We’re back in Derry and Toms in the company of Joe Banks to take a look at Robert Fuest’s 1973 film take on Moorcock’s The Final Programme (AKA The Last Days of Man on Earth).

As is traditional we roam around, but mostly we evaluate The Final Programme as both an adaptation and as a work that stands (or falls) on its own merits, and Joe has a startling take on that ending that I’d never considered. And we talk about some other stuff. 

JOIN US!

The year is rampaging by at a startling pace, it’s April already (despite the frost in Bradford this morning) and our itinerary remains well-packed for the coming weeks. This week I’ll be applying the final edits to our next exploration – The Final Programme movie by Robert Fuest with returning guest Joe Banks – and that will be out in time for the Easter weekend. Since picking up the Blu Ray I’ve watched it a couple of times and I’m convinced that Jenny Runacre is one of the greatest things to ever come out of British cinema. Her Miss Brunner is the high point of the film (more on that in the episode) and I went on to watch Jubilee for the first time in thirty years and she’s just bloody marvellous in that too.

Elsewhere, some of our compadres have been pretty busy.

N Λ Ṇ D has a track featured on the massive Vangelis tribute album released by Castles in Space. It’s Track 4 on Music is Vast: A Tribute to the Music and Legacy of Vangelis. All profits from the album go to Trussell Trust to support their campaign for change to end the need for food banks in the UK.

Our friend Rob AKA Menion’s podcast returned after a six-month hiatus this week. Rob shared his thoughts on RuneQuest and a few other bits and bobs and it’s good to hear he’s back in the saddle. Check out the latest instalment of Confessions of a Wee Tim’rous Bushi.

Graham’s sea shanty collective Duck Pond Sailors has released Urban Navigators, a split album of studio and live recordings comprising a mixture of original compositions and some classics.

Meanwhile, Simon Perrins, artist and occasional BitR co-host  is already five episodes deep into his new podcast Can I Pod With Madness, a podcast that meticulously reviews a copy of Kerrang! or Metal Hammer, from the golden age of ROCK, 1987-1989. This podcast speaks to me on a deep level. I had just about all of those magazine issues throughout that period (although I did fall away from Kerrang! around the time they featured T’Pau on the cover) and it covers my last couple of years in senior/high school when I was a proper greb (ie mulleted metalhead) so it’s truly resonant and very funny. I’ll be picking Simon’s brains on this podcast when he drops by D&Ts in the next couple of weeks. Get on board.

In terms of our own itinerary, as well as Simon, Loz will be back in a couple of weeks to tie up The Fortress of the Pearl, Dave will be dropping by to conclude The Sword of the Dawn, Andy Darby will be joining me as we head down into some classic 60s MM scifi with The Winds of Limbo, Miles and I will travel to counter-Earth and see what the fuck is going on with GOR, I’m STILL negotiating a journey to Amber with Tash, and there’ll be another RPG-centric episode too. I’m just shaping that up but part of the deal may include an online BitR playtest of Black Hack Second Edition and/or Mournblade. We’ll see.

And some other stuff is brewing too.

Including a potential One-Shit Book.

I have to give thanks to Dave for juggling diaries to accommodate some developments over at STIMBOT Towers where STIMBOT CLASSIC (AKA Dad) is due to be opened up so his heart can be tinkered with. The wonderful NHS is undergoing a few trials and tribulations at the moment but I’m sure they’ll find the heart, or at least the valves, of a long-dead god to arrest the entropy and give him a bit of a boost. He’s generally battle-ready anyway and is a tough, leathery old geezer – he just needs that boost and he’ll be back on with the business of smoking Clakars in his shed.

We conducted a small mail-out this weekend past thanks to some patron demon pledges landing in the demon-bound in-tray of sorting and we’ll have more to send as we’ve identified a few more duplicates from the shelves so more on that soon. It’s also occurred to me that there are folks that have been contributing for a good while now who may not be at the Patron Demon level, but have nevertheless invested a great deal in this podcast over the past three and a half years so as of now, folks that pledge at Chaos Engineer, Jugadero or without tier will, once a threshold is crossed, receive print/chapbook copies of the Journal of GAC. I’ll be dropping a line to folks in that position today to get your mailing details.

