Inside UFO 54-40

In February 1982, the twelfth Choose Your Own Adventure book, Inside UFO 54-40, was unleashed upon preteens all over the world. Written by Edward Packard, who not only created the CYOA range but arguably the entire genre of interactive fiction (with the originally standalone book Sugarcane Island, written in 1969 but not published until 1976, and later subsumed into the CYOA range as #62 in the series), the book's plot revolves around the search for Ultima, the fabled planet of paradise. And herein lies the book's big secret, which less generous readers may describe with quite a different word.

The Man With a Tadpole Stuck Up His Nose

Between 1989 and 1994, Tony Robinson wrote and starred in four series of the hugely popular Children's BBC series Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, reinventing the legend of Robin Hood as a sitcom for children which posited that Marian was the true leader of the outlaws, and the foppish Robin of Kensington was little more than a vain incompetent whose greatest contribution to proceedings was designing the gang's costumes.

Robinson very much did not stop at the small screen, however; eight MMaHMM comic albums, adapting the TV episodes, were published between 1989 and 1992, with two being released simultaneously every year. The first two batches coincided with the broadcast of the first and second series, but after the Autumn 1990 transmission of Series 2 the show took an extended break until January 1993, and the third and fourth sets of books were released in the interim (with the final two books actually being published well before the Series 3 episodes they adapted were broadcast!)

If you were writing a sitcom or a children's television serial around this time, then a novelisation was still pretty common, but Maid Marian (a show slap bang in the middle of that particular Venn diagram, and hence more or less obligatory) might be a unique example of an albumisation. It seems like these adaptations were a real passion project of Robinson's, but it's hard to imagine the show translating so well to text (one other book based on the show was published, which contained the playbook for the stage musical based on the show that Robinson wrote with two of the series' cast members, Mark Billingham -- yes, that Mark Billingham -- and David Lloyd).

The artwork for the albums was provided by Paul Cemmick (also responsible for the show's animated end credits, as well as original illustrations for the musical's programme when it was staged by the Bristol Old Vic in 1996, which you can see at the bottom of this page), who worked from Robinson's original scripts (in the earliest cases before he'd even had the opportunity to see any of the show itself, with the only visual references he had being photos of the cast taken at the initial readthrough). A total of nine episodes from across the first three series were translated to print in total; the first two books adapted the first two episodes, which form a loose two-parter, but after that they go all over the place, with the eighth and final volume, "Driving Ambition and Keeping Mum", adapting two episodes in a single book. There was also a serialisation (with the panels modified or redone totally to fit) in the Daily Telegraph's imaginatively titled supplement for younger readers, the Young Telegraph.

A sitcom written by Tony Robinson, aiming to get demographically inappropriate humour in wherever possible, is a very funny show indeed. But such a sitcom adapted into a format that has no need to worry about what's feasible on a children's television budget is something else entirely. There are at least seven examples on any given page of this, so I decided to narrow things down to one in particular.

The Camera Never Lies

If you search for "would i lie to you" on Shutterstock, you will be met with around 500 images related to said comedy panel show, most of which were taken on set during the fourth and fifth series. Quite a few of these actually depict moments that didn't make the edit of the final programmes. In some cases, the exact context is lost to time.

This particular photo might not seem remarkable at first; it's David Mitchell reading out a story which didn't make the cut. But back in the day there was a very good fan forum, That Mitchell & Webb Fansite, which reported back from each recording from Series 3 up to partway through Series 7 with, among other things, a full list of stories from each show, but not whether they were true or not. Sadly, only the Series 3-4 ones are still online (the forum having closed and gone offline very abruptly), having also been posted, and still preserved, at this LiveJournal community.

ZZZapped

The Children's ITV series ZZZap! notched up ten series and 140 episodes in just under nine years, airing between 1993 and 2001. The unusual concept of the series was that it was a comic you could watch (with Christmas editions being styled after annuals and Summer specials after, er, Summer Specials), but if you're not familiar with it, then going and looking up a few episodes on YouTube will probably be more helpful than attempting to describe such an outside-the-box show; primarily aimed at deaf children, it featured no intelligible dialogue and told stories through visuals and text where necessary, with several regular segments that were variously based around slapstick sketches, arts and crafts, puzzle pages, and a section oddly prescient of Taskmaster where children sourced from a local stage school had to attempt challenges ("Tricky Dicky's Mission Impossible" in Series 1, replaced with "Daisy Dares You" from the second series after the original character was deemed to be too frightening -- one of several tweaks apparently made after the mood was judged to have been a bit too surreal in places).

