One Foot in the Radio Theatre

In what we can only presume was late 1994, David Renwick adapted four episodes of One Foot in the Grave for the radio, which proceeded to be broadcast in 1995 in what seems a rather curious timeslot: Saturdays at 1.30pm on Radio 2, weekly from the 21st January. Perhaps because of this, these adaptations seem to have become a little obscure for some time, only receiving the most fleeting of mentions in Richard Webber's remarkably thorough book, The Complete One Foot in the Grave (noting the episodes' subsequent release on cassette and CD in the 'Merchandise' section), although the advent of BBC Radio 7, latterly Radio 4 Extra, allowed for many subsequent repeats, and they've more recently seen a special vinyl release "housed in an illustrated wide-spine outer sleeve -- complete with coffee-spilled rear".

Cub Scouting

Over the 70+ volumes and counting the series currently comprises, the Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebooks have allowed you to fight just about every type of monster you might care to think of. Since the series launched in the 1980s, it should come as no surprise that one of the most recurrent monsters that crops up is werewolves -- a staple of horror movies at the time (tip of the hat to Rebecca, whose journey through lycanthropy in the eighties inspired this post). But do they use the 'were' part to its full potential, or is that just set dressing?

Well, if you've read the 2007 book Howl of the Werewolf, you'll already know that the answer to the question of potential is an unequivocal "yes" -- Howl casts the player as an adventurer who is bitten by a werewolf and seeks a cure for their lycanthropy before the condition becomes irreversible. Boasting a huge number of optional sidequests, locations you'll only find on certain playthroughs and different ways of fighting the book's endgame, it's about as close as a single gamebook will ever get to being a Wide Open Sandbox. Tragically, Howl was only briefly in print during the tail-end of the series' time being published by Wizard Books, and used copies now command truly ridiculous prices rising into triple figures. But do one-off encounters in earlier books bring the same problems as they do to the player character of Howl? How do the books use lycanthropy as a game mechanic when it's not the book's main focus?

Annual Is Horrible, It Is

If you are not British -- and it may interest you to learn that according to Google Analytics, slightly more than half of this blog's hits have come from outside the UK -- you may not be familiar with the concept of the Christmas annual. In essence, they're nice big hardback books produced for the holiday season, usually based around an existing property, featuring comic strips, text stories, puzzle pages and other features. They're probably most associated with anthology comics such as the Beano, but over the years ones have appeared for magazines, TV dramas, pop stars, childrens' books, game shows... you name it. (They're sometimes referred to as "yearbooks" for franchises less associated with children. As a side-anecdote, I found a bunch of Jackie annuals from the 1970s in a second-hand bookshop just the other day which had, written on their price labels, the words "CHECKED -- NO ONE DODGY".)

At some point, someone seemed to have a bright idea: Why not expand this winning formula to non-British properties that are popular over here? Well, they tried, but in a lot of cases the answer to that question is: Because you're not going to be able to produce any new content for such a book (or if you are you're going to be very limited in what you can do), pretty much all the material is going to have to be pre-existing.

And, to be fair, even then they had a stab at it: there was a regular Simpsons annual for a few years in the 2010s, which used existing Simpsons Comics strips and art from a variety of sources, plus (in the earlier ones) some newly made puzzle pages and text features such as "Homer J. Simpson Presents A Gentleman's Guide to Etiquette", again with all images being pre-existing art; I'd be hard-pressed to describe them as classics of the genre, but they do a reasonable job of not obviously looking like they just slapped together a bunch of stuff they had the rights to print. Other shows, however, were not so lucky. One annual in particular comes to mind as quite possibly the worst, most slapdash piece of officially licensed media based on a TV show ever published (at least, that I'm aware of). Before the jump cut, perhaps you'd like to guess what it is.

The Famous Five and You

I wanted to do a proper review of these because I've mentioned them as a shining example of "not very good adventure gamebook based on a licensed property" in one or two other posts discussing similar series, and also someone pointed out that their title is actually quite funny if you think about it. But I should warn you that that perhaps unintentional piece of passive-aggressiveness might well be the highlight of The Famous Five and You.

34 on Sky

Between 24 December 2022 and 4 June 2023, Sky Showcase (as the channel formerly known as Sky One has recently rebranded as) brought Season 34 of The Simpsons to the UK, at least on pay TV: "Top Goon" aired as a festive special on Christmas Eve (in spite of this particular episode's questionable links to the festive season, this has become a tradition for Sky dating back to Season 30's "'Tis the 30th Season"), and the rest of the season followed on a weekly basis from 15 January. With one exception: the annual trilogy of terror, "Treehouse of Horror XXXIII", was not aired as part of this season, and we were left waiting until the Sunday just gone, the 22nd October, for its Sky debut... which it made at 4:45pm.

Give Yourself An Incredibly Unsatisfying Role-Playing Experience

Give Yourself Goosebumps saw R. L. Stine's best-selling series collide with the solo gamebook format in a way remarkably similar to the other big proponent of US interactive fiction, Choose Your Own Adventure, for a total of exactly fifty different books (42 in the regular series, plus 8 'special editions') released between 1995 and 2000, when the franchise entered a hiatus that would last some eight years. With the nineties not being enormously kind to the gamebook genre on the whole, for many members of the generation who grew up with Goosebumps this was likely the first, and quite possibly only, series of interactive fiction books they followed.

If you were of that generation and revisited the original series of Goosebumps books more recently (and for whatever reason a hell of a lot of them have turned up in my local charity shops and second-hand bookshops lately), then they almost certainly read very differently as an adult. Whilst exactly how much of the main range Stine wrote himself still seems up for discussion, the various spin-off series -- this and the short story collections, amongst others -- are beyond debate, with multiple authors having openly stated they ghostwrote various entries. And time may well have been even less kind to the offshoots.

The Blog Author Fulfils a Childhood Dream

Alea Jacta Est!

Translating into English as "the die is cast", if you didn't know, Alea jacta est! was a four-volume series of adventure gamebooks starring the famous indomitable Gauls published in France in 1988, with three of the entries being translated into English a year or two down the line; the original Latin title remains on the cover, but each book is also billed under the rather less imaginative heading of "An Asterix Game Book". The books boasted a full combat and inventory system, and directly mashed together the appearance of a regular Asterix comic album with the functionality of an adventure gamebook, using a mixture of text sections and puzzles based around illustrations. The English translations were done by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge, who so brilliantly translated the original comics, which gives these versions a great sense of authenticity. And the series might very well be one of the most successful marriages of an existing property to the adventure gamebook format. But given such a category also includes Give Yourself Goosebumps, The Famous Five and You and Dick Tracy: A Catch-a-Crook Adventure, that doesn't seem like a terribly high bar to clear. So, what's it like?