As a final fun-fact, our episode on The War of the Worlds broke all of our records for first week downloads and, as per the last report, MORE adaptations continue to emerge into our eyelines – this time a UK film – War of the Worlds: The Attack looks to be updating it to be contemporary (including the ‘kids on bikes’ trope) but otherwise the filmmakers claim to have remained faithful to the Wells novel. It’s evidently a low-budget affair but that’s never a deal-breaker for me. As well as scifi and fantasy novels my brain was fed a steady diet of straight-to-video trashy goodness in the 80s and 90s so I’ll always give something like this a break if it shows some love for the source.

That’s about it for this report but don’t forget that BITR Breakfast in the Ruins Radio is there to help you negotiate the grey fees, either via Radio Garden or the webplayer (that includes the recent playlist).

Andrew Nette returns to Derry & Toms to look at the legendary UK publisher of horror, science fiction and alarmingly violent but sociologically savvy pulps -New English Library. NEL looms large on my shelves but I’ve never delved into their bikersploitation output… UNTIL NOW!

Rum content ahead as we talk about the publisher, the key players behind some of their more exploitative output, and two similar yet very different biker novels from the early 70s:

• Angels From Hell by Mick Norman

and

• The Devil’s Rider by Alex R Stuart

We also refer to Andrew’s groovy book of essays Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, And Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980. Check it out and head on down the rabbit hole…

Friends,

Despite an incidence of the plague here at BitR Central, we continue to have a busy year and arguably our most productive period since this podcast kicked off back in late 2019. Our episode talking The War of the Worlds is flying out of the door like hot cakes and, since that went live, we’ve had lots of pointers to other adaptations that I missed, the best example of which is the BBC Radio adaptation from the 60s (thanks Miles). It does update the story to be contemporaneous with the broadcast, but is otherwise pretty faithful throughout, with a standout performance from Peter (Last of the Summer Wine/Wallace and Gromit) Sallis as a truly vile curate.

On the show, Allister filled me in on the two C Thomas Howell Asylum films (they smell like ass), but I subsequently discovered another effort from that quarter from only the last couple of years. It similarly smells like ass, only in HD, and features one of Tom Sizemore’s final, and rather sad, appearances. I paid for it on Prime out of curiosity, but it appears that if you’re in the US you can watch it on YT. It also goes by the alternative name Alien Attack. Only for completists.

YT is a pretty good source for all things WOTW. As well as being able to view War of the Worlds Goliath there in its entirety, I also managed to dredge my memory and track down a full-cast audio adaptation there that I came across in the early 80s in newsagents in Hull. The AudiSee series of children’s picture books, complete with attached cassettes, only lasted six instalments, but I have strong memories of the War of the Worlds and Time machine issues and they’re still pretty impressive today.

In other news, after some hosting issues, BITR Radio is back up and running on Radio Garden. Also, because wordpress is a bit rubbish and I can’t embed simple HTML on this website without paying for a business account, I’ve set up a simple blogspot page that does allow HTML for free, so you can access the web player complete with playlist here. I’m still playing around with the new auto-DJ interface, so it’s just a big random playlist for now.

On the podcast front we have two in the can undergoing editing and plenty more on the schedule for the next couple of months so stay tuned and watch this space.

As it happens, the reason the plague arrived in BitR towers was me bringing it back from… The Moorcock Weekender.

By way of explanation, last year Dirk the Dice, host of The Grognard Files, invited me to join a weekend of nerdery and Moorcock themed gamery, This then ended up merging with The One Ring Road Trip, a long-standing Tolkien-themed gaming weekend. So, 13 or 14 middle-aged beardoes descended upon a very pleasant and massive old country house to eat, drink and game for a couple of days.

Night one: Elric – Battle at the End of Time (Chasoium edition) – This is something I’d never played (I have the older Avalon Hill edition simply called Elric) but it was entertaining if a little complex. It was also entertainingly swingy thanks and the ultimate conclusion was driven by Theleb K’aarna switching sides and leaving Pan Tang in the lurch late game. Good fun.

Saturday:

Game One: Agon (Moorcock Hack) delivered by Dirk – a more modern, collaborative narrative system that encouraged a lot of improvisation and a jointly created villain for which all the players provided details. I was extremely lazy and created my character as a very thinly-veiled GAC avatar – Jarko Neely (The Crane). Agon’s mechanics are designed to model epic-level play with demi-gods and Greek-type mythology and it worked pretty well on that level.

