Some people just have to do things differently. As with it's cousin, "The Festival of Death" novel, one senses Johnny Morris wasn't happy sitting down to write this one without having to draw out a schematic diagram first. Thus the trick of "Flip Flop" is that one is distracted from the handling of the story, and such trifling matters as characterisation, by wondering if the whole thing is going to cleverly hang together or not.

Listening to it is therefore like following a bit of string. I lost the end a few times, but I came out the other side fairly convinced that it all made sense... probably. Who am I trying to kid? I'm sure Johnny could have pulled the wool over my eyes without me realising, and maybe he did. It doesn't really matter; the art of the conjuring trick is to entertain. And besides which, there's not a bad story under all this anyway. The setting evokes Christmas (which is never a bad thing), specifically "It's A Wonderful Life", although the two different versions of a derelict Puxatorny (one infested with sly Slithergees, one ruined by a war with them) are grim enough to lift the story away from whimsy.

In fact, what makes up for the fact that there is no ending, and the fact we essentially get one story told twice, is paradoxically because there is no end. "Flip Flop" successfully lifts the sense of hopelessness and dread from it's influence "Groundhog Day", the sight of the same day behind an infinite sequence of early mornings mirroring the realisation that the people in "Flip Flop" (chiefly Stuart and Reid, there's no-one else we really care about) are doomed whatever they do. The story is left to cycle endlessly round, with the attempted resolution of each bleak future ultimately inspiring itself again. So it becomes a tragic whole with no happy ending, a bit like the HG Wells story "The Man Who Stopped The World".

The two discs, which unfortunately have to tell essentially the same story structurally, are prevented from being boring by a game of "spot the difference", as certain lines are said differently and different jokes are used (only one take on "anti-radiation gloves") in each version. But why not go further? Why does each story have to follow such rigid lines, so long as its outcome is the same? In part, this is acknowledged in the different roles for Trevor Martin's Professor Capra in each history: in one, he has an interrogation device, in the other it's a time machine. But an even greater stroke of genius would be to tell a completely different story on each side, whilst still maintaining the looped narrative.

Still, we can't complain. All this and it has an amusing dig at positive discrimination too. An odd fish, but by no means a foul one.