Anyway, I wrote it – sneaking in a Doctor Who reference in the process - and the magazine is now out in shops (as well as being available to order online). I don’t think I was especially hysterical or excessively critical, and I refrained from making personal attacks against Davies (who I think was misguided rather than downright evil) himself. Although I did sort of slightly, possibly, a little bit, compare him to Richard Littlejohn.

I hope he doesn’t end up reading it and shouting at me on Twitter, though.

A lot of people know the song “Jilted John” by Jilted John, even if they don’t know it by name. Chances are, they probably think it’s called “Gordon Is A Moron” or “The Moron Song” or something like that. It sounds like this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It got to number four in the UK charts in 1978, was performed live on Top of the Pops on no less than three occasions, and is rightly held as one of the greatest and most memorable singles of the late ’70s punk/new wave era. But for most people, that’s where the Jilted John story ends – as a one-hit wonder, a novelty record and nothing more. What most people don’t know, however, is that “John” actually recorded an entire album. And, what’s more, it’s a masterpiece.

Jilted John was, of course, the alter-ego of a young comedian and singer-songwriter named Graham Fellows – who would later go on to create the peerless John Shuttleworth, and appear in adverts for Yorkshire Tea. In its original form, the eponymous song was actually the B-side of a Rabid Records single called “Going Steady” – in which a not-so-jilted John told of his love for girlfriend-of-two-months Sharon – but on the radio, it was “Jilted John” that gained greater currency, and the single would eventually be re-released by EMI with the sides flipped. In the wake of the single’s success, Fellows and super-producer Martin Hannett regrouped to create an entire album. It had an absolutely fantastic romance-comics-spoof cover, came with a free gift of a “Mice and Ladders” board game, and was called True Love Stories.

Although the album was – by the standards of the single – something of a flop, it’s retained its status as something of a cult favourite. And I absolutely love it to pieces. So if you’ve never heard it – or, even, heard of it – before, allow me to educate you as to its genius…

The first track on the album is called Baz’s Party, and… well, wait. Let’s hold on and back up a minute. Nowadays, if you’re listening to the album, you’re probably listening to the 1999 CD re-release – especially since that’s the version on Spotify, iTunes and so on, and since, unlike me, you probably didn’t go digging through eBay to track down the original 12″ record (with the “Mice and Ladders” board still intact inside, fact fans!) And that version of the album has a couple of additions on it – notably, opening with the very first Jilted John song of them all, Going Steady.

And it’s good that it does, really, because Going Steady is a fantastic song, and makes for a much more welcoming opener. It’s criminal that it never made it onto the album’s original release in the first place – particularly for some reasons that we’ll come on to later. Here it is:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The feel and mood of this track set the tone for the rest of the album – although musically, it’s quite different from the keyboard-heavy arrangements that Hannett brought to the production of the album, having been recorded almost a year beforehand. John is young and naive, a wide-eyed innocent, declaring after two whole months that when he and Sharon have “saved up, we’re going to get maaaaa-rried”. Even if the word “Jilted” weren’t in his name, we’d know this happiness couldn’t possibly last – but for now, his feckless charm is endearing.

Although it makes a great opener musically, though, Going Steady doesn’t actually fit chronologically into the narrative structure that, as we’ll see, True Love Stories has at its core. Then again, neither does the actual album opener, Baz’s Party. That song initially creates a jarring effect if you’re listening to it on the re-release – because it opens with a snatch of “Going Steady” heard on a record player at the titular party, while a supposedly teenaged female voice – actually, quite obviously, Fellows himself – declares it to be a “great song” and asks for it to be played again when it finishes.

Baz’s Party, although funny (“I’m drinking as fast as I can / While we all sing Telegram Sam / And now the boys are dancing to / The silly dance / That skinheads do”), is a touch silly and slight, and probably doesn’t help assuage the initial impression that this is going to be just another “novelty” album. Neverthelss, and although it may appear earlier in the track listing than it’s chronologically supposed to – the version of John that it features surely comes from around track four or five – what it does achieve is establishing the style and tone of the character (even though arguably, on the re-release, Going Steady has already done this better). It also has a truly killer final line:

There’s a boy puking up in the lavatory
His name’s Baz -
It’s his party…

It’s from the next track, however, that our chronological narrative begins, and the concept album starts to take shape. I Know I’ll Never is a minute-and-a-half long call to arms sung by a younger John, as he declares in the brilliant opening lines:

I am reckless and I am shoddy
I’m an adult in a child’s body
I’m twelve years old and I rule O.K.
And I know I’ll never reach pu-ber-TAY! 