Game Two: Dungeon Crawl Classics overseen by Dirk’s co-host Blythy. Lots of fun manoeuvring and interplay shenanigans here. My hook-handed Nadsokorian beggar almost came up trumps after substituting the plot MacGuffin with a fake (made from a dinosaur egg and rhinestones from Elvis’s jumpsuit) and covering the King with a dead lizardman’s energy weapon as he made an end run with the fake magic chaos egg to deliver it to Arioch and co.

You had to be there.

Game Three: A switch of pace as we had a session of The One Ring c/o Orlanth Rex and visited Middle Earth. We went to an inn, hung out with nervous hobbits and killed a load of orcs. Very flavourful.

On Sunday morning was Dirk’s monthly book club where they discussed Stormbringer, but I turfed out as it was a long drive home and we will get to Stormbringer in our own time here on BITR.

All in all a very satisfying weekend. Not the type of thing I’d normally sign up to, particularly after it blew up to be a Moorcock AND Tolkien weekend with more than a dozen people I’d never met, but I did enjoy it. I came back with Dirk’s Groglurg though, so we’ve agreed a satisfying payback for later in the year and he will be coming back to D&Ts to have a few liveners and talk about something suitable.

Should it happen again in 2024 I made my pitch that it should be a Dannus/Gor Weekender. Not sure that will fly though.

It’s 23.02.23.

The year is already tumbling by and, compared to last year, here at D&Ts we’re keeping up a good pace. Having chats with all of our compadres on a variety of topics MM, MM-adjacent and things that are just plain old ‘of interest’ is its own reward but I’ve come to find that the time I spend putting episodes together in the editing suite is a pretty mellow experience and quite therapeutic.

In terms of knowledge and capability, this has been a journey. I still make blobs from time to time, and Zoom is far from an ideal solution to online recording with co-hosts on the far side of the world, but overall I think the quality of the audio has shown a steady improvement. With your support and encouragement I’ve improved my gear, got more practice, identified some routines that help and… perhaps most importantly for my process, I’ve discovered plug-ins. What used to take me hours of bumbling around in the settings on Adobe Audition, I can now accomplish incredibly quickly by applying some simple settings, pressing ‘apply’ and hopping off to make a cuppa.

Having thought back to one of the (in my mind) most notoriously difficult-to-edit shows in our 55-episode run, I decided to see if one of those plug-ins could, at the turn of a dial, significantly improve the audio. So I loaded up The Jewel in the Skull Part Two, activated the plug-in, turned the dial and pressed apply. One cuppa later, it’s transformed into something infinitely easier on the ears.

But… I have a dilemma.

I loved recording those early episodes in Tash’s kitchen and I do wonder if going back and ‘correcting’ them subtracts something. In terms of figuring out how to do it, we were making it up as we went along and getting rat-arsed along the way. And I’m not sure I want to lose that.

Yes, new listeners that land upon that episode that expect a degree of professionalism in their podcasts may be turned off by it. But I’m not sure they’d be any less turned off by our drunken repartee.

I also fear that if I do one I’ll just end up obsessing over revisions to earlier episodes instead of concentrating on new ones.

I’ll continue to mull it over.

Meanwhile, I have two full shows in the can for editing and I’m recording two more in the coming 7 days so I need to pull my finger out and get editing NEW stuff, let alone drunken ramblings from three years ago.

Coming in the next few weeks we have musings on The War of the Worlds with Allister Thompson, New English Library Bikerspolitation with Andrew Nette, The Sword of the Dawn with Dave and a chat about Moorcock, Black Swords and Hacks with Goran Gligović. Also, Phil might finally finish her Phoenix in the Sword homework but having blown her knee out and found she potentially needs a knee replacement she has other things on her plate right now.

Anyway, if you have any thoughts on revisionism (it is very MM after all) let me know.

It’s been creeping ever closer, but finally release day is here. N Λ Ṇ D‘s second epic suite Journal Vol. II establishes a sonic route to that corner of the Million Spheres where our hapless traveller of the moonbeam roads encounters shades and nightmares, but also hope. So zip up your Gohil’s, spark up a Capstan and enjoy the ride into the musical brain of N Λ Ṇ D