7, latterly Radio 4 Extra, allowed for many subsequent repeats, and they've more recently seen a special vinyl release "housed in an illustrated wide-spine outer sleeve -- complete with coffee-spilled rear".

Cub Scouting

Over the 70+ volumes and counting the series currently comprises, the Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebooks have allowed you to fight just about every type of monster you might care to think of. Since the series launched in the 1980s, it should come as no surprise that one of the most recurrent monsters that crops up is werewolves -- a staple of horror movies at the time (tip of the hat to Rebecca, whose journey through lycanthropy in the eighties inspired this post). But do they use the 'were' part to its full potential, or is that just set dressing?

Well, if you've read the 2007 book Howl of the Werewolf, you'll already know that the answer to the question of potential is an unequivocal "yes" -- Howl casts the player as an adventurer who is bitten by a werewolf and seeks a cure for their lycanthropy before the condition becomes irreversible. Boasting a huge number of optional sidequests, locations you'll only find on certain playthroughs and different ways of fighting the book's endgame, it's about as close as a single gamebook will ever get to being a Wide Open Sandbox. Tragically, Howl was only briefly in print during the tail-end of the series' time being published by Wizard Books, and used copies now command truly ridiculous prices rising into triple figures. But do one-off encounters in earlier books bring the same problems as they do to the player character of Howl? How do the books use lycanthropy as a game mechanic when it's not the book's main focus?

Annual Is Horrible, It Is

If you are not British -- and it may interest you to learn that according to Google Analytics, slightly more than half of this blog's hits have come from outside the UK -- you may not be familiar with the concept of the Christmas annual. In essence, they're nice big hardback books produced for the holiday season, usually based around an existing property, featuring comic strips, text stories, puzzle pages and other features. They're probably most associated with anthology comics such as the Beano, but over the years ones have appeared for magazines, TV dramas, pop stars, childrens' books, game shows... you name it. (They're sometimes referred to as "yearbooks" for franchises less associated with children. As a side-anecdote, I found a bunch of Jackie annuals from the 1970s in a second-hand bookshop just the other day which had, written on their price labels, the words "CHECKED -- NO ONE DODGY".)

At some point, someone seemed to have a bright idea: Why not expand this winning formula to non-British properties that are popular over here? Well, they tried, but in a lot of cases the answer to that question is: Because you're not going to be able to produce any new content for such a book (or if you are you're going to be very limited in what you can do), pretty much all the material is going to have to be pre-existing.

And, to be fair, even then they had a stab at it: there was a regular Simpsons annual for a few years in the 2010s, which used existing Simpsons Comics strips and art from a variety of sources, plus (in the earlier ones) some newly made puzzle pages and text features such as "Homer J. Simpson Presents A Gentleman's Guide to Etiquette", again with all images being pre-existing art; I'd be hard-pressed to describe them as classics of the genre, but they do a reasonable job of not obviously looking like they just slapped together a bunch of stuff they had the rights to print. Other shows, however, were not so lucky. One annual in particular comes to mind as quite possibly the worst, most slapdash piece of officially licensed media based on a TV show ever published (at least, that I'm aware of). Before the jump cut, perhaps you'd like to guess what it is.

The Famous Five and You

I wanted to do a proper review of these because I've mentioned them as a shining example of "not very good adventure gamebook based on a licensed property" in one or two other posts discussing similar series, and also someone pointed out that their title is actually quite funny if you think about it. But I should warn you that that perhaps unintentional piece of passive-aggressiveness might well be the highlight of The Famous Five and You.