Having already been introduced to “Baz” in the preceding track, he’s referenced here as John’s best friend too - “Barry is my mate and we can sup / Two bottles of cider each and still stand up” – suggesting for the first time some kind of continuity between the album’s songs. This is carried forward into the next track, something of a companion piece titled I Was A Pre-Pubescent. The first properly “narrative” song on the album, this track tells John’s life story from birth up until his early teens – the main points to take away being the early death of his father and subsequent departure of his mother, and the fact that he and his sister were consequently brought up by their gran (although this fact creates its own continuity problems, as we’ll see).

Having re-emphasised the previous track’s message of just how much John enjoyed the simplicity of pre-adolescent life, however, …Pre-Pubescent ends on an alarming note:

One summer’s day in ’73
I looked in the mirror and it terrified me
For what I saw was quite out of place:
Bum-fluff and acne all over my face
I tried to speak, but when I spoke
All that came out was a croak
My voice had broken
I was a… pubescent, and it was sad

Following John into adolescence, though, is merely a cue for the album to hit its high point. There’s already been a tone that I’d describe as distinctly Adrian Mole (although obviously the album predates Sue Townsend’s novel by a few years) in the tracks up to this point, but it really comes to the fore in Fancy Mice. This exquisite song is a five-minute long opus in which, across a succession of increasingly laboured rhyming couplets, John barely pauses for breath. To attempt to describe it further would fail to do it justice, however, so all I’ll do instead is present it to you in its entirety:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of many, many brilliant details in this song, perhaps my favourite is the fact that John’s chosen name for his first pet mouse is Jane. If you like, you can just see this as being because “Jane” is quite an easy name to rhyme with a lot of words – but I prefer to think of it as a clever piece of storytelling detail, recalling that Jane was the beloved girl that John sat next to in primary school in I Was A Pre-Pubescent.

Unfortunately, after this masterpiece is when the album goes on to hit arguably its one major misstep – and it’s with the inclusion of a re-recorded version of Jilted John. It’s not that the song itself isn’t brilliant – and it’s certainly arguable that to have excluded it would have damaged the album’s chances of commercial success even further – it’s just that it really doesn’t fit. Having been re-recorded to fit in more with the production style of the rest of the album, it’s sapped of a lot of its original power and ramshackle charm – and although a theoretical relationship with Julie could be fit into the album’s narrative somewhere, it seems odd that the next track, The Birthday Kiss, is about John breaking up with Sharon – who, unless experiencing the re-released version of the album, the listener hasn’t heard anything about yet. It would seem to have made far more sense to have Going Steady (either in original form or re-recorded) show up at this point, and if Jilted John had to be on there it could always have served as track one. But hey ho. In the MP3 era, if we want to put together our own versions of favourite albums, it’s not like we can’t do so.

Anyway, none of this should detract from the magnificence of The Birthday Kiss, which is easily the flat out funniest song the entire album has to offer – a tale of unadulterated heartbreak at the youth club disco, culminating in this superb half-sung, half-spoken recounting of John and Sharon’s final conversation:

She said, “Let me explain, John!”
I said, “There’s nothing to explain, Sharon!”
She said, “I think there is, John!”
I said, “No there isn’t, Sharon. And anyway, my bus is here. So you can go back to Colin now…”
“Listen,” she pleaded, “I don’t fancy him! I was just giving him a birthday kiss!”
And I said “Oh yeah? For ten minutes? In the rain? I don’t believe you!
“Anyway, it’s not even his birthday!”

Although if there’s one problem with this otherwise perfect track, it’s that it throws up an odd continuity error – I Was A Pre-Pubescent had already established that John’s Mum and Dad were absent and deceased respectively, and that he lived with his gran. Going Steady had also made reference to this – despite being recorded beforehand – with the line “And my gran says you’re dead nice”. Although The Birthday Kiss does mention John’s gran (countermanding the earlier comment with “Anyway, my gran didn’t like you, she said you were dead common!”), the opening line states “I’ve just come back from the youth club / Mum and Dad are watching telly…” Which, in an album so otherwise carefully constructed, is a little odd to say the least.

