Benny Hill’s Greatest Hits
(Thames Video, 1990)
Hill’s humour was largely one-dimensional, his urgently titillated, naughty schoolboy expressions suggesting an immaturity that persisted through overweight middle-age and somehow found resonance across two decades of British viewership, tainting even the occasional clever (‘Weather Pair’) or madcap surreal (‘Wicked Warden’) piece.
Murder After Christmas
by Rupert Latimer (Macdonald & Co., 1944)
audiobook read by Kris Dyer (Soundings, 2021)
A murder mystery most notable for obfuscating events behind a blanket barrage of affability. All the suspects have blithely joked about doing in Uncle Willie. Latimer plays endlessly with motive and opportunity, meandering up false trails until it all becomes quite tedious.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
by Walter M. Miller Jr. (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1959)
audiobook read by Tom Weiner (Blackstone, 2011)
Award-winning but over-hyped. A drawn-out, wasteland-without-hope, of-its-time fix-up novel exploring notions of—and interactions between—religious belief, cyclical history, information systems and nuclear apocalypse. Miller builds detailed (if bleak and self-indulgent) scenarios. All three sections come to weigh portentously upon the reader.
Guess Who?
by Philip E. High
New Worlds Science Fiction, Vol. 19, No. 56 (February 1957), 88-99.
SF short story in which High attempts to show up the military’s hard-ball pre-emptive aggression while also postulating how to deal with a ruthless species of telepathic shape-changers—an odd juxtaposition, as the latter come across as no better than the former.
Legwork
by Eric Frank Russell
Astounding Science Fiction (April 1956); reprinted Vol. XII, No. 9 (British Edition, September 1956), 49-86.
Published soon after Russell’s classic novel ‘Three to Conquer’, this SF invasion novelette upends the scenario by pitting everyday human grunts against what should be an all-powerful alien telepath. Russell’s distinctive prose ensures that, 70 years on, readers are still carried along.
The Battle of Squashy Hollow
by P. G. Wodehouse, Argosy (UK) Vol. XXVI, No. 10 (October 1965), 14-28.
By Wodehouse’s standards a fairly tame and inconsequential short story—involving golf and marriage proposals, two staples of the Wodehouse diet, but also hypnotism, which isn’t. Droll enough, but the protagonist’s troubles are never really plumbed and he is extricated without difficulty.
The Battle of Bunkum Bay
by John Ryan (The Bodley Head, 1984), reprinted Puffin Books, 1996
Pugwash is well suited to the comic-book format. Ryan devises an uncommonly clever plan for the captain then has it come a cropper at the fiendish hands of Cut-Throat Jake, before fate turns the tables. Tom for once doesn’t save the day.
The Crazy Chase (An Adventure of Dogmatix, the mascot of Asterix and Obelix)
by Goscinny & Uderzo, trans. Frances Vanner (Hodder Causton, 1974)
12-page picture book aimed at very young children. Goscinny’s text is in prose form and lacks the punch of his speech-based narratives. The format affords space for Uderzo’s art but the story is lamentably slight, of interest primarily for naming Mrs Geriatrix.
Sauce: Cheeky Pictures, Jocular Jests and Racy Rhymes of Days Gone By
by Ronnie Barker (Coronet, 1978)
At best an historical curiosity. Barker curates a book of so-called ‘saucy’ illustrations, alongside suggestive verse and black-and-white soft-core pornography dating mostly from the early 20th century. Much of this must have felt a bit off even at the date of publication.
Survival Course
by Philip E. High, New Worlds Science Fiction, No. 11, Vol. 38 (December 1961), 41-58.
A rare foray into first-personal narrative for High. This short story reads more naturally than much of his writing, and the SF idea is as imaginative as ever—albeit with little on show beyond the portrayal of concept (a uniquely hostile lifeform).