Cityport Knocking

In 1982, the British games designer Steve Jackson co-writes the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. His masterstroke is a puzzle requiring three numbered keys you have to find to unlock the Warlock's treasure chest; use the wrong keys and unlocking the chest is impossible, or even fatal!

Jackson has an interesting -- not to mention highly ambitious -- tactic of cheat-proofing his gamebooks like this by requiring the player to take options that are not directly given by the text. He went on to use a not dissimilar puzzle, but with intergalactic coordinates, in Starship Traveller. He put a secret room in House of Hell. Appointment with F.E.A.R. has multiple possible solutions depending on which superpower you choose to play with. He throws the literal kitchen sink at Creature of Havoc, with multiple examples of reference modifiers to allow the reader to take a nonstandard action, and even going so far as to make up a cipher which all English language directed at the player is initially given in, which the player can't decode at first.

Without really meaning to, I have written about nearly all these elaborate puzzles Jackson came up with to ensure that only someone playing the book fairly could beat it.

Except for one.

Bright Spark

The above is a typical example of We Are the Sparky People, a strip which appeared in the DC Thomson comic Sparky for around two thirds of its 1965-77 run. Drawn by Jim Petrie (better known as the artist for 2,000 editions of Minnie the Minx in the Beano), WAtSP was a metafictional workplace comedy based around a fictionalised version of the Sparky office staff; other fourth-wall-breaking strips where the characters would interact with the comic's writers and artists would appear before and after this in various DCT comics, but the Sparky People were unique in depicting the ongoing adventures of the people actually putting the comic together.

The Sparky People also appeared, of course, in the annual Sparky Christmas book. The annuals would always be dated with the year ahead, so the Sparky Book 1976, pictured above, was published in mid-to-late 1975. They were also in a near-constant state of production and had extremely long lead times, each book typically being finished a whole year ahead of schedule -- so the 1976 Book would actually have been completed by around summer 1974. This would cause the occasional oddity; it wasn't unusual for a strip which had been dropped from the weekly comic to show up in the annual quite some time later. (I understand that these days, the Beano and Dandy annuals are no longer produced quite so far in advance.)

And this particular book contains, via the Sparky People, perhaps the only joke ever made in one of these annuals about their long lead times.

Coda

This post marks the end of a quite remarkable period of almost seven months where I managed to keep this very stupid blog updated on a weekly basis; I figured I'd leave more in-depth analysis for the end-of-year roundup, but just wanted to note that golden age is now over, especially since this post coinciding with two weeks' holiday and the release of Kingdom Rush 5 means it may be a little while before you hear from me again.

But I think I kept a very high standard, and whether you are just discovering the site for the first time or think you might have missed something, please do go back and see what I've written so far this year. (Whilst I promised just one paragraph ago to go into more detail at the end of the year, I will point you in the direction of the trilogy of articles from the start of the year on the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, House of Hell and Caverns of the Snow Witch and their alternative versions published in Warlock magazine, which are quite possibly my favourite things I've ever written.)

I'm sure you'll find something that's worth your time.

Timeframes II

A short while ago, I looked through some old issues of the Dandy I found in a charity shop, and highlighted some things of interest in them. As you may be able to tell from the above image, I'm now back with another selection of DC Thomson comics I found just last week; these range from around 1990 to 1992, and there's Dandys, Beanos and even some issues of Beezer and Topper.

First up, please brace yourself for quite possibly the ultimate example of a story where someone thought of the title first...

We Can't Put This in the Radio Times

In October 1990, six months after its US debut, David Lynch's seminal mystery series Twin Peaks debuts on the BBC. The show is given no small amount of fanfare: the film discussion series Moving Pictures profiles Lynch's work on Saturday 20th, accompanied by a broadcast of his 1970 short film The Grandmother, and on Monday 22nd the hopefully self-explanatory series Behind the Screen previews the show. And at 9pm on Tuesday 23rd October, 1990, Twin Peaks makes its much-anticipated British debut on BBC Two. (For reference for any non-British readers, BBC One is the "mainstream" channel, whilst BBC Two is the "highbrow" one, and had successes with US imports from The Twilight Zone to The Simpsons.)