The Birthday Kiss ends the first side of the original 12″ release – and it’s an appropriate break point. Because the entire second half of True Love Stories is an individual narrative of its own – a concept-album-within-a-concept-album, even. While the first half of the album had rattled through the first fifteen or sixteen years of its hero’s life, the second side tells a chronologically shorter, but significantly more detailed, tale. It starts with The Paperboy Song, as a now post-O-levels and newly-on-the-dole John ruminates on how much nicer and simpler things were when he was an early teen with a job delivering papers. Once again, that Adrian Mole-esque feel comes to the surface, particularly as John describes one of the highlights of his job:

At number forty-four
Lived a girl called Wendy Moore
And I sometimes saw her getting dressed
Through the window on the second floor
And once, I wrote her a rude letter
And put it in her Jackie
Well she stopped buying it
Called me a git
And told her brother to attack me…

The song culminates with, oddly, a short dialogue piece as John goes back to his old newsagent’s to ask about getting a job. The newsagent – also voiced by Fellows – tells him that, unfortunately, there are no jobs going; but the plot of the second side of the album is kicked off nevertheless, due to John’s meeting the new assistant, a girl named Karen (er… also voiced by Fellows).

The next track, True Love, sees the album venturing into a different direction musically – it’s cheesy as hell, but there’s a lot more depth of construction to it, and even Fellows’ vocal performance seems to have deliberately changed tone, reflecting the now-older John. Karen “her”self even makes a brief singing appearance right at the end, too.

Click here to view the embedded video.

With John happy in love with Karen (his experiences with Sharon apparently not having taught him a sage lesson about jumping in with both feet), the album continues to get odder and odder. First, there’s In The Bus Shelter - an instrumental piece, with spoken dialogue over the top, as John and Karen, well… sit in the bus shelter, watching the world go by and eating crisps. That’s really all there is to it. It’s probably at this point that the decision to have Fellows do all the female voices feels its most misguided – but as with most of the album’s eccentricities, it’s carried along on a wave of innocent charm.

All is not as well in John’s world as he imagines, however, as we learn from Karen’s Letter - which, like In The Bus Shelter, is a spoken word track over an instrumental backing. This time, it’s a horrified John reading a quite literal Dear John letter from his beloved – who has decided to run away to London and find a job as a chamber maid in a hotel. He’s given hope, however, by the assertion that her actions have got nothing to do with their relationship – even though we the listener know that they surely must. This is conveyed in brilliantly subtle fashion by the portion of Karen’s letter that references her cousin Denise, who “ran away when she was engaged to Terry”. After all, why else make reference to a jilted fiancé if similar motivation isn’t also on Karen’s mind?

Apparently not noticing this, however, John follows the one natural course for a lovelorn teenager in the late 1970s – he hitch-hikes down to London to follow her. And this is where things get really weird. A second non-musical dialogue interlude sees John hitching a lift with a well-spoken older woman (I think this is Graham Fellows doing the voice yet again, but I can’t be entirely sure) – but that’s only the start of a whole new misadventure, as time has moved on when the song Shirley starts up, and we find out that… well, listen to the track yourself:

Click here to view the embedded video.

For a moment this almost feels like it’s going to be the beginning of an entire story-within-a-story – but sadly, the album’s rapidly running out of space. It’s a shame, as you can’t help but feel an entire third side could have been spun out of John’s adventures in London. Instead, however – without even learning exactly how John managed to escape the clutches of Shirley – we find in the album’s closer Goodbye Karen that he’s already given up on his quest:

For two whole days I’ve looked for you, Karen
I’ve been everywhere in London
But I can’t find you anywhere
And now I don’t care
I’m going back home 

There’s just time, however, for a moment of reflection that suggests our hero might actually have learned something from his escapade:

If it’s true
I mean the world to you
You would have let me know
And asked me to go… with you

And so, with a plaintive repeated refrain of “Goodbye, Karen…”, ends the Jilted John story. Although the CD re-release would tack on the single release of “Jilted John” – as well as two cash-in tracks by Bernard Kelly’s “Gordon the Moron” that don’t really merit much discussion (despite Kelly’s ever-present and oft-stated influence on Fellows, these particular tracks simply… aren’t very good) – that would be the last we’d ever hear of John, Karen, Sharon, Baz and the rest. It seems sad that they should be consigned to this solitary cult album, forgotten by all but the most avid of followers – and that Fellows himself would have to wait until the John Shuttleworth days before being recognised as the singer-songwriter of profound genius that he undoubtedly is (he did put out a solo, non-character-based album in the ’80s, but that sank with even less trace than True Love Stories).

