The following images were taken from, of all places, a Youtube upload of Danny Baker After All:
I had completely forgotten these existed, and when I saw them again after thirty two years… all I can say is that I haven’t had a proustian rush like that for quite some time.
I remember the noodles being really good, and I always loved the adorable little figurines on the packaging. Incidentally, that’s why this is featured on the aforementioned BBC programme in 1993, as a member of the public sent it in to the show with the thought that “ha ha ha it looks like the serving suggestion is to have two dolls next to it ha ha ha ha”. Yes, that’s hilarious, dad.
Upon searching the entire internet (for two minutes) for a complete picture of the above noodle brand, I couldn’t find any images of them that dated back to the 90s. It seems this brand still exists, but now they have really dull and plain packaging with not a single kawaii winking dog-thing in sight. So this might be the first ever appearence of 1993-era Doll Instant Noodles packaging on the world wide web after about three decades…
Jonathan Nash, AKA J. Nash (if wet, Jon Pillar), was a very funny writer who, I’m now realising, was a huge influence on me. He worked on the old Commodore Amiga magazine, Amiga Power, and before that got his start at the equally legendary Your Sinclair, both of which were touchstones for British gamers of the 80s and 90s. He brought a very particular comedic voice to gaming that stood out to the prevailing style of most mags at the time – and a big part of that was down to him being genuinely funny.
Nash’s writing was very different from the increasingly coarsening tone of much of what passed as “games journalism” from the mid 90s onwards, or the also wretched “hey cowabunga etc” sort of thing, which would be written by people who hadn’t seen any episodes of The Simpsons made after 1990 until BBC2 started showing it.
A key part of Nash’s writing was his feel for absurdist and sometimes mock-Victorian / Edwardian / early 20th Century nonsense, pretending to be stuck in yet also wryly commenting on “Boy’s Own” 50s larks, in the same field where people (children) earnestly debated the merits of Sonic over Mario.
He further developed the initial YS / AP house style – which had grown out of basically being Smash Hits but without all the grotesque music journalists and the requirement to engage with Johnny Hates Jazz – and brought it kicking and screaming from the late 1980s to, er, the early to mid 1990s. But in every review he would eventually knuckle down and methodically analyse the game in question. He’d dutifully point out the bugs, rotten controls and various unforgiveable corporate shenanigans that resulted in broken and miserable cash-grabs. And those same reviews would be dotted with references to Killer Klowns From Outer Space, or Hamble from Play School, or something.
He was reportedly quite a fascinating man, a genuine British eccentric in many ways; only he was a previously unheard-of type of eccentric who focused on either celebrating video games for being excellent, or exasperatedly deriding them for bad controls, boring plots, really really boring space marine nonsense (if it was an FPS and the year was 2002) or needless ice levels (if it was a platformer and the year was 1994).
He was astonishingly knowledgable – for example, he seemed to have an amazing array of info on old cartoons stored in his head, which he’d offer nuggets of in posts on random forums under obvious fake names like Mr Thisisanobviouslyfakename. He also had a surpising aversion to using swearing in his work – while he was never offended by bad language, and would occasionally use a rude word if absolutely required, he apparently would genuinely use phrases like “Bother!” or “Dash it all!” when upset.
This may sound a bit odd, but I feel J. Nash’s comedy stylings (Urgh. – Ed) had a certain moral code to it that was starting to go missing in the 1990s games scene, and has pretty much vanished out of the usual AAA areas. It must be stated that his seriousness at properly doing the actual revewing part of reviews pissed off a lot of game devs and video game companies, simply by pointing out that they tended to shove out an awful lot of absolute (spit – Ed). He stood up for the little guy, in other words. To further illustrate, here’s a quote from him on that well known fundamental corporate word and concept, “product”:
If you use this [word] and are not speaking about multiplication, you ought to be punched. If you use this and are speaking about games, you ought to be crippled with hammers and entombed alive. You cannot even use it ironically. The simplest way to trap a member of AP into a scandal of violence is to go up to them and say this word once in a non-mathematical context.
His biggest commerical achievement was co-writing the 2000s BBC Radio adaption of Sexton Blake, along with his long time collaborator Mil Millington. None other than Simon Jones – Arthur Dent himself – took the main role, and the series also included June Whitfield and William Franklyn, in one of the latter’s final performances. Yet to me, and many others, the likes of his withering-but-also-scrupulously-fair review of Alien Breed 3D, or the whole farrago around that one bloke from Commodore UK screaming at him down the phone while Nash downloaded a massive picture of the Animaniacs, tend to be among the examples of his work that echo down the years… for better or worse.
I’ll end this by simply copy and pasting an example of one of my favourite types of writing he did, which I call The Very Very Long List Of Things On A Theme. The original link is here, and it is titled “Further Terrific Stock Music”.
Mood Suite: Parsimony
Bright and Early at the Sinister Bakery
Hearse Chase
Mounting Consternation
Consternation Mounting
Reading the Will (With Biscuits)
What an Exciting Town the Tourist Information Board Thinks This Is!
Unwise Foot Pursuit Up Hill
Approaching the Space Cafe
Is He the Murderer?
Is She the Murderer?
Is He the Murderer After All?
Block of Flats
Naughty Danger
Elderlies’ Comicals
Elegance at the Canal
Big Car
Disproportionately Thrilled Patrons of Cheaply Sketched Nightclub
Unwise Foot Pursuit Up Lighthouse
This Looks Considerably Less Fun Than at First Appeared
