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Showing posts from 2016

Public Eye: Welcome to Brighton?

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Back to the 1960s, 1969 to be precise, for this episode of Public Eye. I am reminded that it is actually the first episode of the fourth series, although you wouldn't immediately know that on the basis of what is currently available. Virtually the whole of the series up to this point has been wiped, leaving only a few episodes of the ABC series remaining from the run up to this point. What this means for us now is that to all intents and purposes Frank Marker's career begins with him getting out of an open prison. Of course there are hints of his previous career as a private investigator and the mistake which caused him to be incarcerated. The mistake has obviously left him with a legacy of bitterness, which spills out periodically for the rest of the series. This series is usually considered an odd one out in the run of Public Eye, because it concentrates far more on Marker himself than on his actual work. The fact that Marker is taken from his life in prison to the rath

Acorn Antiques

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I have written about a number of funny programmes here, following my usual policy that since this is a blog it will be about what I am watching and also will not include programmes which I do not like. Obviously Acorn Antiques makes it onto here because it is a programme I like very much, although I am finding it very difficult to write about it because of the complex nature of the programme and also my reaction to it. For a start, Acorn Antiques was never intended to be a show in its own right, although you can now get it in its entirety on a DVD. It was intended to be a segment in the show Victoria Wood as Seen on TV. I see that this ran from 1985 to 1987 and I remember it with great fondness. The wonderful Wood also unfortunately died of cancer earlier this year, which gives an extra sadness to the fact that I have found Victoria Wood as Seen on TV very difficult to watch at this length of time. I found that it had not worn well over the years. This is not however truse of Acorn

No Hiding Place

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Legend. Tthat is the only word for this series. It is the stuff of which cult TV legend is made. A phenomenally popular series in the 1950s and 1960s, and for the most part wiped by its makers Associated Rediffusion. It is right up there with the one remaining episode of Police Surgeon, the first series of The Avengers, and I gather that there are enthusiasts out there who have made it their life's work to locate more episodes. I gather there are people on the internet selling the available episodes on DVD but there are also episodes available to be watched and/or downloaded in all the usual places in cyberspace, so there isn't really that much  need to pay for a DVD. Personally I have downloaded the five available episodes on archive.org and watched them in an order which is probably out of synch with the order they were broadcast. I'm not sure that really matters, since it seems they are far divorced in original running order, and so there isn't any continuity in a

Spitting Image

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The rest of the classic TV blogosphere is gearing up for Christmas, so in true form, I am going to write about Spitting Image. In fact I can't think how I have never written about it here before, but I am watching my way through all the series of Spitting Image, now that I am feeling the need to give Are You Being Served a rest. Oh - perhaps I had better mention that the paucity of posts here has been because my new job is taking up quite a lot of my energy, but I am glad I jumped ship and should have done so years ago. My perception is that this most cult of all cult TV shows has been rather ignored by we who write about these things on the internet. This is surprising, because it was prominent throughout its run from 1984 to 1996. Even I, never a political animal, tuned in regualrly and enjoyed its ridicule of the great and the good who run this country, and in fact the world. Perhaps it has rather been ignored because it was so much of its time, and it naturally loses much of

Redcap: First Impressions

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A fortnight into my new job, which is much better than my last one, I have got enough energy to think about a blog post. I have repeatedly put off buying this series although it comes up regularly as a recommendation for me on Amazon, largely based on the reminiscences of army life often found in online reviews. My own interest in cult TV was first raised by the repeats of The Avengers screened in the early days of the UK's Channel Four and can only approach the shows I write about here with any reminiscence once we hit the 1970s. I do not find reminiscence for national service or the glorification of armed service sympathetic and can tend to be put off by the attitudes it engenders. Yet yesterday I found myself in the Entertainment Exchange Leamington Spa and read the blurb on the back of the box. I have a feeling there is somebody in Leamington with very good taste in television indeed, because that shop has introduced me to many a new TV series. I was surprised to find on the

