Appointment with Susan

I have written about Steve Jackson's Appointment with F.E.A.R., the seventeenth entry in the Fighting Fantasy series, before. But to recap, it departs from the series' usual swords-and-sorcery based books to provide a superhero adventure heavily influenced by the Golden Age of Comic Books, and provides unparalleled replay value by hiding the information you need to find the titular meeting in different places depending on which of four superpowers you choose to play with.

One thing Appointment also contains is this encounter, at section 410:

You arrive at Parker Airport and ask the nearest security guard whether anything is happening. "The Silver Crusader!" he gasps. "Thank goodness you're here! Follow me. I'll take you to the Control Tower." You follow him up into the Control Tower where you find the place buzzing with activity. The Air-Traffic Controller greets you nervously. "Have you heard? No? The police are on their way. Some guy calling himself 'the Tormentor' has hijacked a DC10 full of passengers to London. He's mad! No demands; nothing. Says he'll crash the plane. Blames it all on 'Susan'. We don't know what to do. A complete nutter! Is there anything you can do?"

Ghost in the Magazine

On 4 October 1996, Have I Got News for You returns for its twelfth series. For some reason, several listings magazines incorrectly report the guest panellists will be David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, which the show feels compelled to address, showing the above clipping with the following joke:

"Good evening and welcome to 'Have I Got News for You', and we apologise to the millions of viewers who have tuned in expecting our guests to be the two stars of the hugely popular series 'The X-Files'. This information appeared in several newspapers and magazines, and yet no-one seems to know quite how it happened."

My purpose here today, however, is not to find out how that happened. (I don't think Anderson or Duchovny were even in the country at the time!) Two weeks later, for the third episode, the following call-back happens:

"Good evening and welcome to 'Have I Got News for You', and apologies to the millions of viewers who may have read that this week's guests were to be Lord Lawson and Mark Little, as I'm afraid they are."

One week later, the fourth show opens thusly:

"Good evening and a special hello to those of you who may have read in the current edition of TV Quick that this week's guests are Father Christmas and Rupert the Bear. So, welcome to the show, I'm Jemima Puddle-Duck."

Putting aside the revelation that HIGNFY only had one publicity image to use at the time... surely this is someone at TV Quick trying to keep the joke going for another week? (That might seem the obvious conclusion, but it's never mentioned on the show.) I wondered what the Radio Times listing for this episode said... and it doesn't mention either guest, indicating that information was not yet known and the editors of TV Quick weren't actually leaving that out just for the sake of the joke, they just decided to do the joke in absence of actually having the information available. Thereby creating a very odd non sequitur to anyone not watching old repeats in sequence, or who just happened to read the listing in isolation.

Revision Quest

Adventure gamebooks, as I have discussed on many previous occasions, were massive in the 1980s, but then towards the end of the decade the market for them apparently suddenly tailed off. Whilst a few of the hardier ranges straggled on into the 1990s, and the genre has been revived several times in the following millennium, many of their authors ended their careers in interactive fiction around then. One such example is J. H. Brennan, who authored several series of gamebooks, most of which had their tongue firmly in their cheek, between 1984 and 1986.

Over a decade later, however, Brennan returned to the genre for an imaginatively titled series called Adventure Gamebooks. The four titles in this series were Egyptian Quest, Aztec Quest, Greek Quest and Roman Quest, and, as you might be able to guess, all four featured a player character who either travelled back in time or already lived in that time. These were significantly shorter than Brennan's 80s gamebooks, aimed at a younger audience, and were largely a genuine attempt to educate readers about the history of the period.

In 1997, Egyptian Quest and Aztec Quest were published in England. The other two titles, for whatever reason, never were; Greek Quest and Roman Quest only saw physical releases in France (a country with a very large role-playing scene, and where Brennan already had an existing fanbase), a few years later in 2000. Over a decade later, however, Brennan self-published all four titles as eBooks.

Now, comparing the eBook editions of the latter two titles is probably going to be beyond me, unless a bilingual French gamebook enthusiast happens to come across this blog. But I can compare the 1997 and 2011 editions of Egyptian Quest and Aztec Quest -- because Brennan's self-published versions had some significant differences compared to the ones released fourteen years earlier.

Just Ask For A Massive Headache Related To 30-Year-Old Television Listings

So, last week I wrote about a little mystery: How did ITV cope with Children's ITV lasting seven and a half minutes longer than usual on 16 April 1991, owing to a transmission error the previous week stopping them from finishing broadcast of episode 3 of The Diamond Brothers: South By South East? And looking at the TV listings for episode 1, and then episode 3, seemed like it had the answer:

Comparing those two, I came to a conclusion that, in my defence, wasn't entirely unreasonable: ITV just scrapped the cartoon at 5pm to account for the extra running time.

Just Ask For The ITV Schedule For 16 April 1991

15/01/23 Update! Please see here for a version of this piece that, er, isn't totally wrong after the third paragraph.

So, I'm once again talking about a subject which has become what this blog has become best known for over the last few years: the deeply obscure Children's ITV serial The Diamond Brothers: South By South East. If you are new to the blog, you may wish to acquaint yourself with the whole saga before reading on.

But the most important thing to know here is: On 9 April 1991, ITV attempted to broadcast episode 3, but partway through there was a technical fault they couldn't fix. One week later, on 16 April, they picked up episode 3 from where they left off, then showed episode 4. This resulted in a fair amount of oddities, which you can read about on the link above, but one thing I still didn't know even after the series resurfaced was where exactly the cut-off was, as when Neil James -- who provided me with his copy -- was recording the series back in 1991, he managed to pretty successfully splice the end of the 9 April interrupted transmission and the 16 April chunk.

However, the Twitter account Glad You Remember noted that they had a memory of where it might have happened from watching the original broadcast. If you go and look episode 3 up on YouTube, then the line they cite happens about 16 minutes in. Early on in the next scene, at just after 16:30, there is a sudden jump which, once you're looking out for it, doesn't look like tape damage, but a different recording cutting in. So I am happy to consider that particular matter closed: that is indeed where the transmission fault happened. (A previous post on the matter noted that the 16 April recommencement had a hastily added title card reading "EPISODE 3 CONT."; this is not on the extant copy, but it's easy to imagine it appearing during the long pan across the railings at the top of the scene.)

But then, on 16 April, airing that missing section would have resulted in the Diamond Brothers' timeslot being seven and a half minutes longer than usual. Can we work out exactly how they would have coped with that?

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.