Zine: Scotch Doubles.

[moonlightmead.livejournal.com]

I bought Scotch Doubles: A Professionals & Champions '/' Zine second-hand (it was first published in 1993) in September, knowing nothing about it beyond the title. I have now finished it, and am not terribly likely to keep it. But, before I get rid of it, can anyone who has seen this - or perhaps Champions, the other half of the crossover - tell me what I am missing? I cannot work out how seriously I am to take it.


Scotch Doubles: A Professionals & Champions '/' Zine was published by Nunn-Better Press in 1993, and reprinted in 1994. It contains the title story, and then some miscellanea at the back: a recipe for Bodie's Brownies, a sneak preview and advert for In Sprite of Himself, a list of "You are reading this zine because" tickboxes and some more pictures. It is a crossover between Pros and something called The Champions, which is a 60s series described to me as "like The Persuaders", not that this helped me.

There is one long story and it's a lot of text. A quick word-per-line count resulted in a guess of about 900 words per page: 60 lines in very small font on a page. Of the 172 pages, 40-odd are illustrations, but that's still a lot of writing. Even if we subtract arbitrary numbers for half-pages with illustrations, we are surely talking 90-120,000 words? So someone spent a lot of time on writing this. The artwork is credited as 'selected by' rather than 'by'. I am not sure what that means, but even if it was picking things out from a CD of designs, there are so many that someone spent a lot of time on that, too. (See right down at the bottom for more on this.) I also spent a lot of time on this zine - reading it - but by the end of it, it was just through stubborness that I finished the zine.

I started off thinking it was a serious story, despite the fact that every single secondary character is apparently named after a brand of whisky; then I thought it was a poorly-written attempt to be a serious story with notes of attempted levity in both narrative and dialogue; and in the end I decided it was intentional humour but that I was missing the jokes by a mile. I am aware that my sense of humour is a bit crap, but the humour didn't work for me at all. Before long, I was thinking "What the hell was this Champions programme? It must have been written on LSD". In the end, I was just determined to get to the end in the hope of working out what it was meant to be. I never did work it out, but the reason for the name Scotch Doubles came up right at the end: apparently it is a bowling term, and I can only assume that this explains the method the enhanced super-Bodie and wonder-Doyle use to save Cowley from a fate worse than death.

Oh. Super-Bodie and wonder-Doyle? Well. Yes. On their flight back from Hong Kong and Esther (or, occasionally, Ester), they crash in a mountain valley somewhere in the Himalayas and die. Bear with me. They are brought back to life and endowed with a variety of superpowers by three characters who live in a secret mountain city populated by monks and an Elder. I assume this is the Champions element kicking in. The new abilities are fairly sweeping. Seeing in the dark is fairly handy for finding the loo at night, apparently; but a problematic aspect is their new ability to feel each other's emotions. After pages and pages of inexplicable moodiness and peculiar actions of the parts of all five, we reach almost the halfway point of the zine and Bodie and Doyle suddenly feel mutual desire rise, bonk wildly for four paragraphs ("As they reached the peak before jumping into an orgasm, they grabbed each other by the ass and held on for the ride of their lives"), discuss their feelings some more, and then do it all again. Oh. Another super-power: getting it up ten times a night. By the end of the zine, they are telepathic with each other and developing precognition and clairvoyance.

Returning to the UK, they arrive just after Evil Mastermind has put his plan into motion: Cowley's old mate, now head of MI6, has hatched a convoluted plan to... well, I'm not sure. Kidnapping everyone in CI5 and making MI6 think they are playing a paintballing game with them so that CI5 will shoot them with real guns is part of it, but the main thrust (boom boom) is for Cowley's old mate finally to kidnap and have his evil way with Cowley, who spurned his advances many years ago. The rescue is played for laughs - at least I presume it was intended that way - but isn't really worth the previous 160-odd pages to get to this joke.

