Mr. Mister's OTHER Hit
Featuring Thor: Ragnarok, The Adventure Game, Fuzzy-Felt Fantasy and more...
Hello, and indeed welcome to the first proper instalment of Tim Worthington’s Newsround, hammered out in the middle of a miserable damp downpour and to the appropriately miserable accompaniment of a random chance hearing of Broken Wings by Mr. Mister, a band who had apparently taken the idea of choosing a name that sounded funny the first time you heard it then progressively less funny each time as adopted by The Be Sharps in The Simpsons as an aspirational career aim, all looked like they were actually some of their own fans who ‘stood at the back’ and had somehow ended up filling in for the actual band in an emergency, and all answered questions in Smash Hits like they were being asked to name their favourite stock rate fluctuation for the Financial Times only in as non-committal a manner as possible. Broken Wings itself is quite a baffling song in that it was clearly intended as an empowering anthem of triumph over adversity, but the lyrics are constructed in such a manner as to suggest that they are actually telling someone with a serious injury to just stop whining and get on with it. Speaking of getting on with it, and before we start babbling on about their little-remembered other hit Kyrie…
What’s New?
There’s a new It’s Good, Except It Sucks out with Mic Wright joining me for another look at 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok, a movie that certainly did something new and influential with its knowing adoption of big eighties straight-to-video action comedy stylings - but has it been a little too influential? It’s an interesting chat considering whether its effect on the Marvel Cinematic Universe going forwards has been a good thing or a bad thing - or even a bit of both - and we also get to find out what Mic would do if he had the ability to crush Thor’s hammer. If that’s a question you want to know the answer to, you can listen to it here.
Inspired by some of the themes and observations we touched on in it, I took a look at why Loki has proved just so popular with audiences in I Feel Like Everything’s Going To Work Out Fine which you can read here. It’s quite a short feature but it’s also one that took on a weird irony due to the extent to which it focuses on Vote Loki, a comic series that pretty much unintentionally served as an inadvertent warning about more or less everything that has happened since 2016. You can probably work out for yourselves exactly what happened more or less the minute I hit publish.
Also, if you haven’t heard it yet, Mitch Benn recently made a return appearance on Looks Unfamiliar for a chat about Children’s BBC’s improvisation-crazy dual celebrity panel shows Star Turn and Star Turn Challenge, evil Grange Hill teacher Mr. Hicks, Subbuteo-rivalling tabletop football game Striker, Lines by post-punk Liverpool band The Planets, Marvel UK strip Night Raven and the sudden craze in the eighties for having international celebrities acting in pop videos, and you can find that here. Meanwhile if you sign up for my Patreon here, you can find a couple of little-seen album reviews from the archives as well as a brand new look at the very odd advertising campaigns run by British Gas Showrooms in the mid-sixties.
What I’ve Been Watching, Reading And Listening To…
A huge hefty recommendation here for Strong Female Character by Hanna Flint. Some of you may know Hanna from her appearances on It’s Good, Except It Sucks talking about Agent Carter here and WandaVision here; this book is a collection of essays about growing up as the movie-fixated mixed heritage child of a prominent politician as seen through the prism of Disney princesses, Hollywood sirens and, of course, Kevin Costner. It’s funny, touching and thought-provoking all at once with plenty to say about everything from The Little Mermaid to The Tale Of Two Sisters and is well worth a read. You can find it at Amazon here. I also recently got to see Carrie Dunn holding a fascinating Q&A about ‘Unsuitable For Females’, her brilliant history of women’s football in the UK. You might have recently heard Carrie on Looks Unfamiliar talking about Channel 4’s early nineties coverage of the Women’s FA Cup - and if you haven’t it’s here - and this book is every bit as entertaining and you can find it here.
I’ve also been enjoying Grand Theft Marvel, a collected solo series featuring vigilante, diamond-pilferer and occasional friend with benefits of Spider-Man - but emphatically NOT Peter Parker - The Black Cat. I actually bought this in a panic impulse splurge on the way back from London in March 2000 with a national lockdown becoming more likely by the minute, thinking I would at least have something to read over ‘the next couple of weeks’, and promptly stuffed it in an old laptop bag and forgot about it until right now. Yes, even the reference to Felicia in Spider-Man: No Way Home didn’t prompt me to remember it. Anyway it’s great fun and features both Dracula and The Black Cat’s pet cats, so hobbies and interests frankly.
