9 Other Things the BBC Fabricated

1. Natasha Kaplinsky is actually one of those retro, '60s-type-futuristic robots, like that one out of the Jetsons.
2. None of the National Lottery “jackpot winners” ever won more than a tenner.
3. Daleks don't exist.
4. Alan Johnston was just a victim of a prolonged, BDSM-related mishap. (Too soon?)
5. Philip Schofield's hair colour
6. Pudsey's actually deaf, but the producers thought that that wouldn't come through as well on screen (this explains why he never speaks).
7. The “House of Commons” is filmed in a studio just outside Manchester.
8. That bloke who was accidentally interviewed on News 24 that time—he was a publicity stunt.
9. Anne Robinson's face

Failed Spin-offs: video games

Grandma Turismo

Designed to appeal to the older market, who are severely under-represented in the modern gaming culture. In it, you have the choice of any pre-80s hatchback, designed to get Grandma to the shops for more cat food, or to the doctors to sort out her intermittent migranes. Winning the 24-Hour Grimsby Cup can win you the coveted fibreglass Lada with a whopping 83bhp.

Super Monkey Balls

Guide Ai-Ai, Mee-Mee, Gongon and Baby through the various stages of increasing difficulty in search of testicles which, upon possession, makes them turn into Super Monkeys.

Need For Speed: London Underground

Search the various train stations of the capital city in search of amphetamines, making sure not to attract too much police attention.

WipEout 1897

Karl Benz’s “Velo” of 1894 celebrates its third birthday in this slow-paced German import in which drivers must compete over several areas of the globe, including Prussia, Cape Colony and Dominion of Canada. Cup races include the Gold Rush Challenge on the Klondike River and the Diamond Jubilee Derby in London.

Womb Raider

Designed to test your gynaecology skills in this first-person baby creation game, the title was withdrawn early due to extreme graphic content and feminist pressures.

Brian Lara‘s Crickets

Turns out that the record-breaking West Indian sportsman was a keen entomologist. It also turned out that everyone else was not.

Quaker

A mild-mannered member of the Religious Society of Friends meets his match as he enters another world through a Slipgate in order to, ultimately, defeat Shub-Niggurath in this unofficial spinoff from the Doom franchise. Although the level design and initial gameplay were encouraging, the lead character’s insistence upon sitting still, in silence, for up to hours at a time proved to be a hindrance.

Tekken Fag Tournament

Yoshimitsu, a lifelong Lucky Strikes fan, duels with Jin Kazama, an avid Marlboro Reds smoker, in this smoke-a-thon to unlock rare blends of tobacco.

The game was a failure for so many reasons; tobacco promotion and projected titular homophobia to name but a few. The real reason it was considered to be a flop was that no-one was ever a winner, and that the only way you could die was after 25 hours of gameplay, at which point cancer would set in. Even then, half of the time the characters still didn’t die.

Dirge Racer

Ridge Racer’s rather grim sequel resulted in intentionally slow driving, hearses only available in black and a soundtrack that reduced gamers to tears. The tagline “dead good” also helped Namco gain record complaints.

Shadow of the Colostomy

A young man called Wander travels across a vast land with his horse, Agro, in search of giant colostomy bags who reign supreme and affect the life of his lady friend, Mono. The preceding game already featured too many dark colours; the over-inclusion of brown did not help the sequel.

Rape Escape

Fugitive apes on heat, dispersed through time, descend upon anything with a pulse in this tasteless sequel to the first game on the PlayStation that required a Dual Shock. The game provoked the media to defend primates around the world by constantly playing that old clip of David Attenborough whispering into the camera about how great apes are, and how they are really nice, crap like that. You know the one. He’s kind of crouched at the front and they’re behind, generally messing about, playing up to the camera.

Transgenders

Optimus Prime becomes Optima Prime in a cars-to-fembots game designed to unite the gender-unspecific community of the world with the robotics industry. Gameplay waned after Optima found a split end after two steps on level 1-1.

GoldenPie

In a movie game spin-off’s spinoff, British super spy James Bond takes his latest campaign to Russia in search of Alec Trevelyan, who plans on using a giant satellite to destroy the world’s pastry and meat reserves in order to rid his life of his most hated foodstuff. James, being a true gentlemen, blows everything up in order to keep his beloved lunch.

Blast Corpse

Rare, Ltd. really hit a low with this early N64 title in which a crack team of demolition experts have to destroy buildings that get in the way of a slowly-moving, nuclear-powered corpse that could explode on contact with anything.

It also resulted in a successful lawsuit from Capcom who were miffed at the prospect of a competitor to their Resident Evil franchise.

Poland

It's a bit dusty nowadays here at The Twaddle HQ (off the A19, five minutes' walk from Gunpoint). We should never have left the Twaddlebot in charge without teaching it basic housekeeping skills. Or at least giving it an MP3 of I Want To Break Free.

To be fair, it probably wouldn't've done any housework even if it knew how: it's a right lazy get. So to save it the effort of having to hammer out a website every time some chump stumbles upon El Twad, we bought it a hamster. Called Blogger.

Blogger's a chirpy little bugger—she runs round in her wheel all day, generating a whopping 1.21 gigawatts of electricity. And we use Blogger to power The Bollocks. We've... kind of... integrated her into the Twaddlebot... sort of like the Megazord. We wouldn't've thought you could connect a hamster to a bag of old ZX Spectrum bits either, but as it happens, you can.

Yeah. “The Bollocks”. 'Cos we just realised (about three-and-a-half years too late) that “The Bollocks” would've been a better name than “The Twaddle”, (particularly given the reason we had to change it from “This Wasn't A Tree” in the first place (there's history (also, an apostrophe inside double brackets looks quite rude... ((')) ...yeah))), so we're using the name here instead. Sneaky, eh?

