1. The Weekending tie-in "The Cabinet Leaks", from 84/85.
2. "Radio Active Times" 1987 I think.
3. "The Uncyclopedia Of Rock" you know this, Al.
4. Inevitably... "Bachelor Boys" 1984.

There have been some rubbish ones as well - the Smith&Jones one, the Girls On Top one, the Reeves&Mortimer one (if you ask me). None of which I bought, I just perused them in Smiths.

Not to mention 'Steve Davis - How To Be Interesting' and one about Ronnie Biggs that I saw in a 2nd hand book shop (true - published by Virgin).

My brother used to have the mary whitehouse encyclopedia years ago, a big hardback thing, but it got lost, so last year I had a look on Amazon and they had it. It was a paperback version though. I ordered it( 'bout £11 inc p&p) . It arrived and I was most upset to discover that in a feeble attempt to save paper the publishers had removed a large portion of the entries, presumably thinking that no one would notice!
even though a lot were cross referenced:
e.g at the end of the 'ants' entry it says - "as studied by Sir David La-di-da Attenborough (see Attenborough, David, Sir la-di-da)"
but that entry wasnt there!
Bastards eh?

At the risk of repeating myself, "Our Dumb Century" from The Onion.
The Reeves and Mortimer book at least contained lots of original material, even if you don't find them funny.

I can't work out if mk was taking the piss, but just in case he wasn't... a lot of the cross-referencing referred to items that didn't exist, mate. They haven't been 'removed' - even in hard-back the book was noticeably thin, given that four people had had a hand in writing it...

Ah! that might explain it. I used to be sure i could remember specific entries that wernt there anymore, but its probly just my mind playing tricks on me..

Not really a tie-in as such, because it didn't have a show to tie-in with, but I got a book about ten years ago called the Book of Revelations (similar size and format to tie-in books), which was highly amusing. Anyone remember it?

Harry Enfield's tie-in - Wad and Peeps - was dire. Three jokes spread over 100-odd pages.

What about "In Bed With Jonathan Ross", or whatever it was called, the tie-in for The Last Resort? Utter shite. But that doesn't count as a comedy tie-in, does it?

I think we've got a hideous Hale and Pace book somewhere - perhaps i'll find it and destroy it.
In fact, our house appears to be the place where bad Cmedy tie-in books come to die - Phil Cool, Lenny Henry, Jasper Carrot etc.

The father ted books (scropts and parish magazines) are good though.

The sort that unimaginative relatives always gave you 'coz you liked comedy on the TV...

The Spitting Image one springs to mind as a pretty dire memory. Paul Merton's history of the 20th Century was not good. And those one Ade Edmonson did (how to be a complete bastard? that's not much to do with TV though is it)...

But yes, agree on The Mary Whitehouse one (was good, and half the references were always missing), Bachelor Boys.

Did anyone read these anywhere other than on the bog?

>Did anyone read these anywhere other than on the bog?

I read most of the MWE one in the shop. And then bought it.

Go figure...

I once did a 'Smiths crawl', in which i got through an entire issue of the NME just by reading it at different branches of W.H.Smiths. Felt woozy afterwards.

The two Goodies books were hilarious, although I found a lot of it incomprehensible, being eight. Radio Active Times is storming, the Not books patchy, Fist Of Fun book might be the best thing Lee & Herring have ever done.

Rubbish ones: Alas Smith & Jones atlas that I got for Christmas in 1983, Big Night Out, Go To Bed With Jonathan Ross, that Harry Enfield lazy one from a few Christmases ago where he mumbled on about his favourite/most lucrative creations.

The Adam and Joe one is actually funnier than the programme, and the Onion format works better 'doing' the past rather than the present.
Funny, eh?
And is it just me or is Big Red Book a bit shite (especially compared to 'Bok/Papperbok')?

There were four Goodies books, all indistinguishable from the L&H one.

>There were four Goodies books,

Fair enough - The Goodies File and Goodies Book Of Criminal Records I know of. What were the other two, Bent? Or Halo?

all indistinguishable from the L&H one.

Hey, I never said Fist Of Fun was original. It just made me laugh more than almost any comedy book I've ever seen. (Specifically: the tribute bands page, the football stickers double page, the sitcom ideas pages, All Things Bright & Beautiful, but perhaps most of all, that photo in the Gallery of a stick-insect with Esther Rantzen's head playing the flute.)

Even L&H admit they stole all the jokes from old Goodies annuals - so there no mystery there. I re-read the FOF book recently, and it seems to get better each time i read it - maybe beacuase i'm getting older or something. Perhaps i'll ask the cast of Bruiser about it - they seemed to have read the sitcom ideas page a lot...

>And is it just me or is Big Red Book a bit shite (especially compared to 'Bok/Papperbok')?

The Big Red Book is, quite obviously, simply a bunch of sketches from the first two series haphazardly slung together. However this made perfect sense, as it would ensure that the material the Pythons liked could be seen even by people who hadn't watched every programme. (Anyone know of any TV comedy tie-in books that pre-date this, btw? I don't know of any - even the 'Q' tie-in book came later.)

It was the Bok that took the risks, and incidentally set the standard for tie-in books that followed, by using a great deal of new material which had very little to do with the series it was meant to be a spin-off from, as well as being imaginative with its recycling of old material.

The way the style constantly leaps about, with no two pages the same, was a huge influence on the Smith & Jones tie-ins, while the NTNN and RadioActive books restricted themselves considerably by choosing to parody existing magazine (or calendar) formats. One book which combines both techniques (cheaply, too) is the little-mentioned Who Dares Wins book, which uses the gimmick of appearing to be a trashy Mills & Boon novel which has had various articles, pictures, parodies etc glued into it, though often the glimpses you're given of the send-up bodice-ripper are funnier than the WDW stuff that's supposedly stuck onto it.


What's the fourth Goodies book, then? The third one is the Goodies' Disaster Movie, where they try and get the funding together to make... a disaster movie. I remember seeing it at a mate's house when I was younger and loving it, then tracking it down 2nd-hand when I was older and discovering that it contained precisely two amusing pages. Mind you, the same thing happened with the series. I'm just not seven any more...

I found the Three Of A Kind book recently in a second-hand bookshop (the only places to go for comedy books, I think). It's got much of the stuff done in the series, but is quite entertaining.

>I found the Three Of A Kind book recently in a second-hand bookshop (the only places to go for comedy books, I think). It's got much of the stuff done in the series, but is quite entertaining.

I really liked TOAK at the time, even going as far as buying the LP in 1983. Good sketches, and the odd great song too - the Break Wind & Fire number was particularly superb.

Didn't know of a book, though.