The Unofficial Complete I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue Official Stage Tour Dates

My own souvenir programme from the 2020 Bristol show

These have been removed from the show's Wikipedia article by some tosser who reckons they're "not of encyclopaedic value", and I compiled them from 2020 onwards (plus I have some additional notes on the earlier years I found out whilst double-checking some things), so consider this my contribution towards preserving comedy history -- absolutely every date in the history of the ISIHAC stage tour.

31 on 4

Between 29 September 2019 and 17 May 2020, Donald Trump was impeached for the first time, the United Kingdom held a general election to decide who out of the two worst people eligible for the position would become Prime Minister, then went on to leave the European Union, the primaries for the 2020 US election got underway, that actress from Casualty referred to Greta Thunberg as "Sharon" on Celebrity Mastermind, and then the COVID-19 pandemic shut down most of the planet.

With all that going on, you'd be forgiven for forgetting that between those two dates Fox aired the 22 episodes that make up Season 31 of The Simpsons, which began airing in the UK on Sky One on 24 December 2019, and then weekly from 17 January to 29 May 2020... although there are a few little footnotes on those broadcasts we'll get onto in due course. At some point this autumn, Channel 4 will bring those episodes (or at least nearly all of them) to free-to-air television; the twentieth season of the show they've premiered, and almost certainly the sixteenth consecutive one to debut in the tried and trusted early evening slot on weekdays -- but that looks like it might be changing just a bit, as the scrapping of the terrestrial broadcasts of Hollyoaks means that from Monday 25th September, Our Favourite Family moves back half an hour to 6.30pm. Time will tell if this is a permanent change, I suppose.

For the fifth year running, then, I present my guide to possible cuts, censorship and outright cancellations to watch out for; as ever, I advise you to keep an eye on Wesley Mead's UK Scheduling Information page at The Simpsons Archive for news of when exactly these episodes will arrive on C4, and I'll be back with a full list of edits and whatnot after they do.

My Scintillating Observations on the Recording Order of the First Series of Red Dwarf

The first series of Red Dwarf was originally scheduled to be recorded and broadcast in the following order:

1. "The End"

2. "Bodysnatcher"

3. "Balance of Power"

4. "Waiting for God"

5. "Future Echoes"

6. "Confidence & Paranoia"

However, before the episodes could be recorded, an electrician's strike at the BBC put paid to the planned filming dates in early 1987. The series was eventually remounted towards the end of the year, but as the story famously goes, during the hiatus, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor took a second look at the scripts and decided to drop the planned second episode, "Bodysnatcher". They rewrote the ending of "Confidence & Paranoia" so, instead of successfully resurrecting Kochanski as a hologram, Lister unwittingly brought a second hologram of Rimmer online instead, and wrote a new finale, "Me²", following on from this. The episodes were thus recorded in the following order:

1. "The End"

2. "Balance of Power"

3. "Waiting for God"

4. "Future Echoes"

5. "Confidence & Paranoia"

6. "Me²"

(7. Reshoots to "The End")

"Future Echoes" turned out so well that it was bumped up from fourth to second, giving a broadcast order as follows:

1. "The End"

2. "Future Echoes"

3. "Balance of Power"

4. "Waiting for God"

5. "Confidence & Paranoia"

6. "Me²"

The story of "Bodysnatcher" getting dropped is a pretty well-known one to any Dwarf fan, but the changing of "Confidence & Paranoia" seems to be a less-discussed one -- had Grant Naylor already changed their minds about this ending when they decided to drop "Bodysnatcher"? Were the two decisions made in tandem? Was the originally planned ending a consequence of deciding to bump all the episodes after "Bodysnatcher" up one and write a new finale, rather than write a new second episode?

Our Roboteers in the North

In August 2000, at the conclusion of the filming of the fourth series of Robot Wars, five special episodes were filmed, to go out as Christmas specials. Two of these promised to be the most destructive episodes imaginable: the Annihilators, where six robots fought until one was immobilised and eliminated, then the remaining five returned for the second battle, and things carried on until only one was left. The two Annihilators were split into the Northern and Southern groups, with one half of the geographical divide represented by each show.

And if you look at the Southern Annihilator, all seems fine: Bournemouth residents Razer, Hemel Hempstead natives Behemoth, Essex boys Spawn of Scutter, Bedford's Onslaught, Vercingetorix of the Isle of Wight, and finally Atilla the Drum hailed from Southampton. One or two of those actually stray into the East of England, not the South East or South West, but all seems fine here.

Turning our attention to the Northern Annihilator, we start off perfectly acceptably with Chorley residents Spikasaurus. Then we've got Dominator 2 of... Cambridgeshire? Suicidal Tendencies from... Derby? Stinger, residents of... Lincoln? Killerhurtz, native to... Oxford? And Chaos 2, residing in... Ipswich?! This is a very odd definition of "the North" we've got here, isn't it? What's going on?

Bottled

Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds was the fourth of the nearly twenty different point-and-click adventures released by Humongous Entertainment between 1992 and 2003, and was the first of their titles to use randomised plot elements on each playthrough -- every time you played the game the messages in bottles you had to find would be in different locations. I covered this before, the last time I went insane, but just to recap:

• The first bottle will appear at either the Old Whale Bones, near the beach, or by the volcano
• The second bottle will appear at either the Deep Canyon or in the junkyard
• The third bottle will appear at either the King's Castle or in one of the three caves

As you can see from the previous article, later Humongous games would find more and more ways to experiment with random elements on each playthrough, but as the first game to use the idea, The Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds perhaps doesn't take full advantage of the idea. But there's one other element of the game that changes on each playthrough... and it's a strange one, which comes in the penultimate cutscene of the game.

Broken Gamebooks #23: Talisman of Death

Talisman of Death was only the eleventh book in the original Fighting Fantasy series, and one of the earliest (the second, in fact) to be sourced from an outside writer after it became apparent that the range's creators, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, could not possibly hope to write quickly enough to meet the huge public demand the books generated. The writers in question were Jamie Thomson and Mark Smith, who took the book outside of Allansia to set it on a fantasy world called Orb, which they would later use in their own gamebook series, The Way of the Tiger, effectively making Talisman a sort of pilot for that series (which came from a totally different publisher).

Thomson and Smith went on to write many more gamebooks -- apart from two other Fighting Fantasies, Thomson's credits range from two early-nineties offerings based on The Crystal Maze to co-authoring Can You Brexit?, an adventure casting the reader as the Prime Minister in the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, whilst Smith's CV is shorter but he also collaborated with Thomson on the highly ambitious Duel Master series and the sci-fi Falcon books, aimed at a slightly older audience than most gamebooks -- and from playing Talisman, their very first foray into interactive fiction, it's not hard to see why. Talisman is a well-designed, well-written tome impressive in its scope and scale, with its authors coming up with several innovations new to the range at that point... which unfortunately leads to one of its most memorable errors!

Taker of Photographs

Here we have some photos I took during my visit to the Game of Thrones studio tour in Belfast when I was on holiday in June; this is mostly just a way of keeping the blog updated whilst freeing up some space on my phone.

Fantastic Advertising Opportunity

Having been alerted to the fact that "Cwickham" sounds like the name of a brand of microwave ham dinners, I would like to inform any executives from Findus that I will consider any and all offers regarding this blog's URL