Quite a good film, anyway; the whole "basing reality on ill-conceived television" idea was amusingly done, although maybe underplayed a bit, and ultimately the whole thing didn't make enough sense. But the superbly odd Thermians were more than enough to make the film worth watching.

Good if the Nomic has a good emperor, annoying if it's got an annoying one. From his behaviour elsewhere, though, Mr Holmes would appear to fall firmly into the former empire. This could be rather good.

Mercifully, taxpayers didn't foot this; Bisto apparently commissioned the research "in response to calls from people asking what to do about wasted gravy"; eerily implying that it's unsafe to pour down the sink and should be disposed of in designated dumping areas.

"The scientists also discovered that for the most efficient gravy absorption, the food had to be eaten in the right order" - for goodness' sake, it's only gravy; we aren't talking about uranium and carbon rods, here. For most efficient absorption we should probably mince the whole meal up and compress it to a small, easily-swallowable tablet. I think someone's missing a point. And wasting a research budget.

Which are all fairly unplayable and infuriating, of course, because that was the favoured way of making games last more than a few hours, back in the eighties. It's nostalgia, though, even if the Dizzy games were never really that interesting. Get it where you can.

An appropriately bewildering log of an online chat thing with Bill Bailey.