But then, with a name like his, John was always going to be jilted by the world, wasn’t he…?

You can listen to True Love Stories on Spotify, or buy it stupendously cheaply from Amazon and iTunes. In case the rest of the article didn’t make it clear, that’s something I highly recommend you do immediately.

Postscript: Although True Love Stories appeared to be the end of Jilted John, it wasn’t quite. In researching background and audio content for this article, I discovered two little gems. First off, a track called “Mrs Pickering”, recorded in 1978 – presumably as an unused cut from the album – but eventually issued on a 1980 Rabid Records compilation called The Crap Stops Here. And secondly – and somewhat oddly – an entirely new song performed when Fellows briefly revived the character for a performance at the Big Chill festival in 2008, titled “Keira Knightley (Eat Your Dinner)”:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s terrific, but sadly it didn’t herald a new era of Jilted John material…

Nevertheless, whatever’s happening with the production at the moment – or what might be speculated as happening with the production – I still think there are a whole host of reasons to be optimistic. And, in my position as Official Red Dwarf Cheerleader, I feel it’s my duty to remind people of them.

Because the shows are great. Really, seriously, great. You can call me biased if you want, but anyone who knows me knows I’ve been plenty critical of Red Dwarf when I don’t like it. I know that due to my current role, I’d obviously have to be positive about the new series in public no matter what – but if I didn’t like the new episodes that I’d seen filmed, I’d simply avoid talking about them except in an “official” voice. As it is, though, I love them. Obviously, I can’t say too much about them without giving away things that aren’t meant to be given away, but here are just a few of the reasons why the return of the show fills me with so much joy:

• First and foremost, they’re funny. Each of the episodes I saw (four, out of the six – although in one instance we only saw somewhere between half and two-thirds of the total running time being filmed) had at least one absolutely huge audience reaction moment, but the genuine laughs are healthily distributed throughout the entire series.
• The stories are great. Strong, memorable, well-constructed plots, throughout the entire series. One episode - which I didn’t actually see being filmed, but have heard a detailed synopsis of – has a genuinely inspired and innovative central premise, one that I don’t think anyone has ever done before. It’s the sort of thing that carries on the fine tradition of episodes like “Future Echoes” and “Thanks for the Memory” in exploring inventive, original sci-fi ideas.
• It’s fan-pleasing. A few of the episodes are really heavily rooted in established Dwarf lore, and do things that we might never have expected to actually see on screen. But man, are they satisfying.
• Then there’s the final episode. Well. To say anything detailed about it would ruin the many, many treats it has to offer – but if it doesn’t immediately leap high onto the “all-time favourite” lists of the majority of fans, then the majority of fans are mad. It’s brilliant: thrilling, clever, funny, surprising, and even a little bit moving. It contains not one, but two of the best guest actor performances the series has ever had. And it has a final line that – no kidding – nearly moved me to tears right there at the recording.
• The lead cast are all on top form. Any concerns about not slotting back into the characters after such a long time away were fairly well alleviated by Back to Earth anyway, but across this full series they feel comfortable, happy and confident in these roles. And more than anything, this is the series that will dispel the myth that Lister and Rimmer are simply too old these days for the show to work. They’re not – the show has simply adapted its tone and premise to fit them.
• The guest actors, as already hinted at, are pretty much uniformly superb, too – I can’t think of a single bad performance across the episodes I saw, but I can recall at least three or four superb ones. A handful of actors get to play roles that are quite significant to the Red Dwarf mythos – and which rely on their being able to fit in with preconceptions a fan audience might have about them – and without exception they do so with aplomb.
• It looks amazing. Obviously, we haven’t seen the special effects, model shots and so on yet – but I remain confident that, even with whatever technical problems are currently going on, ultimately it’s all going to look and feel terrific. One thing is for sure, though – the sets, whether onboard Red Dwarf itself or elsewhere, are astoundingly good. The Dwarf interior, in particular, feels like a combination and culmination of all previous incarnations, and ultimately it’s almost like the ship how it always should have looked. Maybe I’m biased towards it having spent a day walking around its corridors (and, I’ll admit, pretending I was actually onboard the ship), but I fell in love with it before that, at the moment I walked into the first audience recording. It’s beautiful.

