Thunderbirds – 23. The Duchess Assignment

Jack Knoll's avatarSecurity Hazard

Directed by David Elliott

Teleplay by Martin Crump

First Broadcast – 17th February 1966

If I was to tell you there was a Thunderbirds episode all about an old woman with a gambling addiction who decides to rent out a portrait to a New York businessman, and ends up being kidnapped and trapped under a burning building – you probably wouldn’t believe me. If I was to then tell you that in my opinion, it’s one of the best episodes of the entire series you would probably never listen to anything I said ever again. Well you can do that if you like, because The Duchess Assignment is a real episode of Thunderbirds and it is certainly up there as one of my favourites. In my opinion there is just so much that The Duchess Assignment does right to pull off this unconventional story. It has the right amount of comedy…

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#BookadayUK July 2014 – week one round-up!

Hannah R.'s avatarHaving Read The Book

The topics for July 2014 The topics for July 2014

So this month, the #BookadayUK baton has been handed from Borough Press to Doubleday, and as I was so rubbish at keeping up with last month’s hashtag, I have decided on a Sunday to do a little round-up of the week’s topics.

So here we go!

July 1st – A book that made you laugh out loud – One of the easiest questions to answer so far, without a doubt the book guaranteed to make me howl on the bus is The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 and 3/4. Everything about it is utterly perfect.

TheSecretDiaryOfAdrianMoleJuly 2nd– Favourite SF/Fantasy novel for world UFO day! – Not genres I bother too often I have to admit. But seeing as he is always shelved in that area of bookshops I’m going to go for Under The Dome by Stephen King. I literally finished…

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Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Dave Addey's avatarTypeset In The Future

Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a movie adaptation of the cult sixties TV show, very nearly didn’t get made. If it weren’t for the runaway success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (both released in 1977), fickle Paramount executives would have canceled their faltering TV project Star Trek: Phase II, instead of adapting it into a big-screen production. We must give thanks, then, to producer Gene Roddenberry for pushing the project through ten years of development hell. In doing so, he named a space shuttle, created a custom font pack, and relaunched the swashbuckling futurism of the greatest of all space franchises: Star Trek.


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DEFINING CANON IN AN ALIEN WORLD

roguereviewer's avatarroguereviewer.

As a franchise consultant to 20th Century Fox on ALIEN, Predator, and Planet of the Apes, I often had to take a long hard look at a number of long-beloved franchise stories and try to figure out how exactly that could still fit in canon. If I couldn’t, I had to recommend they be tossed. I proposed a third option–what I’ve come to call barroom canon. These are stories overheard in a bar (or read in a comic, or played in a video game, or even posted on Facebook) that may or may not have some truth to them. This allows canon to have some flex in regards to including stories that otherwise could no longer count in a franchise’s development.

As the lead writer and canon consultant on the ALIEN RPG by Free League Publishing, I developed the following Canon Tier guidelines to working out the ALIEN universe.

Because…

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