A quick mention too for the fab and indeed gear podcast The Big Beatles Sort-Out, in which Paul and Garry Abbott rank various Beatles-related recordings according to their own critically evaluated criteria. Having already done the original albums and singles, various semi-canonical odds and ends and the songs that the individual Beatles wrote for other acts in the sixties, they’re now taking a look at the a-sides and b-sides of the solo singles that John, Paul, George and Ringo released between 1970 and 1980, and I’d like to single out the particularly amusing edition looking at Whatever Gets You Through The Night and Power To The People by John Lennon, Call Me by Ringo Starr, What You Value by George Harrison and Backwards Traveller/Cufflink by Paul McCartney, which also some very surreal observations on skiffle bands adrift in old carpet warehouses. You’ll have to listen to find out what all that’s about, which is handy because you can find it right here.
TV That Time Forgot
The Adventure Game (BBC2, 1980-86) was a Dungeons And Dragons-inspired post-Douglas Adams and proto ZX Spectrum text adventure game early evening BBC2 show - although it originally went out on Saturday mornings on BBC1 - in which a team made up of Children’s BBC-adjacent celebrities of the John Craven, Keith Chegwin and Richard Stilgoe variety, slightly more adrift schedule outliers like Kirsty Miller from Maggie, a smattering of quip-deficient but affable and keen to have a go popular sporting figures and some extremely out of place experts from such fields as classical music and academia took part in a series of physical logic puzzles with the aim of recapturing a spaceship-powering crystal from the inhabitants of Arg, a planet where more or less everyone and everything was named after an anagram of ‘Dragon’. Regular featured puzzles included retrieving a key from some fiendishly lopsided contraption or other, The Drogna Game which involved deducing the correct sequence of coloured shape-bearing squares on a tiled floor, something about a sign saying ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain’ which they never seemed to be able to figure out, and the inevitable gantry-staged showdown with ‘The Vortex’, a BBC Micro-derived column of multicoloured static that they had to dodge - or distract with a green cheese roll - while making their way step by step to the other side. Failure to do so resulted in the player being ‘evaporated’ and having to ‘walk’ home across a shakily-realised starscape.
Stuff You Can Buy
There’s currently 10% off Top Of The Box Vol. 2 - the story behind every album released by BBC Records And Tapes, featuring everything from Topol’s Israel to EastEnders Sing-Along - in paperback with the code WARMUP10 from here. This code also works for all of my books, and they’re all available for Kindle too if you’d prefer to read about all of those albums of birdsong in a digital format. If you’re not in the market for a book but would still like to chip in with a quid or two, you can buy me a coffee here. If nothing else it can go towards getting something to replace the frankly lacklustre Taylors Of Harrogate Hot Lava Java which frankly does not deliver on the dynamic promise of the volcanic packaging art.
Emergency Questions
Another dip into Richard Herring’s book of thought-provoking and rationality-defying posers - you can find more of my responses here.
393. Which toy did you always want for Christmas but never received?
MB Games’ Star Bird, a post-Star Wars spaceship that made all kinds of exciting electronic sounds and flashing lights as you ‘flew’ it thanks to some ingenious weight-balancing mechanism inside it. I asked for it again and again and never got it. Many years later, I spent a small fortune on one on eBay, and pointedly sat and played with it at my parents' kitchen table.
So What Was That At The Start?
The absolutely stunningly gorgeous box art for Fuzzy-Felt Fantasy, a politely psychedelically-inclined 1970 set encouraging creatively-minded youngsters with a predilection towards affixing small pieces of fabric to each other to create mind-expanding vistas somewhere between Yellow Submarine, an early prog-rock album cover and one of those non-canonical animated inserts you got in the middle of a Smallfilms production. That cat has clearly seen some far-out sights.
…and to finish, here’s a mystery link!