the pointless weblog

Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons was written by Terrance Dicks and published by Target Books in 1975. It was based on a Doctor Who TV serial written by Robert Holmes. The book contains 6 full-page illustrations by Alan Willow, who presumably also did the cover illustrations, although it doesn’t actually say.

I’ve never seen the TV version of this story, but as it contains an evil circus, The Master, malevolent murderous plastic dolls,  a gigantic crab/spider/octopus beast, telephone wires of death and plastic daffodils that are programmed to kill each and every one of us, I expect it is the scariest thing ever broadcast on TV.

Despite all that, the most shocking moment comes on page 55.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard the term “garaged” before, and it’s making me shudder mildly with revulsion.

The illustrations that pop-up throughout the book are uniformly excellent. I would usually worry slightly about them spoilers, but the blurb does enough of that already.

This is yet another Ladybird World Cup guide (and the last one I ever got).It was written by Lorraine Horsley. Scandalously, the price of this was £1.20, a 45p rise over the previous one, and a whole 70p more than the 1982 one. Inflation in the children’s book market (and also The Beano) was pretty much completely out of control in the 1980s. 

By 1990, at long last, I was finally old enough and competent enough to fill a book in on my own with my beautiful flowing script, complimented perfectly with the wonderful writing style of a Parker Vector fountain pen (the height of sophistication, and much better than the standard issue fountain pen that our school provided). I wish I still had such a wonderful writing tool. Now all I’ve got is a hundred thousand biros from Essex Business Link and BAE Systems infesting the corners of my room.

Talking about pens is much more important than talking about football.

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This is another Ladybird World Cup guide, written by John P. Baker and published in 1986. The results were filled in by my grandad again, mainly (the ones all in capitals). The other handwriting might well be mine. It looks a bit like mine. It’s probably my older brother’s again, though.

My main memory of this World Cup is, unsurprisingly, England losing to Argentina. When Maradona scored his second goal my mother became so furious she stormed off to her bedroom and refused to watch the rest of the game. In an attempt to cheer her up, I took my Pac-Man board game upstairs and we played it on her bed. The Pac-Man boardgame is the greatest of all diplomatic tools.

The other thing I remember is my sister bursting into tears when France beat Brazil on penalties in the quarter finals. I have never forgiven Michel Platini for this and I never will. My poor sister and her anguish.

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Naranjito: World Cup Final In Danger was published in 1982 by Ladybird Books and was written by Lynne Bradbury and illustrated by Graham Marlow.

I might not remember any of the football from World Cup 82, but I was absolutely obsessed with this book. The book is all drawn in felt-tip pens, which seemed to be the fashion at the time (Ladybird’s excellent Garden Gang books from around then were also drawn like this). I assume that was also why I scribbled all over the cover. I always desperately wanted to fit in.

The story is all about Naranjito - the greatest mascot in world cup history - and his friends saving the world cup from the evil Doctor Mantis and his robot assistants, who have been blowing up cities in an fit of misanthropic disgust.

Naranjito and the rest get captured by Mantis eventually, and he has them brought to the underground bunker in the middle of the desert where he lives, and Naranjito blows it up.

On their return to Spain, a rosy-cheeked Hitler greets them as the heroes they are.

The one bit of this that always haunted me was when Pedro, the muscle-bound lemon, gets stuck in some lift doors. With this, and the bit in Krull when the cyclops gets crushed to death by a stone doorway closing on him, I was frightened of lifts for most of my life, terrified that eventually the doors would close on me and never open again.

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This guide to World Cup 82 was written by John P. Baker and published by Ladybird Books. It seems to have had the results filled in by my brother and also probably my grandad, too.

I don’t remember anything at all about World Cup 82 (I was only 4 then), although I did spend ages obsessing over this book in the build up to the subsequent tournaments. I think the thing I liked most about it was the way my brother had filled out all the tables completely wrongly, suggesting he wasn’t quite as infallible as I feared.

Looking at it now, though, I think maybe it was my grandad who had filled it out wrong, and my brother was correcting his mistakes. This is the worst discovery of my entire life.

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