Running Scared
dir. Peter Hyams (1986)
An underrated 1980s film that grows better with each rescreening. Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal form one of the all-time great partnerships as two bantering police officers looking to set the record straight before early retirement. SF fans will recognise Joe Pantoliano.
Winnie-the-Pooh
by A. A. Milne (Methuen, 1926)
audiobook read by Bernard Cribbins (Bolinda, 2015)
Winnie-the-Pooh has never lost its appeal as a collection of gentle, safe children’s tales featuring loveable anthropomorphised animals with foibles. Bernard Cribbins upholds the tradition of making Piglet sound unspeakably annoying, but redeems himself by giving us Eeyore à la Geoff Boycott.
How to Fight a Girl
by Thomas Rockwell (Turtleback Books, 1987)
Whereas How To Eat Fried Worms flowed as a story, this sequel is little more than a muddled hodgepodge of preteen social issues: fighting amongst friends; family dynamics; the awkwardness of dating. Much of the plot is as confused as its protagonists.
Elephant in the Kitchen
by Winsome Smith (Ashton Scholastic, 1980)
No one character stands out as owning this story (where the eponymous pachyderm doesn’t participate all that much), but the tale of Cato the shrinking elephant and Sam the absentminded artist remains a fun — and not at all frightening — middle grade adventure.
Jonathan Creek, Series 3
(BBC, 1999-2000)
Although the mysteries still beguile and Alan Davies continues to charm in the leading role, Series Three of Jonathan Creek does feel slightly deflated. Little wonder that the show was subsequently rested for several years (before returning with a revamped character dynamic).
Pyramids
by Terry Pratchett (Corgi, 1989); audiobook read by Nigel Planer (Isis, 2002)
Pratchett’s Discworld series truly hit its stride in this, the BSFA-winning seventh book. Pyramids is a self-contained and ingeniously conceived, desert-dry satire on the type of human thinking that underpins religious folly. Nigel Planer is suitably droll in voicing the befuddled participants.
The Return of the Antelope
by Willis Hall (The Bodley Head, 1985)
Hall excels in depicting minor characters and incidental detail, yet there remains a largely untapped visual element to this children’s fantasy of Lilliputians who have ill-fatedly retraced Gulliver’s Travels back to England. The book reads like — and is — an adaptation from television.
The Blues Brothers 2000
dir. John Landis (1998)
Openly based on and playing homage to its predecessor (though consequently making little sense as a standalone film), this Blues Brothers reprise justifies itself through time-appropriate character progression, in-joke nostalgia, a new car pile-up record and an all-star rhythm and blues soundtrack.
The Witches and the Grinnygog
by Dorothy Edwards (Faber & Faber, 1981)
Somewhat abstruse and unlikely to appeal to post-millennial YA readers, Edwards’ tale of pagan magic reawakening in a small English village remains a curious, highly ambitious work, told always indirectly and sketching out its titular characters by painting the landscape around them.
The Eighteenth Emergency
by Betsy Byars (Viking, 1973)
Benjie is running scared from the school Goliath, an emergency that offers no blithe, fanciful solutions such as have been devised for escaping shark attacks and the like. Betsy Byars’ well-rounded social survival tale both takes seriously yet contextualises Benjie’s all-consuming dread.