Just Ask For South By South East: The Book of the TV Serial, Only It Turns Out It's a Bit More Complicated Than That

When we last left my ongoing quest for the missing 1991 Diamond Brothers TV series, I was still reeling from a startling revelation: the TV series was not actually an adaptation of the third Diamond Brothers book, but rather the book was a novelisation of the series. Not only that, but it appeared one of the reasons why nobody had ever realised this in the time since the series fell into obscurity and the book became the far better-known version was because when Walker Books reprinted South by South East in 1997, several sections of the text were significantly rewritten, removing or changing sections from the 1991 version of the book. I strongly suspected that the material only found in the earlier Lion Books printing that coincided with the broadcast of the TV series was originally in the show, was faithfully novelised by Anthony Horowitz when he did the book, but then removed when he did his rewrite a few years later. But without access to the TV episodes, I had no way of knowing for sure.

Except, of course, that the title sequence for the series is on YouTube. Jamie, who uploaded the only footage of the series publicly available, does have access to the full series, but as he is not the license holder he can't upload anything else (so please, please don't pester him about it, least of all on my account -- he's not deliberately withholding the episodes, he just can't share them for legal reasons; he is working on a documentary about the tragically short life of Dursley McLinden, for which he tracked the episodes down in the first place, and may be able to include some more footage from the series in that). But it occurred to me that surely it would be OK to ask him a few questions about the material that's only in the 1991 version of the book and check to see if it was in the TV series?

And it was, and I can tell you that Jamie delivered in spades; I am enormously grateful to him for taking the time to do this. So let's take a second look at the differences between the '91 and '97 versions of the book, with the tremendously helpful addition of the perspective of someone who's seen the TV series. (I would recommend you read my first comparison of the two different editions, linked to above, if you haven't already before going on to this one.)

L'escouade Mystère

I noticed from my stats page today that quite a few new readers have been directed to the blog today from a French-language forum about adventure gamebooks, so if you're one of them, a very warm welcome to you. The page in question was specifically linking to my review of The Mystery Squad adventure gamebooks, and I learnt quite a lot of new stuff about the series' publication in French from it, specifically:

• The final two books in the series were never published in France for whatever reason; a similar phenomenon affects several other series of the time, such as the GrailQuest series which also never saw its last two entries published over there.
• As you can see from the picture above, the French editions used original artwork for the covers rather than the photographic ones, although they did mostly use the original internal illustrations (with one important difference... see below).
• In France, the Mystery Squad were rechristened Thomas Laloupe (Casey), and Rémi, Anatole and Julie (James, Bodger and Beans). So presumably French parents in the 1980s were less cruel to their children.
• Finally, what probably really makes this post worth writing: the series' frequent rebus puzzles, which I didn't mention in the original review but probably should have done, were redone for the French-language editions, so here's a comparison using the one uploaded by Gauthier, the author of the article:

The French version decodes to ES-PIONS-NON-DIVERS-ALLAH-TOUR-JUS-LIT-ET-RE-MI: Let's spy divers at the tower. Signed Julie and Rémi.

The Diamond Solution

On a previous edition of what is now apparently the blog's defining mission to chronicle every oddity concerning the Diamond Brothers books and their film and TV adaptations, we looked (well, correspondent Simon Drake looked at it and I made some extra notes) at two different edits of the 1988 film Just Ask for Diamond -- a longer one, which was originally released on VHS in the UK, and a significantly truncated one that appears to be the only edit of the film available on DVD. Lacking information about what was originally shown theatrically or was available overseas, I couldn't determine exactly what the deal was with the two versions. But thanks to another reader, Giles Leigh, who carried out some research into home video releases of the film outside the UK, I think we can, at the very least, make a pretty educated guess about what happened. Much of what you are about to read is what he sent me, and I am enormously grateful to him for doing the work and giving me permission to reproduce it here.

Just Ask For South By South East: The Book of the TV Serial (Definitely)

You know, when I first started writing about a series of comedy detective novels originally published in the late 80s and early 90s, and the obscure television series they spawned, I didn't really expect them to end up becoming such a big part of the blog. But they have, as the story behind them has grown progressively more and more complicated and the number of mysteries they've thrown up has increased. So before we dive into the latest of those, perhaps a recap of the story so far would be useful.

I first inquired about the 1991 TV series The Diamond Brothers: South by South East in December 2017. At that time, I believed the TV series was an adaptation of the third book, and there was one big mystery, and one little one:

• The TV series was extremely obscure, to the point that not so much as a single still image from it could be found on the internet.
• The book was published on 14 March 1991, and the TV series began broadcasting just twelve days later, on the 26th.

