The Livingstone Art Museum

When I heard that Ian Livingstone -- co-creator of Fighting Fantasy, co-founder of Games Workshop, and without whom this blog would very probably have never been started -- was to receive a knighthood in the New Year's Honours, I thought I should probably come up with something to pay tribute to the great man. And what I came up with was this: a guide to the various times Sir Ian cameoed in the illustrations of his own adventure gamebooks.

Best of 2021

In a way, there were two types of post on this blog last year: one about an extremely obscure CITV series from 1991 that was never repeated or released on home video, and everything else. So when making a list of the best posts, I sort of have to split it in two... but let's begin with a full recap of the remarkable story of The Diamond Brothers: South by South East.

29 on 4 2

So, Channel 4's terrestrial debut of Season 29 of The Simpsons began slightly later than it normally does on the 22nd November, and wrapped up on 17th December. Here, then, are several thousand words examining the various episodes they censored, as well as other notes of interest mostly concerning cases where there are alternate versions of certain episodes, compared to my earlier notes on potentially problematic/interesting-for-other-reasons episodes made before the run started.

Broken Gamebooks #1 ½: Realm of Chaos Redux

Way back in the first ever Broken Gamebooks article, nearly five years ago now, the inaugural adventure gamebook under discussion was the sixth GrailQuest book, Realm of Chaos. I have some startling new revelations to share with you, which were provided by commentator Ed Jolley. (Ed has also left some thoroughly interesting notes on some of my other posts, which you would be well-advised to seek out.)

Five Years

It was exactly five years ago today that the very first post was published to cwickham.blogspot.com. It was, of course, a review of an obscure series of adventure gamebooks from the 1980s.

I'd only started writing that review the day before; as I note in it, I got into a conversation with Andrew Ellard on Twitter about an adventure gamebook he'd had as a child but was struggling to identify, and at his suggestion I ended up writing a review of the series. And suddenly I needed a place to post it. I'd always meant to start a blog some day, and this was the impetus I needed to finally get around to doing so. I decided to see how long I could keep updating it on a weekly basis, which turned out to be almost exactly three years; for the two years since then, I've had a similarly totally arbitrary target of keeping it updated monthly. And, to my mild surprise, some people have been quite interested in what I've written.

To mark the fifth anniversary, then, I thought I'd look at the ten most-read posts according to Blogger's stats page, and see if I can work out why these pieces are so popular and if I have anything new to say about them. If you've been a regular reader over the last half-decade, why not try to guess which posts they are before reading on?

Yes, obviously I know why not, but play along, OK?

Clash of the Metal Titans

The first four series of the iconic robotic combat gameshow Robot Wars were a straightforward knockout tournament: each episode comprised a single heat, the winner of which would progress to a semi-final, and the winners of those would progress to the Grand Final. Thus, the episode titles for those series followed logically: "Series 2 Heat K" or "Series 3 Semi-Final A" make it clear what you're talking about.

But after the Fourth Wars, the UK championship took a temporary backseat for Robot Wars Extreme, a series featuring a wide range of different mini-tournaments. Each episode of Extreme 1 featured a mix of the different ongoing tournaments, plus the occasional one-off battle. So with the exception of the two Annihilators (which featured six robots who qualified from the earlier "Mayhem" melees fighting together, with one robot being eliminated each round until only one survived), and the Second World Championship, those episodes don't have any easily identifiable moniker.

Except the original Radio Times listings appear to have given each episode a title. One fight in each episode would be branded the "Main Event" of the night, and most of these titles come from those: I don't know if these were official titles given to them by the production team, or if the RT made them up themselves. At any rate, the episodes were titled thusly (read this list alongside the Robot Wars Wiki's episode guide if you like):

1. The Challenge Belt
2. The Ultimate Mayhem
3. The International Inferno
4. The Ultimate Vengeance
5. The Armed Forces Mayhem
6. The Ultimate Vengeance
7. The Annihilator Special
8. The Ultimate All-Star Conflict
9. The House Robot Rebellion
10. The Second World Championship [NOTE: Shown in this position on BBC Two, but had aired as Episode 16 of the earlier BBC Choice run]
11. The Forces Special [NOTE: Shown in this position on BBC Two, but had aired as Episode 17 of the earlier BBC Choice run]
12. The All-Star Quarter-Finals
13. The Flipper Frenzy
14. The All-Star Semi-Finals
15. The Tag Team Terror Final
16. The Annihilator Special
17. The All-Star Grand Final

Given there are two different fights dubbed "The Ultimate Vengeance", the two Annihilators are not differentiated between, and one of the twelve Mayhems has seemingly been arbitrarily given the title "The Ultimate Mayhem" just because it had Hypno-Disc in it, these titles are sadly not terribly helpful. Still, the Radio Times listings are the only place I've ever seen these episodes referred to as anything other than "Episode 1", "Episode 2", etc.

Nog een Artikel met een slecht vertaalde Nederlandse Titel

Last time on the blog, my attempts to track down the obscure 1991 Diamond Brothers TV series brought the attention of Netherlands-based reader David; as the show was a British-Dutch co-production, he was able to provide me with a large number of contemporary pieces about the show's broadcast in the Netherlands from Dutch newspapers. David had a few more notes to give me after reading my resulting piece, which I think deserve a post of their own.

Vraag Gewoon Nog een Keer om Diamant

Last time on my epic quest for the never-repeated, never-released-on-home-video Diamond Brothers TV series from 1991, blog reader Giles Leigh had tracked down a whole bunch of newspaper and magazine clippings pertaining to the series' broadcast in the Netherlands. Bearing in mind I knew the show had been a co-production with a Dutch filming company, allowing for filming on location in Amsterdam, this is possibly something I should have thought to look into before. Ahem.

Anyway, another blog reader, Netherlands-based David, has now been in touch with another selection of clippings from various Dutch newspapers covering the series' broadcast there; I am tremendously grateful to him for sharing this veritable treasure trove, and for helping out with the translations. Pictured above is the first of these, taken from the 8th April 1991 edition of the Leidsche Courant and featuring, unless I'm mistaken, a never-before-seen publicity still of Colin Dale and Dursley McLinden.