Dispatches from Fighting Fantasy Fest 4

A picture of Jonathan Green, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, the quality of which may explain the lack of photography accompanying this piece.

On Saturday, September 3rd, approximately 400 Fighting Fantasy fans descended on the University of West London in Ealing for the fourth Fighting Fantasy Fest. It had been three years since the last Fest, allowing this year's event to fall on the 40th anniversary of the franchise -- and to mark that occasion, two new gamebooks were launched, one of which was the first entry by co-creator Steve Jackson in the series since Creature of Havoc in 1986. It all added up to give the event a buzz you might not think possible for a convention for a 40-year-old series of childrens' books. This was going to be something special.

Yellow and Blue

In December 1990, at perhaps the peak of Simpsons Mania in the US, the show's first tie-in album, The Simpsons Sing the Blues, was released, a mixture of covers and original songs performed by the cast in-character (accompanied by several well-known musicians). The album spawned several singles, plus the music videos for "Do the Bartman" and "Deep, Deep Trouble" (the former of which was likely the introduction for several of the show's British fans, receiving an outing on Top of the Pops some years before the BBC would win the rights to the show itself), and was the inspiration for several similar albums from other franchises such as Dinosaurs.

Around 1992, a follow-up along very similar lines was recorded, The Yellow Album... which was then repeatedly postponed and put on the shelf until it was finally released in 1998, for unclear reasons (also putting the kibosh on the idea of any more music videos, which some songs from TYA would have had had it been released as originally scheduled). Not only that, but even if you own The Yellow Album, you do not have the songs as originally intended; when it was finally released, half of them had had their tempo and pitch noticeably sped up, several others were edited in some way, and one song (the Prince parody "My Name is Bart, And I Am Funky") was removed altogether. The Simpsons Archive has a fine list of all the differences between the original test pressings and what actually made it to the shelves.

For a time, MP3s apparently taken from a test pressing were available online, but they seem to have disappeared now, leaving this "original" version of the album lost for the last few years (if not decades). I was quite surprised, then, to find this on a recent YouTube search: what appears to be an excerpt from the song that was cut entirely (it runs to 2:29, but the Archive gives the time for the full song as 4:54). If anyone in the know can confirm for certain that that video is indeed part of "My Name is Bart, And I Am Funky", that would be welcome (I realise it's difficult to see what else it could be, but absolute confirmation for sure would just be nice).

And: Do those original versions of the other songs still exist anywhere? (I've had a go with the Wayback Machine but have had no luck beyond this contemporary piece on the album's release, and discovery of the bootlegged test pressing.)

A Bit of the Radio Times Listings for A Bit of Fry & Laurie

Amusing Radio Times listings from the 80s and 90s, as written by the show's production team, before the practice sadly stopped, are great. As taken from the BBC Programme Index, then, here are the ones that concern A Bit of Fry & Laurie.

Lord Fear's Domain

Over five years ago, this post detailing everything you could possibly want to know about Knightmare tie-in adventure gamebooks was published to the blog. But as mentioned, there was one omission -- the seventh and final Knightmare book, Lord Fear's Domain, which was left out because a) it was not a gamebook, but a straightforward puzzle book, and b) presumably due to reasons of a short print run, it went for silly money online at the time and I couldn't really justify shelling out for a copy, especially when it wasn't a proper gamebook. (A few reasonably priced copies have shown up on Amazon more recently, which is going to be helpful for reasons that will become apparent.)

Imagine my delight, then, when on the date this post was originally published, I was in a charity shop and found, amidst a pile of obscure titles by well-known children's authors, a copy of the 'missing' Knightmare book in question. We are sticklers for thoroughness here at Ludicrously Niche, so here is an addendum to that original post covering Lord Fear's Domain.

130 Dates with David Mitchell

A little while ago, I promised to dredge up all of the recording dates for Would I Lie to You? from old revisions of Wikipedia (initially placed there by the admins of the excellent, and now sadly defunct, That Mitchell and Webb Fansite, and later by some sad, lonely individual with far too much time on their hands) at some point and post them here. And that point is now.

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.

Broken Gamebooks #21: Dead of Night

Sometimes I regret the name given to this series of articles, because Dead of Night -- the 40th entry in the Fighting Fantasy series, written by Jim Bambra & Stephen Hand and published by Puffin in late 1989 -- isn't really broken, it's basically just got two small-ish logistical errors, one of which the player can easily exploit. It's also rightly considered one of the strongest and most memorable entries in the series, owing to its pervading sense of Gothic horror, high quality of writing, innovative additions to the basic gameplay system and having multiple possible ways to get the successful ending.

But you came here for the mistakes.