Caption Captured

Okay, if you're reading this, by this point I'm going to assume you know the whole deal this blog has with the 1991 TV series The Diamond Brothers: South by South East at this point. If not, why not start at the beginning, then come back here? I'll wait.

Welcome back. Anyway, the exciting news here is that I have been made aware of the existence of another off-air recording of the sole UK broadcast in 1991, this one the property of Paul TG of theTimeVault podcast. And this one has slightly more of the transmission error that afflicted episode 3.

Paul shared a few videos with me on Twitter, confirming what I already believed to be the case: the 9 April interrupted broadcast cut off just after the Diamond Brothers leave the guest house, and the following week's one-third-episode began over the long panning shot of the railings. Most thrillingly of all, though, he shared with me the caption added to the beginning of the 16 April portion of episode 3:

See here for the crucial video of the beginning of "Episode Three Cont..."; Paul also shared with me videos of the end of the 16 April recommencement and the point at which his recording of the 9th April cuts off, which are nice to have but I don't think show anything that isn't on the existing YouTube upload of Neil James' copy. (Paul did mention that his original VHS recording captured the whole breakdown, including the entirety of Tommy Boyd and Neil Buchanan's dead air, but unfortunately the person who transferred it to DVD for him cut it out and the original tape is long since broken!)

Anyway, this is going to be tremendously useful when I finally get round to writing my episode guide on the show (still pending my finding out what the cast list for episode 3 should have read, so do get in touch if you have any thoughts on that).

Revision Quest II

A few weeks back, I compared the 1997 and 2011 editions of an obscure adventure gamebook called Egyptian Quest, the latter of which was self-published by the author and contained several intriguing additions compared to the original printing.

I had a hypothesis for those additions -- specifically, that they were written for the nineties edition but that had to be pared back to hit a strict word count -- and I had also intended to cover Egyptian Quest's sibling, Aztec Quest, in the same post. However, it turned out that there were far more changes than I was expecting, and I was able to make a much stronger case for my theory than I was expecting to from just the first book. So, like some weird DVD extra nobody asked for or watched, here are a selection of the changes between versions of Aztec Quest.

A Slightly Convoluted and Badly Told Anecdote About Armstrong and Miller I Have Just Remembered

Back in 2010, I attended the first night of The Armstrong and Miller Tour at the Bristol Hippodrome. And it proved to be significant that it was the first night.

The show was predominantly live, but there was a pre-recorded series of animated inserts where Armstrong, Miller and the sole other member of the cast, Katherine Jakeways, voiced characters in an MMORPG (basically not unlike the later E4 sitcom Dead Pixels)... except for most of the show, the screen wasn't working, and only the audio was played in. And nobody seemed to notice; perhaps the audience were too polite to try and bring it to their attention, but nobody on the crew picked up on it, and the cast certainly didn't!

Eventually -- possibly this is a false memory, but it was before the very last insert was played in, certainly after quite a few of them had been -- Ben and Xander broke character to say, slightly embarrassedly, that we should have been able to see things as well as hear them in the bits where they and Jakeways were off-stage, but the projector wasn't working, and they managed to get things fixed in time for us to see the last one. Suddenly having visuals did make that one sketch much funnier, at the cost of basically ruining every other one... and the punchline to the whole thing, where the cast came back on stage dressed in the same ridiculous costumes as their MMORPG characters, who had agreed to meet up in real life, which had far less impact as a result.

Although it strikes me just now that we potentially missed out on something even funnier if nobody had noticed anything was wrong until that point...

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?