Film critic Kim Newman is a prolific author of fiction. His trademark is mashing up characters from the works of others, as well as historical figures, in alternate histories. His novel Anno Dracula, for example, asks what might have happened if Dracula had not been defeated and became king of an imperial Britain ruled by vampires. You might call it clever-clever fan fiction but I often find it dazzling. How many pop culture connections can one brain hold?

‘Teddy Bears Picnic’ is a particularly thrilling example. It has Bob and Terry from The Likely Lads fighting with the British Army in Vietnam, alongside Frank Spencer and Blakey from On the Buses. And in the sky overhead, between cricket games, psychotic special forces officers Jennings and Molesworth blast ‘The Teddy Bears Picnic’ from their helicopters, to terrify the enemy. William ‘Just William’ Brown, meanwhile, has gone mad in the jungle.

Years later, Bob writes a book which Michael Powell wants to adapt into an epic movie to be called It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum…

You get the idea, there’s a lot going on.

First published in Interzone, August and September 1997, and then collected in Back in the USSA, 1997