Broken Gamebooks #9: The Crimson Tide

This is another famous Fighting Fantasy faux pas that no series called "Broken Gamebooks" would be complete without mentioning, and also an important lesson in proof-reading.

Last Exit to the Writers' Room

The Simpsons writing room, circa 1993

The year is 1993, production on the fourth season of The Simpsons is drawing to a close, and the show's original writing team is beginning to break up. Al Jean and Mike Reiss - a writing partnership who have been with the programme since the very beginning, and have been in charge of the show for the past two production seasons - are giving up the reins of the show to develop their own animated sitcom, The Critic, for ABC. Many others are on the way out: Jay Kogen and Wallace Wolodarsky, another duo around since the start, have already left before this production season has even finished. Also gone are Jeff Martin, David M. Stern, Jon Vitti and, most notable of all, series developer and creative supervisor Sam Simon (following pressures on his relationship with co-developers Matt Groening and James L. Brooks). George Meyer hangs around, but in a reduced capacity as 'creative consultant'. Two others stay on full-time, but extremely briefly: Conan O'Brien leaves after only a few episodes of the fifth season when he gets a gig elsewhere, and Frank Mula stays for around half of it. That just leaves John Swartzwelder as the only writer/producer from the original team sticking around full time (the following season he obtained special dispensation to work from home and his credit changed to 'consultant').

Edit Wars #7

In the summer of 2001, two new series of Robot Wars were filmed: the fifth series of the 'regular' show, and Robot Wars Extreme, a special run of shows featuring a variety of different mini-tournaments. The Pussycat team, with driver David Gribble, participated in both of them.

On the 13th of October 2001, David - a familiar face to Robot Wars viewers for nearly three years - was involved in a motorcycle accident and passed away at the tragically young age of 17; his final television appearances were aired posthumously. Various sources say that this dedication was featured at the end of Extreme episode 1, taken from the Robot Wars Wiki:

At the time, Robot Wars was first run on BBC Choice, then got a terrestrial outing on BBC Two a few weeks later. I would presume that this was seen on the 26 October 2001 BBC Two broadcast of episode 1; the episode was originally broadcast on BBC Choice on 8 October 2001, five days before David died. Eight new episodes of Robot Wars were broadcast on BBC Choice between David's death and the first BBC Two screening of the series; it is possible that one of those also carried the dedication, and they also used it on the first episode's terrestrial outing to make sure it was seen. (For the record, David's final appearance on the show was the Series 5 semi-final, which was originally broadcast on BBC Choice on 23 May 2002 - but that episode would not be seen by terrestrial viewers until 25 October of that year, over a year after his death.)

Terror of the Zy-Gougers

Some time ago now, Big Finish Productions - purveyors of fine audio dramas, principally based on licensed 'cult' properties - decided to let the first fifty of their Doctor Who audio dramas go out of print (continuing to sell them as downloads). Obviously, despite how cheap the downloads are, a fair number of Who fans do like physical media, and this means second-hand CD copies of all 50 plays have been subjected to considerable amounts of price gouging online, but exactly how much chiefly seems to depend on the quality and content of the stories.

Nowhere is this more apparent than The Chimes of Midnight, widely hailed as one of the best Doctor Who stories in any medium, which will now set you back more than five times as much as its price when it was originally released in 2002! (All prices given are correct as time of writing...) Another highly regarded story, Spare Parts (the 'Genesis of the Cybermen' story, which went on to inspire their return in the TV series in 2006) will cost you nearly £50.

Stories which are less well thought of, or have less of a 'hook', fare a bit better - several of them, such as The Rapture, can be yours for a mere £10, slightly cheaper than it was when it was first released. You do get the occasional anomaly, though - Jubilee, a highly-acclaimed Dalek story by popular writer Robert Shearman which was loosely adapted for the TV series, is only slightly more expensive to buy now than it would have been when it was new. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how fan opinion sways these prices in the vast majority of cases.

(Wouldn't it be nice if BF combated this with some limited-edition reissues of some of the most badly affected stories? Next year is the 20th anniversary of Doctor Who at Big Finish, so it'd be the perfect opportunity! The first few stories all used the Pertwee theme rather than era-specific ones due to rights issues, so it'd be a great chance to correct that, and even do some new behind-the-scenes features given BF didn't start doing those until 2007... Go on, you know you want to, BF.)

Starlight Adventures

It's the mid-1980s, adventure gamebooks are at the height of their fame, and the place to go to get the original and the best is Puffin Books, the publishers of Fighting Fantasy.

Such was the concept's popularity that Puffin also published some rather curious offshoots: series that were not part of Fighting Fantasy, but looked a bit like them. They all had the 'ADVENTURE GAMEBOOKS' banner (sometimes referred to as the "sawtooth" design), the same basic cover design, and they all looked pretty similar internally... but they weren't actually part of the Fighting Fantasy banner. One of these was the Cretan Chronicles, which I have expressed my distaste for in an earlier article. Another was the Starlight Adventures - a series of gamebooks aimed at girls.

Long Reads #3

Time for the periodic roundup of the best of the blog over the last few months, I think, especially since over the summer there's a possibility I might not be able to post a new thing every week. Sorry about that.

Just Ask For South By South East... Yet Again

You know, it's really quite difficult to find pictures to illustrate an article about a television series from which no footage or still pictures are known to exist.

Way, way back in the mists of time of, erm, six months ago, I went on the trail of an incredibly obscure CITV series based on Anthony Horowitz's Diamond Brothers books, and was soon able to confirm that it did actually exist.

A few months later, on the Red Dwarf fansite Ganymede & Titan, I am one of the several people coming up with several thousand ridiculous ideas for episodes of Red Dwarf that are mostly puns on titles of existing episodes. The Diamond Brothers film and television series somehow come up in the course of that, and it turns out forum member bloodteller knows someone who saw it and has quite a lot of interesting information about it! Thanks to them for giving me permission to reproduce what they wrote here (here's a link to their original post).

Lost in N-Space

The Summer of 1993: A brand new, fully dramatised Doctor Who radio drama, The Paradise of Death, is recorded and broadcast in five weekly parts on Radio 5 - the first new 'proper' Who made by the BBC since Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred went to find cities made of smoke and people made of song in December 1989. It stars Jon Pertwee, Elisabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney, and was written by the producer of Pertwee's television era, Barry Letts. Letts went on to novelise the story for Target Books the following year. (I'm going somewhere with all this, don't worry.)