Two Children's Programmes: The Owl Service and The Flockton Flyer

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Reflections on some 1970s children's TV programmes today, which I'm putting in a single post because I don't think my jaundiced meanderings on each are substantial enough for one post. It's a funny thing, because even though I am a 70s baby, I almost never remember the children's programmes of the 70s which are eulogised in the reviews on Amazon. I periodically watch one of them and have posted here about the ones which take my fancy. The first of the two I have in mind today is The Owl Service, adapted for screen from his own novel by Alan Garner. If there is one thing that can truthfully be said about The Owl Service, it is that it is guaranteed to leave its viewer uncomfortable. For a start, the book it is based on wasn't intended for children originally. And of course on adaptation the book doesn't really make a convincing children's programme, since to adult eyes it is quite incredibly sexy. I mean real, proper, all but showing it, young sexy stu

Francis Durbridge Presents... The Desperate People

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Mitchell Hadley at It's About TV commented on my post about Doctor Who: The Invasion that that was the first disc he bought on an international basis to circumvent high US prices and to play on his multi-region DVD player. It is a funny thing that the modern world of interational commerce and the internet mean that we cult TV fans are better served than we ever would have been in the days of the TV series we like to watch! I personally bought my set of The Man from UNCLE from Canadian Amazon. It was remarkably inexpensive and was couriered over to me and arrived two days after I ordered it. In the bad old days we would probably have been forced to belong to clubs and subscribe to magazines to get the TV programmes we like. This is also how I have managed to obtain the first of two volumes of Francis Durbridge Presents. I wrote some time ago, when I bought the region 2 DVDs of A Game of Murder that I was confused about whether or how the whole remaining series had been released o

Dick Barton Special Agent

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My policy on this blog is not to write about shows which are complete duds; of course it also means that if a show does not appear on this blog it may mean I think it is a dud or I may just not have got round to writing about it. Nonetheless I think it is better to use this blog to write about quality TV than to publish a list of shows which should be avoided. The point of this preamble is that this post is intended to rehabilitate a show which is unfairly neglected in my opinion. The reviews online seem either to be outstandingly positive or absolutely terrible. This show is real Marmite, and it is the 1979 Southern TV series Dick Barton Special Agent. The original Dick Barton series was a radio series broadcast from 1946 to 1951on the Light Programme, and the eponymous hero undertook a series of adventures, driven by his boredom after being demobbed after the war. The series is redolent of a Britain long-gone, and many of the attitudes it shows are redolent of a dream Britain whic

Doctor Who: The Invasion Again

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I see that I have blogged about this Doctor Who adventure here before ( http://culttvblog.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/doctor-who-invasion.html), and was surprised to see that what I focussed on was comparing Doctor Who with Sapphire and Steel, and that on re-watching this adventure, it makes quite a different impression on me. The subject of The Invasion, put very simply, is fear and loathing of The Machine, and the ambivalence towards technology which was so characteristic of the time provides a number of ironic twists to this adventure. The first of these is obviously that ironically, despite the Doctor's repeated statements that he hates computers (which I am taking as representative of technology as a whole) this adventure does not survive in its entirety. The irony is that the technology of the time, and the television companies' attitudes to it, resulted in this cry against the dominance of technology not surviving. This irony becomes even more twisted when it comes to the

Undermind

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I've had this series for some time and actually started writing a post about it at one point, which although I make a point of keeping everything (while not being what I would call a hoarder) I can't find it so will begin again. Plot-wise, we are in totally familiar territory with Undermind. Well, I say totally familiar, it is in the sense that technology, some kind of signal, is being used to get inside people and undermine society. The use of technology is very apparent from the very beginning of the series, and of course that is a characteristic subject of the 1960s television I write about here. The only different from the short of shows I watch normally is that the enemy here is an alien force, which I suppose places us with one foot in the sort of horror films of the 1950s when an all-American town is taken over by an alien force, only in this case of course it is set in Britain. In the case of Undermind the fear is placed in a very specific period of time. It is not

French and Saunders Parody the New Avengers

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The Avengers: Mister Jerico

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Today a post about one of two films I have been meaning toblog about here which are related to The Avengers in one way or another; the other one is Q Planes, which is thought to be a possible inspiration for the character of Steed, and I wil blog about it at some point, although I have never managed to watch it all the way through yet! I make no bones about tagging Mister Jerico with 'The Avengers'. Mister Jerico I believe was intended to be the pilot for another series starring Patrick Macnee. Just reading the box, the names are so familiar: written by Philip Levene, original music by Laurie Johnson, produced by Julian Wintle... This, kids, is what the team behind The Avengers went on to do before they went even further on to the New Avengers. And in fact the film is so very much like The Avengers in some ways. The font used for the titles was also used for The Avengers titles. It has Patrick Macnee in it, playing the sort of ambivalent figure he played in the earlier serie