That’s probably about all I’d better say, anyway (though if you want more from me on the new series, I wrote a bit more about the actual experience of a recording day in my official capacity) – there’s a delicate balancing act in talking about this series, because everyone with any kind of connection to it – whether official or fan – wants to avoid ruining the twists and turns it has to offer before its broadcast later this year. But my point is this: the recent chatter on Twitter about model shots and music is just about the first negative-sounding word that has come out from anywhere connected to the production, and it shouldn’t cancel out the immense positive feeling from the episode recordings – the feeling that, quite simply, Red Dwarf X is just about everything that a new series of Red Dwarf should be.

It’s going to be amazing. And Autumn can’t come soon enough.

For those who don’t know about it, this tradition dates back to 2007, when I put together a Christmas compilation with the help of my LiveJournal friends. I wanted to put my favourite Christmassy songs together, but I also wanted to discover some new, interesting and slightly obscurer festive tracks. This album was the result. It’s been tweaked a little most years since, but the core structure and rules remain the same: it’s largely indie/alternative, but with a couple of more well-known and poppier tracks in there. In general, it’s supposed to consist of the tracks that you don’t just hear in every shop you walk into in December. So even if they’re good, you won’t hear things like “Christmas Wrappin’” or “Stop The Cavalry” here.

(The one exception is “All I Want For Christmas Is You”, which thanks to its status as The Greatest Christmas Song Of Them All is featured not only in its original form but also as a surprisingly excellent cover by My Chemical Romance)

This year, I’ve subbed in and out a couple of tracks – Jonathan Coulton’s “Chiron Beta Prime” and She & Him’s new version of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” were the things I wanted to add, so Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and the Pogues have made way (the latter because… well, as great as it is, it doesn’t really fit here, because it’s so widely-heard over the season).

Of course, if you like some of my choices but not all, you’re perfectly welcome to sub in your own tracks to make your own version! The album as it is here, though, is specifically designed to clock in at just under 80 minutes, and so to fit perfectly onto a CD-R should you wish.

Merry Chrimbo, and enjoy!

Download Now That’s What Seb Calls A Christmas Album! (2011 edition) (via Dropbox)

1. Vince Guaraldi Trio – Christmas Time Is Here (2:44)
2. Murray Gold & Neil Hannon – Song For Ten (3:29)
3. Mariah Carey – All I Want For Christmas Is You (4:01)
4. Fountains of Wayne – I Want an Alien For Christmas (2:19)
5. Loudon Wainwright III – Christmas Morning (3:49)
6. Low – Just Like Christmas (3:08)
7. The Ronettes – I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus (2:41)
8. The Ventures – Sleigh Ride (2:22)
9. Grandaddy – Alan Parsons in a Winter Wonderland (2:59)
10. Bright Eyes – Blue Christmas (2:19)
11. Eels – Everything’s Gonna Be Cool This Christmas (2:48)
12. The Vandals – Oi To The World (2:15)
13. The Beach Boys – Little Saint Nick (2:10)
14. Zombina & The Skeletones – A Chainsaw For Christmas (3:11)
15. The Ramones – Merry Christmas (I Don’t Wanna Fight Tonight) (2:06)
16. The Kinks – Father Christmas (3:43)
17. Rilo Kiley – Xmas Cake (5:24)
18. Jonathan Coulton – Chiron Beta Prime (2:51)
19. Spitting Image – Santa Claus Is On The Dole (3:48)
20. The Long Blondes – Christmas is Cancelled (4:29)
21. Half Man Half Biscuit – It’s Cliched To Be Cynical At Christmas (3:48)
22. She & Him – Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas (3:42)
23. Badly Drawn Boy – Donna and Blitzen (4:19)
24. My Chemical Romance – All I Want For Christmas Is You (3:45)

It’s still sinking in, really, even though the first weekly news updates from my pen (keyboard) are already up on the site for all to see. I’m actually, officially, part of the Red Dwarf “family”. It’s been a long and odd journey getting here – from watching the show as a nipper, to setting up my first blog about it in 2004, to playing Doug Naylor (the Doug Naylor I now work for) in a fan film, to joining the obnoxious loudmouthery of peerless fansite Ganymede & Titan, to publishing a book about the show. Even then, I never expected through any of that that I’d ever really get to have any official connection with the series – even though, like anyone else, I’ve always had a dream that I’d one day be writing it (fitting it in and around my Doctor Who and Superman commitments, of course).