Subplots and themes that crop up all the time: plenty. There's a long one about Murphy/Susan Fisher. (If you don't like het, there's at least one scene to skip...) There are weird jokes by the characters about Kate Ross wearing pyjamas with attached pouches for her feet at night. There is Murphy's trauma ever since the Smurphs arrived in Britain. (His girlfriend tells him in bed that all she can see is a big blue elf on top of her.) There is Champions characters plot which I have largely ignored. Bodie's stomach barely stops rumbling. There is constant bizarre conversation in which everyone explains that they were not previously gay, despite a wide variety of experimentation with other men. (It was all about lust, so that wasn't being gay.)

I am aware that I am picky about other people's writing and make as many mistakes myself, but there are many, many typos, from the 'switch two letters about' variety ("protegése") to misplaced or missing apostrophes and word confusion ("field personal", "dulcimer tone" - dulcet? - and the like). Susan alternates between Fisher and Fischer. A spellchecker was obviously involved, but it didn't know names: the mention of the Karma Sutra is an example. This means that references to characters like "General Issimo Franko" leave me unclear whether this, too, was a joke, or simply a really bad spelling error. There's also a lot of use of / marks where I would not expect them: "Each held other MI6 agents/terrorists", "her small lab/medical office", "Doyle/Harper" (when he's undercover)

The participants in the discussions about the frequency of Irish origins and Catholicism in fanfic (one at T&SW and one that starts in the comments to the recent Larton rec here) will be variously entertained or appalled to add another CI5 member to the list: "Kevin Murphy wasn't the only one in the room with an Irish temper. Elizabeth Mary Bridget McShane was the youngest of seven children...". Yes, this is Betty. Murphy's full name is Kevin Patrick Ian, btw.

The dialogue really doesn't work for me.

Bodie talks like this (assume the TM to be in superscript): "Count on it mate, Linkwood ain't armed with no SplatmasterTM."
Doyle talks like this: ' "...we don't considered ourselves gay, but we are happy. As I said before, the homosexual relationships we've had in the past were passing fancies, curiosity, if you will. There was never any degree of fondness or love involved, just lust." Glancing over at Bodie, who was now a lighter shade of pink from his previous fushia, Ray smiled with warmth and sincerity before he continued. "Until we discovered our feelings for each other, that is. Tell me Sharron, is this sudden entrance into the world of homosexuality an after effect of our powers? Are you a lesbian?" '

Apparently it was all inspired by a chat in a hot-tub at Media West. All I can say is perhaps if you are a Champions fan it makes more sense.

There are occasionally some quite astute comments (well, I thought so) and paragraphs, but the text is so long that they really are buried - to the extent that I leafed through to find one to quote and failed, although I know they're in there.

Since I've got so far, I may as well pretend this is a proper review and mention the last bit. Illustrations. There are a lot: I counted 39 full-page illustrations and 19 pages which contain text and illustration. They're all black and white. Some are reproductions of photos from the series or of the actors and seem linked to the text. The others are line drawings of tiny cherubs which look like early clipart (if not, I apologise to the artist) and full or half-page illustrations of interlocking knotwork and illumination-style birds and men and other figures: the sort people often call 'Celtic' artwork. The cover art is a good example of it. They're pretty if you like that sort of thing, but I do not see what in the world these are to do with the plot - or even the subject matter, unless it's the links between Scotch and Scottish, and then Scottish and Celtic, and then Celtic knotwork and Anglo-Saxon artwork (which is what I think these are closer to). Not that this explains the cherubs. Not the Victorian bathers.

Bit nervous about posting this, because I like to find something positive, and it's entirely possible the original author is still around and will be aghast. But, well. I would have liked to have known more about this zine before buying it, and even before I get rid of it, I would like to know: what am I missing? Is it simply that my sense of humour is very different? Or non-existent - I have been accused of this often enough to think that there may be some truth in it. I do like at least some funny Pros stories! I enjoyed Larton, and Love Conquers All, and Fly on the Wall, and... erm. Okay. Not many! But anyway, is this zine a product of its time and place? Is this the sort of thing that comes out of hot tubs? (Do all conventions have hot tubs? (*books for Connotations immediately*) Or of Media West?

Tell me what I missed about this zine!