Anyhow, we've now got this new Twaddlebot/Blogger combination—“Blogglebot”? “Twaddleblog”? “Twbloddgleberot”?—running the show. Which is great! The ...Twaddggerblot... is far more efficient than it used to be—even our Germans are impressed. Not wanting to be outdone, they've been Twad Brew-ing at double-speed—Doppeltstärketwadbrau, they call it. Let's just hope the Twaddlebot (those other names sounded far too Welsh) doesn't start invading Poland or anything... that'd be unfortunate. And really politically incorrect.

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We begin The Bollocks, uncannily enough, with a compendium of Failed Spin-offs.

Failed Spin-offs

Often, once a TV show has run its natural course, or when the channel just needs a bit of easy cash, producers look at ways to reinvigorate an existing television franchise by creating a spin-off series. Unfortunately, for every Frasier there are hundreds—if not billions—of CSI Knaresboroughs.

The following are some of the ideas that were this close to being inflicted on the licence-fee–paying public.

Wacagay

Timmy Mallett spends his school holiday mornings travelling around the UK with his mallet, Pinky, waking people up at 6:30am in order to commit homophobic hate-crimes.

The show was cancelled after ITV bosses decided it was “utterly, utterly, utterly, utterly, utterly, utterly, utterly, utterly, utterly, utterly immoral” to wake people up at 6:30am.

Futureheadarama

A Mackem barbershop/rock quartet are accidentally cryogenically frozen on New Year's Eve and awake to find themselves in 31st century Sunderland. There they join the crew of an interplanetary delivery company who “hope they have a wonderful first day” and “are so happy to have them join the team”—they are so lucky on their first day. And they say “this is the job that people die for—I hope you're ready for the next stage. A lot of people work in the same place; don't let them get in your way”.

Among their co-workers are an alcoholic, foul-mouthed robot who “has no mind”; a pizza delivery boy who “can't raise the energy to get from A to B”; a senile old professor who's “trying not to think about time” and a “stupid and shallow” daughter of rich Martian land-owners.

Upon the series' cancellation, the quartet released a best-selling album based on their experiences.

Father Dead

After Dermot Morgan's untimely death, the cast of Father Ted reassembled for one more series, but the magic just wasn't there.

Nappy Days

Series chronicling the early years of the Fonz, along with his pals Chuckie, Phil and Lil and his spoilt cousin Angelica. In the last episode to be made, Fonzie must return safely to his playpen by jumping over the goldfish bowl on his tricycle.

Winner the Pooh

Michael Winner stars as a happy-go-lucky bear who lives in Hundred Acre Wood with—and sells car insurance to—his woodland pals, Tigger and Piglet, as well as Eeyore, whose Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is allayed by Pooh's frequent reiteration of his catchphrase, “Calm down, Eeyore”.

Space 1998

Series following the adventures of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the year 1998, as they boldly accomplish missions such as launching a telecommunications satellite, adjusting the Hubble Space Telescope's mirrors, and docking with the Russian space station Mir.

Frederick the 6th Musketeer

Abandoned after market research concluded that “they were pushing it with the fifth musketeer”.

Teenage Hero Turtles

Turns out the Turtles' mutancy was critical to their widespread popularity.

Biker Grove from Mars

Popular entertainers Ant 'n' Dec star as super-cool, earring-wearing, motorcycle-riding Martian mice who come to Newcastle-upon-Tyne after being blinded in a paintball war on Mars.

Captain Scarlet and the Mystermen

The indestructible hero of the popular series Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons faces his deadliest foes yet—brightly-coloured, anthropomorphic, geometrically-shaped rings of light, each of whom represents a different aspect of the human condition.

Nightmare

Virtual-reality game show. A team of children must guide one of their cohorts—who wears an upturned metal bucket on their head—through an artificial world in which all their worst fears are played out. At the end of each programme, the team dies.

Queen as Folk

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II comes out of the closet and divorces the Duke of Edinburgh, her husband of sixty years. This series follows the trials and tribulations of an octogenarian, out-and-proud, modern monarch in 21st-century Soho.

Causality

Intricate science fiction set in a hospital's Accident and Emergency department, dealing with the nature of time and the repercussions of cause and effect.

Fresh Prince of Belarus

Will moves to the former Soviet Republic along with Uncle “Shredder” Phil and the whole family. As the actor who played Geoffrey the butler in the original series was unavailable at the time of filming, Stephen Fry joins the cast, reprising his popular role as “Jeeves”.

Rosie & Gin

Gritty drama following an alcoholic gypsy puppet who lives on a narrowboat with her lover, Sir Jimmy Savile.

Gran Designs

Kevin McCloud follows septagenarian architects as they chase their dream of building their own conservatory.

Ann’s House Party

Ann Summers hosts this Saturday evening family entertainment show from her house in Wizzard's Sleeve. Each week she awards the vibrating Gotcha Oscar to another good-humoured celebrity tricked into having sex on camera. (The show was suspended indefinitely pending Health and Safety's investigation into the nature of the “gunge” used on the programme.)

Starkey & Titch

Oasis drummer Zak “son of Ringo” Starkey and TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh join forces to fight crime, with the help of Graham Norton as “Huggie Bear”.

Through the Keyhole Surgery

Sir David Frost invites a panel of well-known personalities to guess the identity of the mystery celebrity as Loyd Grossman performs keyhole surgery on them.

Challenge Alnwick

With the aid of a two-foot-wide mobile phone, the town of Alnwick, Northumbria, tries to build a community centre for disabled children in just four hours, on a budget of twenty-six pence. Filming was abandoned when it was realised that only a small portion of the town's population would fit inside the Challenge Alnwick helicopter at once, leaving much of the rest poking precariously out of the sunroof.

ITV2

Obviously.