The synopses for the episodes in the UK's premier TV listings magazine, the Radio Times, would normally be submitted by the production team at this time (with the writers of comedy shows often taking the opportunity to come up with humorous or misleading ones). It seems unlikely but not impossible that was the case here, but someone was definitely writing up bespoke listings (perhaps someone at the BBC, or someone working for the magazine itself), which we can read courtesy of the BBC Genome Project:

#1.1 "Pilot" aka "Northwest Passage"

Original US airing 08/04/90

Original BBC airing 23/10/90

Radio Times synopsis: The feature-length opening episode of David Lynch and Mark Frost's acclaimed television series. An offbeat murder-mystery drama about a small town where anyone would want to be.

Starring Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean
"She's dead. Wrapped in plastic." The body of Laura Palmer, a beautiful teenage girl, is found by the shoreline in the small lumber town of Twin Peaks, shattering the tranquillity and revealing a host of dark and twisted secrets involving drugs, illicit love, Norwegian property developers, Douglas firs and cherry pie.

Crystal Book Persuasion

Name a gameshow from circa the late 80s to early 90s which you'd guess had a large number of tie-in puzzle/game books published. You might well say Knightmare first in answer to that unwieldy question, and you'd be absolutely right. But I'd be willing to bet that The Crystal Maze would be in your top two.

The very first such book, simply entitled The Crystal Maze, was published in 1990, the same year as the first series, and a pretty early example of a tie-in book for a Channel 4 show. Internet listings say it was released the same day the very first episode actually aired, which seemed like a mistake to me at first, but Iain Weaver recalls it being advertised after the broadcast of Series 1 episodes (quite possibly including episode 1). In any case, the above is the original cover, clearly recognising the marketability of Richard O'Brien; it was later reprinted with a photographic cover depicting the Crystal Dome.

Reject All Cookies

Across the 1990s, various American mass-market monthly paperback series aimed primarily at 8-to-14-year-olds hit the United Kingdom; series such as Goosebumps, Animorphs and The Baby-Sitters' Club. The British versions had their own cover art providing a different spin to the US designs, and the books were also edited to change American English to British English: principally this would just be changing "mom" to "mum", but other modifications such as replacing brand names British readers would not be familiar with, and changing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, also happened. (Amusingly, references to Dennis the Menace were left unchanged, presumably with the line of thought that readers would assume it was the Beano character.) It was all a bit odd, since the stories were clearly still taking place in America, but I suppose understandable.

Sometimes, however, they rather missed the point.

Stories of the Choir from Hell

Out of Tune was a Children's BBC sitcom about a village choir that ran for three series between 1996 and 1998. To be blunt, in spite of featuring a distinctive title sequence and theme tune, a regular role for Nick Maloney as the vicar, and the screen debut of James Corden, plus early appearances for the likes of Charlie Brooks and Jane Danson, it does not appear to have left a huge cultural footprint; its IMDb listings are clearly incomplete, little else about it can be found on the internet, and less than a third of its episodes -- nearly all from the first series -- are available on YouTube. A bit of a shame for a show with the ambition to end its first series with the visual of a car precariously balanced on a church steeple on a children's television budget.

What does survive in full, though, are the programme's original billings in the Radio Times, courtesy of BBC Genome. So let's have a look at the ones for the first series, shall we?

1. TX 14/02/96: First in a seven-part children's comedy about a village choir. A new arrival threatens to shatter the harmony of the Little Wickton Choir.

2. TX 21/02/96: Second in a seven-part children's comedy about a village choir. Problems arise when the piano disappears.

3. TX 28/02/96: Third in a seven-part children's comedy. Street is deperate to impress Chas.

4. TX 06/03/96: Fourth in a seven-part children's comedy. The choir decides to go on a 24-hour fast for charity.

5. TX 13/03/96: Fifth in the seven-part children's comedy about a group of young teenagers who join their village choir. Street is suffering from toothache.

6. TX 20/03/96: Sixth in the seven-part children's comedy series. The choir prepares for an important conker match.

7. TX 27/03/96: Children's comedy series. The parish magazine hires a mysterious new agony aunt. Written by Rory Clark and Robert Taylor. Next episode next Tuesday.

Uh. Haven't you been pretty clear this is a seven-part children's comedy series, Radio Times? Why are you billing another episode next week on the listing for episode seven?

8. TX 02/04/96: Continuing the comedy series. Chas's driving test is looming, but will the choir from hell help her?

Because there was indeed another episode the week after, on a different day (with Rugrats taking up the Wednesday slot). A minor mistake, perhaps... if they had only been wrong by one episode. But it appears they weren't. They were out by ten.