But now I do. I’m responsible for the weekly site news updates, as well as keeping it generally ticking over – and some other bits and bobs of work that I can’t really talk about now, to boot. And there’ll be a lot of news updates to come – in case you didn’t know, Red Dwarf is imminently entering production for a brand new series of six episodes, to be broadcast next year on Dave. And I’m going to be seeing a lot of that first-hand, and telling the world about it. In a lot of cases (as with our already-teased big announcement next week) I’ll be the first person to tell worldwide fandom of major goings-on (although in other cases, Digital Spy will probably beat us to it as we negotiate the “Can we publish this yet?” legal minefield that they’re not bound by).

Unfortunately, this also means I have to keep my opinions about Series VIII to myself from now on, but hey ho.

It’s a bloody exciting time, though. Unlike the man I’m replacing – the eleven-years-serving, pretty-much-impossible-to-follow Andrew Ellard, now a scriptwriter/editor of no small renown – this isn’t my full-time job, and I’m not involved in the production side of things, or anything like that. I’m the part-time news-monkey, basically. But still – all of a sudden, I’m getting paid to write about Red Dwarf. Every week.

It’s definitely one of those “wish I could tell the teenage self” moments, I’ll tell you that.

Thing the first: Captain America!

I saw it! It was great! And I wrote about it for Film4, thusly:

It’s true that it doesn’t aspire to be anything particularly weighty or original – but at what it sets out to do, it rarely puts a foot wrong. Director Joe Johnston, in full-on Rocketeer mode, crafts a charming and entertaining period action romp that may never exactly hit an unpredictable beat, but is no less enjoyable for it.

Miles better than Green Lantern, not quite as good as X-Men: First Class, but about on a level with Thor. Splendid.

(Less splendid : Rotten Tomatoes posting the review, but not attributing it to me – just to “Film4″ generally – thus meaning it’s missing from my scorecard. Booo!)

Thing the second: New podcast!

My regular collaborator/partner in crime/argument board James Hunt and I have launched a new comics podcast, via our website Alternate Cover. It’s called The Graphic Novel Book Club, and it does exactly what it sounds like – each month, we solicit comments from our readers/listeners on a different graphic novel or trade paperback collection, setting discussion topic questions but also looking for any opinions/insights/etc. that people might have – then we throw them into the mix with our own thoughts and sit there chatting about it all for three-quarters of an hour. The first episode is now live on Podomatic and iTunes, and we’ve already posted discussion topics for the second, which we’ll be recording in a couple of weeks. Have a listen! Some people say it’s listenable and entertaining even if you don’t know the comics we’re talking about. I couldn’t possibly comment.

(And yes, it does have a slightly tautological name. “The Graphic Novel Club” might have been better, but then it wouldn’t have been as clear that we were specifically using a book group/book club format. It would have just sounded like a club.)

Thing the third: When Saturday Comes #295!

I’ve written at unnecessarily gushing length in the past about how much of an honour it is to write for When Saturday Comes, so I won’t retread all that ground again. But! This month is quite special, because for years now I’ve read their annual season preview supplement – in which one writer for each club in the league answers questions about their opinions on the previous season and expectations for the coming one – and thought about what I’d say if I were doing the section on Liverpool. So it’s quite exciting that this year, those answers are actually in the real supplement. I actually did a little double-take when I got the email asking if I’d do it. No, really.

What’s more, in the issue itself, an article I did a little while back about the history and merits (or lack thereof) of the away goals rule has made it to print. It’s not quite as exciting a piece as I was hoping when I started it – I was hoping to go into more extensive details about the circumstances of the rule’s creation/introduction, but discovered surprisingly little readily-available information despite doing some extensive library-based research and everything – but it’s still a relatively fun skim over the rule’s history and musing on whether or not it’s still a valid method of settling draws nowadays. Er, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Anyway, the issue’s out in shops on Wednesday – I’d post a picture of the cover, but WSC haven’t put it on their website yet. But it’s issue #295, it costs £3.50, and it’s got Stewart Downing, Phil Jones and Jordan Henderson on the front. So, you know. Buy it, if you like.