Over the next few years, the response I got was more than I could possibly have hoped for. Steve Williams submitted Radio Times listings that provided the first photographic evidence of the series' existence. I was sent an extensive second-hand account of the original broadcast. My own research turned up a promotional poster. It turned out the series might have been released on VHS in Spain. Someone who was an extra on the production for one day even got in touch. Finally, in May 2021, footage of the series actually emerged on YouTube in the form of the original opening titles. Bearing in mind that back in 2017, I semi-seriously floated the theory that the series might actually have been some sort of elaborate hoax, I was pretty happy with all that had come to light -- short of the actual full episodes turning up, I'd done about as well as I could.

But then, only a few weeks later, I was sent something that cast a new light on the second mystery (the TV series' extremely close proximity to the release of the original book). Christian-Bernard Gauci informed me he owned an edition of the book from 1991 which he, and I, quite reasonably assumed was a TV tie-in edition:

But as I thought about this, something seemed off. If there was a TV tie-in edition, surely it would've had to have been published more or less at exactly the same time as the original book? Wouldn't it have been a bit odd to have the book published with two different covers at the same time? And then a staggering possibility hit me: This wasn't a TV tie-in edition of the book. It was the only edition of the book published in 1991. Because, contrary to what everywhere (including the first page of later editions of the books) that mentions it says, the TV series wasn't actually an adaptation of the book, but the book was a novelisation of the TV series.

The Stupidest Puzzle in Adventure Gamebook History

You try to cross back to the real world, but it is no good. Some force holds you here. It will be released only if you are successful in the Trial of Ghosts. You have heard that in some parts of Titan, humans practice barbaric forms of trial. For instance, a sorcerer might be thrashed with stout branches of thorn. If the wounds on his body form, in the judges' opinion, shapes born of Hell, then he is burned as a necromancer; if not, he is released, though he may be near death or scarred for life.

In the same way, the Trial of Ghosts is arbitrary - a matter mainly of luck. On the opposite page is what you see on the ground in front of you. Roll one die: this is the number of the square you start on. You now have to pick a route through to the centre, which is where the judges sit, and is indicated in the diagram by a question mark. The route you take must consist of only five squares, including the one you start with. The route can go vertically, horizontally, or diagonally from square to square. Thus, if you start from 4, your route could be 4, 7, 183, 21, 19. When you have chosen your route, turn to the paragraph whose number is its total (234 in the example above). If the paragraph makes no sense, you have failed the test and will be hanged on the gallows, with the crowd's laughter ringing in your ears. Because you are currently bound to this world, your POWER will be drained and your physical body will die too. Good luck!

Section 309 of Phantoms of Fear, there, with a puzzle charitably described by the Fighting Fantasy Wiki as "flawed in multiple ways". If it's not obvious from the text, you are in a dream world during this encounter, so whether or not the paragraph you reach as a result of this puzzle makes sense or not may be up to the player's interpretation.

Edit Wars #14

Just a quick one this time, but this is an interesting development: It appears that circa Series 4 of the original run of Robot Wars, participating teams could receive the live, uncut studio footage of battles they participated in on request. This means that two battles featuring Iron-Awe survive in their raw, unedited form:

Iron-Awe vs Mazakari vs Mortis: Uncut Version vs Broadcast Version

Iron-Awe vs Steg 2: Uncut Version vs Broadcast Version

Also, I mentioned these on Twitter when they first started appearing, but this channel has recently uploaded an absolutely enormous number of videos from the live events in '96 and '97 that were effectively a pilot for the TV series. It may well be that some of these clips are the same ones that convinced the BBC to commission the show, so it seems worth mentioning them here...

Just Ask For South By South East: The Book of the TV Serial of the Book (Maybe)

So far this year, my never-ending quest for the 1991 Diamond Brothers TV series had had two big breakthroughs: the sleeve for a Spanish VHS release surfaced in March, and then the actual title sequence followed suit in May. Short of the actual full episodes turning up, I thought maybe we'd had all the discoveries we were ever going to have.

I was wrong, for today Christian-Bernard Gauci got in touch to tell me he owned a TV tie-in edition of the book. Thanks to him, I am able to shed a little more light on this lost series. More pictures and my "analysis" follow under the cut.

Unsung Heroes

Remember HeroQuest? It was basically a simplified tabletop RPG crossed with an adventure board game. Very much your classic dungeon crawling setup. BoardGameGeek describes it as "Milton Bradley's answer to Dungeons & Dragons", which is a pretty good description. It's been out of print for many years now due to legal issues (although a crowdfunded revival is currently in the works), apparently relating to co-developers Games Workshop, but still remains fondly remembered despite a second-hand copy of the game being likely to set you back at least £60 on eBay, quite possibly much more, to say nothing of the various expansion packs released over the years.

But there were also three -- seemingly pretty obscure -- adventure gamebooks based on the board game. So let's talk about those.