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.

Truth and Consequence

Buried deep in old revisions of the Wikipedia article for Would I Lie to You?, and the Wikipedia article for the list of episodes of Would I Lie to You?, are the recording dates for every episode except those in the first series, and one other day when I'm stuck for things to write about I'll probably stick them all up here.

Most of the time, WILTY? is recorded a while before broadcast -- ranging from Series 2 remaining on the shelf for seven months before broadcast, to Series 6 filming its final episode on 30 March 2012 and then beginning transmission just two weeks later on 13 April. But Series 7 is an odd one -- due to David Mitchell being in Turkey to shoot the short-lived comedy drama Ambassadors, it doesn't start in the same week as the return of Have I Got News for You as likely intended, but a few weeks in, and it's the only series that's still being filmed whilst it starts airing. So let's have a quick look at the order.

Weird Things I Have Found In Charity Shops

I like spending my weekends looking in local charity shops and, as the title of this post may indicate, sometimes I find some weird things in them. The image above, however, shows something I found a short while ago that wasn't just weird -- it was something I didn't even think existed.

Season 20 of The Simpsons was released on Blu-ray in America shortly after its original broadcast as a vanilla edition with no special features, to capitalise on the fact that it was the first season to contain episodes produced in high definition. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found a Region 4 DVD version of the same release in a charity shop in Bristol. Asking Wesley Mead about it revealed that only Australia and Germany got this release -- which seems a very odd thing to happen at all, given the only reason the release happened was because the episodes are in HD. My conclusion was that this set's previous owner had taken the trouble to import this from overseas. But then, if you're donating it because you've just got access to Disney+, then apart from the fact that you'd expect to find other DVDs of The Simpsons or even other Disney+ shows alongside this one (and I didn't) -- wouldn't someone who went to that length to get hold of a copy be a pretty hardcore fan, someone who'd want to hang on to this as an interesting curio? Wouldn't they be aware that just because something's available on streaming now, doesn't mean it always will be?

Anyway, this got me thinking about other similarly inexplicable (to various degrees) things I've seen or even purchased in charity shops over the years. Here's a selection of them. (Not included: a surprisingly large number of adventure gamebooks and Doctor Who novelisations from the 80s and 90s that go for upwards of £70 online and which nobody bothered to do a price check on.)

The 14 Museum

One of the most prolific adventure gamebook authors of the 1980s was J.H. Brennan. You may remember that his gamebooks were, in fact, the subject of the first ever post of this blog over five years ago. But to recap, he wrote three series of gamebooks at the height of the craze in the 80s: GrailQuest, which was set apart from most other series of the time by being incredibly funny; Sagas of the Demonspawn, which by contrast was played absolutely straight; and the Horror Classic Gamebooks, which fell somewhere inbetween those two extremes.

But, apart from the occasional cross-series reference, there was one thing which all three series had in common, and that was what happened when you died: you were directed to another section which described what happened afterwards. That section basically functioned as the gamebook's afterlife. Originating in GrailQuest as one of its many running jokes, this metatextual section was (at least in that series) always section 14, and was often referred to by the book as "the dreaded 14" whenever the player was directed there. You may think the use of the number 14 was a deliberate joke about how you'd expect the obvious number for such a section to be 13. And you'd probably be right. But if you look at how the idea was used in all three series you can, among other things, more or less prove that for certain. So here, then, are all the deep -- and not-so-deep -- hereafters that Brennan ever wrote.

Just Ask For The Guest Cast For Episode 3 Of South By South East

As you may recall, when I last left you on the subject of The Diamond Brothers, I had finally managed to see their 1991 TV series for myself -- but that threw up a brand new mystery. I'd already known that episode 3 had been interrupted by a technical fault, but getting to see the show added something significant: the net effect of that fault, and the way ITV dealt with it, meant that any actor who was only in the affected episode was not credited onscreen at all. So I had seven characters in search of an actor.

I included screenshots of all seven in that post, and after spreading it far and wide, I'm happy to report that four have been identified. So where are we now?

Christmas in April

The Would I Lie to You? Christmas special I was in the audience for went out on the 20th December (and is still on iPlayer here), but I've been waiting for the outtakes show to go out before I do my follow-up post detailing various things that didn't make the edit. So here you go.