What follows is an uninspired superhero origin story that trots out all the predictable story beats of the genre without ever adding anything new or inspired. All the good promise of both the concept and some excellent effects sequences is lost in a script that is determined to plod its hero from A (reckless responsibility-phobe) to B (world-saving hero) without ever developing or exploring his personality along the way.

So that’s a big fat “no”, then. The rest’s over at Film4.

And also, although it was a few weeks ago, I’m quite pleased with my main contribution to the Doctor Who review canon this year (we’ll ignore my sloppy, far-too-short and unfocused review of “Day of the Moon”) – I’ve been waiting a long, long time for Neil Gaiman to write an episode of the show, so there’s a good reason why my write-up of “The Doctor’s Wife” is somewhat long and rambling. But I think I hit upon a nice theme with it, and that it’s a good piece all in all, so… yeah.

Firstly! There’s another issue of the fine and august publication When Saturday Comes out with something by me in it. Just a little something, mind – a sidebar piece for the regular “Screen Test” feature, in which old football-related VHSes are dusted off and written about. What did I review? Well, you’ll have to buy the magazine to find out, innit. But it’s something I used to own about twenty years ago, then recently remembered about, and thought “Hey, I should buy that off eBay and then write about it for WSC, shouldn’t I?” So I did. The cover looks uncannily like that picture on the left, and you can find out more about what’s in the issue here.

Secondly, last week I went to see the first of this year’s barrage of superhero movies, Thor, and then reviewed it for Film 4. And here that is. I didn’t make a single joke about how the lead character’s name sounds like someone with a lisp saying “sore”. I think that shows remarkable restraint and maturity.

Specifically, I collected a load of articles about Red Dwarf written by the Ganymede & Titan team over the last eight years, shuffled them around, edited them, formatted them, and turned them into a print-on-demand book that’s now on sale via Lulu.com. Hurrah!

There’d been talk about doing a G&T book of some kind for years, but it was after getting Jane Killick’s Stasis Leaked (a collection of old articles of hers on the making of Series I) for my Kindle that I again reasoned we could probably do something similar. The original plan was for an eBook release, with a view to possibly printing at some point – but as I investigated publishing options, it became apparent that getting a physical copy out there would actually be pretty feasible. The deadline I’d set – to have the book onsale at the Dimension Jump convention this last weekend – made it too tight to actually get any new material in (for one thing, I wanted to do a mammoth article on the history of the Dwarf novels), but it’s still a pretty solid package, with 200 pages of material that while available online will probably not have been read even by everyone who visits the site regularly. And if this one does alright, we may well do a Volume 2 – with more in the way of new stuff – in future.

G&T’s Photoshop wiz Danny Stephenson came up with an absolutely astounding wraparound cover based on my original concept, and this is one of the things that I think really helps it stand out as a darned fine artefact in its own right. Here’s what it says on the back:

Red Dwarf, the cult BBC2 and Dave sci-fi sitcom, has entertained millions of fans worldwide since its first broadcast in 1988.

Ganymede & Titan, a Red Dwarf fan website, has entertained literally several of those fans since its launch in 1999.

Now, a selection of the site’s best articles from between 2003 and 2011 have been rounded up and thrown into The Garbage Pod, the first such collection of unofficial fan writing in the show’s long and illustrious history.

Inside, you’ll find analytical critical commentary, bloody-minded arguing, meticulously researched Lists of Stuff, hard-sci-fi theorising and elaborate swearing from the site’s team of entirely unprofessional and equally unsanitary writers.

Over at Lulu, we’re selling the print copy for £4.99, and the PDF download for £1.99 (and a Kindle version might well follow when I can sort out creating/formatting it). We’re making a small profit on each copy sold, all of which is being donated to Amnesty International. And while I imagine most of the people I know who are Dwarf fans are already G&T readers so know all about it already, if there’s anyone who isn’t but would be interested in picking it up, you can do so right here.

We figured, though, that our best business would be done at DJ – and it seemed to go down pretty well. We sold around two-thirds of the copies we’d ordered in bulk and brought with us, and drummed up a decent amount of interest. We also gave copies to, among other people, visual effects king Mike Tucker, and – most excitingly – Doug Naylor himself (who insisted on paying for his copy, and asked us all to sign it, which was A BIT OF A THRILL). People who got around to reading any of it while there seemed to enjoy it, which was great.

So it may be a daft little self-published vanity project with an incredibly narrow niche market - but still. I’ve got a book out. Yay!