The first series also featured a unique opening sequence not used on the others, where a boy purchases an issue of ZZZap! in a shopping centre, and uses the attached "Free TV Zapper" to cause the comic to grow to 18 feet in size, to the mild shock of the other shoppers. This sequence was filmed in Chequers Shopping Centre in Maidstone (still open today but now known as The Mall Maidstone, and used for several other sequences in this and later series), and the prop comics have been placed alongside other, real comics the shop in question (there's nothing in the sequence to provide confirmation but it looks like it's probably a WHSmith) was selling that day:

Time After Time

When Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone devised the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, in 1982, they came up with three basic statistics the player would have to keep track of, known in the first draft as COMBAT FACTOR, STRENGTH FACTOR and LUCK FACTOR, later renamed in rewrites as the catchier SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK (SKILL and LUCK being calculated by 1d6 + 6, and STAMINA by 2d6 + 12). Over four decades and more than seventy books later, that basic system has more or less remained the same, but many authors have wanted to add something new to it. The first book in the series to have a fully-fledged fourth statistic you had to keep track of was Jackson's House of Hell, which introduced Fear Points: the 1d6 + 6 value you rolled up at the start of the adventure represented the maximum number of Fear Points you could accrue before being frightened to death. Many other books with unique statistics followed: the Japanese-themed Sword of the Samurai requires the player to keep track of their character's HONOUR score, with certain actions being forbidden if your HONOUR score is too low, and the character committing seppuku should it ever fall to 0, whilst the Lovecraft-influenced Beneath Nightmare Castle features a WILLPOWER score, which represents the player's ability to keep hold of their sanity. But by far the most common unique stat was a way of keeping track of time: the adventure of the day was on a time limit for some reason, and the Time statistic measured how much, uh, time you had left. And different writers, telling different stories, would implement this idea very differently.

How differently, then?

Comic Cuts

In the Mr. Bean episode "Hair by Mr. Bean of London", initially released exclusively on VHS in November 1995, whilst Mr. Bean is at the barber's, he picks up a copy of the Dandy and reads it while he's waiting.

You know what's coming. Which issue of the Dandy exactly?

"The Government Urges the Court to Allow Mr. Goodman to Continue!"

The final production draft of the script for the sixty-third and final episode of Better Call Saul, "Saul Gone", is available to read here, one of ten standout scripts that year submitted by their writers for the Emmys published on Deadline. There are a number of small tweaks and differences between the script and what ultimately ended up on screen. The opening flashback to "Bad Choice Road" opens a bit sooner, with dialogue from Kim over the phone that isn't in the broadcast version. There's a small addition to Gene's attempt to escape Omaha where he has an altercation with a homeowner, which was filmed and can be seen on the deleted scenes on the DVD. When Saul hires Bill Oakley as his advisory counsel, in the script we don't hear the start of their conversation, we only see Oakley's reaction. When the plane arrives in Albuquerque there was originally meant to be a shot of the remains of Jimmy's Suzuki Esteem in the desert, providing a link back to the "Bad Choice Road" flashback (a remnant of this idea still appears in the trailer for the episode). Various other odd lines and moments are different. There are other little touches that seem to have been thought of later on -- if you compare the establishing shots of desert scenery in the pre-titles sequence with those in the pilot of Breaking Bad you'll see how similarly they're framed, building on the final episodes' theme of things coming full-circle.

But perhaps the most important change -- at least to me -- is during the climactic scene where Saul Goodman confesses all his crimes on the stand:

Top Dad Homer

On 19 November 1999, it is announced that Tony Blair is to be a father again. Amongst the coverage of this on BBC News is this piece, which links it to recent comments from Charlie Lewis, a professor of psychology at Lancaster University, on how Homer Simpson is one of the best examples of modern fatherhood. One quote leapt out at me: "He has recently started going to parenting classes, so at least Homer is trying to be a good parent in his old age." Which recent event, precisely, did Professor Lewis have in mind when he made these comments?

Whilst the BBC News piece doesn't state the origin of the comments, a quick Google of "charlie lewis lancaster university homer simpson" brings up this Guardian piece, indicating they were made the previous day at the first national conference on fatherhood. At this time, the most recent episode was "Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder", which had aired in the US four days earlier, on 14 November. And that episode does indeed have a plot where Homer tries to bond with Maggie, and in its final minutes he goes to a daddy-daughter swimming class with her. This episode would not air in the UK until the following month, but it's the only recent episode that seems to fit the bill. Even if Professor Lewis had been watching at BBC Two pace (and it seems more likely he would have looked up the most recent episodes for any developments he could cite), they were showing seasons five and six at the time, and there's nothing there that would seem to be an example unless you really stretch the definition.