Seventies TV: Steptoe and Son the Film

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Back to the 1970s today, and while I will grant you that Steptoe and Son was a series which spanned the 1960s and 1970s, I am mainly interested in the first of the two spin off films here, which is also called Steptoe and Son, and as so often on this blog, not really for a very obvious reason, but we will come to that. I had better begin by making a disclosure that I have never really taken to Steptoe and Son. If I'm frank it is because Steptoe senior is way too much like my own mother; unfortunately for this reason I can never find entertaining his continual manoeuvring to keep his son under his thumb. It is far too near the bone, and in this film he actually does something which my own mother would do, namely pretend to be ill to get his own way, having prevailed on his own son to take him on honeymoon! Personal concerns apart, the subject of this film is really a domineering father who will not let his son, who is nearly forty, grow up or get away from him. There is a wildly

Colonel March of Scotland Yard/Colonel March Investigates

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In a recent post about Knight Errant, I passed out of my usual time frame, i.e. beyond the beginning of the 1960s. In recent weeks I have also passed beyond my most recent date, previously the 1990s, when I posted about The Game. This has caused me to reflect on what TV was like before television executives began smoking copious amounts of weed in the 1960s and came up with the weird shows I post about here. I think probably Knight Errant was an atypical example, since it definitely has Avengers overtones. I'm not sure whether this is accurate but I have a mental picture of a snobbish division between the worthy broadcasting of the BBC and the more ephemeral broadcasting of the independent channels - in fact exactly the sort of programmes I blog about here. I'm sure the BBC's output required close attention and could not be reduced to background, although I suspect the picture in my mind's eye of people in evening dress (both viewers and broadcasters) is much furthe

The Avengers Series 1: Lost Episode Tunnel of Fear Recovered!!!

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I'm wrong. I'm wrong wrong wrong wrong. Never has it given me so much pleasure to say these words. After my confidently stating that no more Avengers Series 1 episodes would be found, behold Tunnel of Fear has turned up. You can read about it and other recovered shows at http://observationdeck.kinja.com/lost-episode-of-the-avengers-rediscovered-after-55-year-1787383187 I don't need to tell readers how delighted I am and it is one of the episodes I have always wanted to see. My only sorrow is that the first screening next month is sold out! Image credit: http://ianhendry.com/the-avengers-1961-lost-episode-tunnel-of-fear-from-the-very-first-series-rediscovered-after-55-years/

The Avengers Series 1: Toy Trap

There is something disheartening about watching old TV, in that it reinforces that human nature does not really change, and that the ambivalence about progress which I write about so often here, is a wise way to approach the treatment we humans mete out to each other. This series 1 Avengers episode is incredibly topical - for me at least - since recently in my city three brothels were busted in three separate operations on three successive days. The police were supposed to have reason to believe they were brothels. Well with the best will in the world, apart from the tea rooms in Sutton Coldfield, I knew all along that the other two were brothels and fail to see how they could have been anything else. I also used to live round the corner from the notorious Cuddles, where a major legal concern was that the girls were foreign nationals who had their passports taken off them. Even without that danger, the takings at the other brothels were phenomenal - in the millions - and it is very pl

The Avengers: The House that Jack Built

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Another day of non-stop rain here in Blighty, so I'm going to get my head down to a fairly analytical post on an Avengers episode I have always found difficult. To be frank, and to get the criticism out of the way at the beginning, the big downfall of this episode is that the sequences of Mrs Peel running through the house are way too repetitious, and rather mar what proves to be a seminal episode when considered in a more analytical way. That said, I was unsurprised to find my one big criticism echoed elsewhere on the internet, but was very surprised to discover that this episode has been sold for years in bootleg editions by S and M studios. No, I don't get it either, but this discovery was one of the things that have reinforced for me how differently a show can be understood. There is a very real sense in which the key concern of this episode is one of the major ones of so much 1960s TV: the fear of the machine, and in fact the absorption of Mrs Peel into the machine is t