Best of 2022

It was exactly one year ago today that my round-up of everything vaguely readable posted to this blog in 2021 was posted, meaning that that post technically qualifies for inclusion in this, my round-up of everything vaguely readable posted to this blog in 2022. That's some Inception-level stuff there.

But also, that post effectively served as a round-up to a story that had taken over the blog in 2021, having spent the previous three years as an occasional running thread: my quest to track down The Diamond Brothers: South by South East, a television series that, despite being written and directed by a hugely successful and prolific novelist and featuring an all-star cast, had fallen into such obscurity as a result of airing exactly once and never being repeated or released on home media that not so much as a single still image from it was available online at the time. And obviously the big story of the blog this year is that, in March, thanks to the hard work of Neil James and Simon Drake, I was finally able to see it for myself, and discovered a new mystery: what the cast list for episode 3 should have been, given that it was affected by a transmission error that, in short, meant it was broadcast without any end credits.

I had a follow-up on that enigma in April, where I'd been able to fill in most of the cast list but still had a few gaps left. And before I write any more, I want to find out if I can get the missing names at the very least (as well as a few other things, such as where exactly episode 3 cut off during its failed transmission). And this is where you come in. Possibly.

30 on 4 2

Channel 4's terrestrial premiere of Season 30 of The Simpsons in the UK began on Tuesday 1st November. A Tuesday. I ask you.

Anyway, it wrapped up earlier this week; back in September, I predicted which episodes might be cut, dropped altogether or otherwise moved around for the fourth year in a row, and here we see how the battle of expectations versus reality panned out.

Board to Death

Circa Christmas 2000: Having already released a range of Robot Wars action figures, school supplies, multiple tie-in books, an official magazine, and just about anything else you care to think of, the latest addition Mentorn and the BBC deign to add to this already sizeable list of merchandise is a board game. And I have to give them some credit for actually coming up with a unique game, and not just slapping the logo and a bunch of publicity stills on Monopoly or Cluedo or something. But... well... trying to replicate actual robot combat in this medium is certainly a choice. Below the cut are all four pages of the rules. You make up your own mind as to how much fun the target audience for this game might have had with it.

Of Brittas and Men

Over on Ganymede & Titan, a rewatch of all 74 episodes of Red Dwarf is underway for their quinquennial ranking of said episodes from worst to best. They hit Series V this week, and I found one comment particularly intriguing: describing a certain line of Rimmer's (Chris Barrie) in the episode Holoship as "a bit of Brittas creeping in", in reference to Chris Barrie's other famous sitcom character, Gordon Brittas (Chris Barrie).

I wondered just how far apart Barrie's stints as Rimmer and Brittas, both sitcoms filmed in front of a live studio audience, were, and how recently it had been since Barrie had last played Brittas on the occasion of that episode. But whilst recording dates for every episode of Red Dwarf that played out before a live audience are easily accessible online, the same is not true for Brittas.

The Borrowers on the BBC

A question literally nobody has ever asked: How many different adaptations of The Borrowers has the BBC broadcast over the years?

Me:

30 on 4

You know the drill by now: sometime this Autumn, most likely at some point in November based on the last few years (owing to Season 29 being one episode shorter than normal due to a last-minute pre-emption, Season 30 is an episode longer, which might tip the balance slightly, especially if there's no episodes skipped which seems possible), Channel 4 are going to show a new-to-terrestrial season of The Simpsons, originally shown by Sky a little under four years ago; the 30th season of the show overall, the 19th to debut on C4, and unless something truly seismic happens, the 15th consecutive season to debut in the familiar weekdays-at-6pm timeslot. I'll be back once they've wrapped up with a list of cuts and other oddities, but for now here's a list of things worth watching out for, including any episodes that might be dropped from the 6pm slot altogether.

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.)