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Showing posts from 2018

Time as Treated in Some 1970s TV Series

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I recently took a leap in the dark and bought the box set of Timeslip, a show I've never really fancied on the basis of its reviews on the internet. Part of the reason for that is that I like my vintage TV to reflect the contemporary world and I have a preference for series beginning in the sixties up to the end of the seventies. Naturally I make arbitrary exceptions to this rule when it suits me. One of the things about mainly sticking with one period of television is that I become familiar with the conventions of the time, and thus it becomes comfort TV. The world view I find myself banging on about here is the contemporary 'modern 'reverse one of hope in the scientific future, frequently combined with warnings of what could happen in the event that the burgeoning technology gets into the hands of a diabolical mastermind. I am currently in the midst of several shoes which treat time in different ways, so this post will be about several at once. The first is The Cha

Cybermen/Cybernauts with Reference to Doctor Who! The Moonbase

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I have been watching The Moonbase, and I'm liking it very much. Not for the first time it has made me ponder that Cybermen appear in Doctor Who, and Cybernauts appear in The Avengers. Cyber of course indicates that something pertains to the world of computers, information technology and, nowadays, virtual reality. Much of this was a fond dream in the 1960s but the appearance of this word reflects the contemporary enthusiasm for the brave new world of science, an enthusiasm I have written about here frequently. I have also written about the corresponding fear of what happens when technology gets out of hand, which is of course present in the depiction of both Cybermen and Cybernauts. I had wondered before whether anyone else had made a connection between these two monsters, and of course fandom didn't fail me, see for example  here.  That link also kindly did my homework for me and revealed that the Cybernauts were first broadcast a full year before the Cybermen made their

Target: Shipment

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I try not to do much in the way of description here, because there's a lot of that about on the internet. In the case of Target there isn't any, so here we go. Hackett arranges a sting because he is informed a strong van is going to be raised. It doesn't happen but he finds his informant has been murdered in his own car. Hackett immediately suspects Maynard, a local respectable luminary of being behind this, and confronts him at the golf club. After twists, threats and intimidation, and much police footwork, the truth about what is happening on the ship, is revealed. I love the glee with which Hackett confronts Maynard at the end. I commented before that the cars in this show are gorgeous. Hackett is given a mark 3 Ford Cortina to drive after the murder in his original car, a more recent Ford. The flares are also quite something. Apart from the cars what most strikes me about this show is how old fashioned the police's office looks. The clattering of typewriters do

Target: First Impressions

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It gives me great pleasure finally to be writing about Target here, and I'll just give my first impressions because the discs only arrived today and I'm rushing into print. Target is one of those legendary series of UK television, legendary because nobody has seen it since it was broadcast. Legend has it it was the BBC's answer to the popularity of ITV shows like The Sweeney and The Professionals. It followed a similar formula and perhaps overdid the violence because after a record number of complaints it was pulled after only two series. Basically if you like the other shows you should like Target. I do. The shows still exist and I have bought series 1 from  here.  If you send the guy an email he invoices you by email and you pay by PayPal. What you get is three printed DVDs in cardboard sleeves. They have menus but otherwise there's nothing fancy and that's fine by me. Picture quality is acceptable in my opinion, but as usual don't expect HD from a show of t

Danger Man: The Ubiquitous Mister Lovegrove

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I have been prompted to watch this episode by a new comment posted on my  original post  on this episode. It has been some time since I have watched many Danger Man episodes and have also not watched through The Prisoner lately so wanted to revisit what I thought before. When I started this blog I had an ongoing fear that I would find I had blogged about all the interesting shows and run out of things to say. This no longer frightens me because I now realise that good TV can be watched repeatedly and bring different things to mind. In my first post I decided to take the view that this episode was a true precursor of The Prisoner. This time round the episode has made me think differently, purely because of the opening scene of the car crash. It is evident that Drake of course works for an organisation. And this has taken my train of thought two ways. The first is that the opening scenes remind me of the Avengers episode, The Hour That Never Was. Visually they are incredibly similar

Freewheelers: Series One

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The only series of this show currently commercially available is series 6, which I have written about here before. I see from IMDB that this show was not only very go-ahead at the time, apparently being the first time in the UK that a boat was set up as an Outside Broadcast Unit, but also suffered from the junking common at the time. Apparently the only reason it survives at all was because the material chanced to be kept by the series film editor. The upshot is that apparently what I have is a reproduction of this single copy. You can buy it off the internet as I did myself. The only thing I would say is that I have decided I am not going to name (and thus advertise) the vendor for one reason. I was impressed with the speed at which they rushed the order round here, sending me emails all the way to let me know what was happening. So customer service is great. The discs came to around £15 which I suppose would be a shop price for many box sets, and in this case I don't mind pay

Doctor Who: The Smugglers Episode Two

I'm afraid this post will be rather derivative, since I looked online and found that everyone else has already thought and published the thoughts I had myself! What is all my own thought, though, is a growing distaste at the idea of time travel. I'm actually no great traveller at, although it's the actual travelling I dislike rather than the being in different places. This episode makes very clear how dangerous time travel is and how much you could feel trapped. Nobody will believe the truth about your situation and you will be permanently an alien in the place and time you travel to. A humorous point is perhaps rather overdone about this in the way the other characters consistently mistake Polly for a boy, because of her sixties-era trousers and cap: In a further touch of panto, Polly is mistaken for a lad throughout. The joke’s on her for wearing 1960s slacks and a Bob Dylan cap, but the notion that any lusty seadog wouldn’t immediately clock luscious Anneke Wills in h

Steed's Library: Spotted Again

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I have rather got out of the habit of posting my sightings of the books from John Steed's flat in Stable Mews. I suppose I have got used to the idea that this set of distinctive leather-bound books would keep appearing all over the place in sixties TV (and it's not only the books, props reappear all over the place in The Avengers, and recently I have read about props being used in both The Prisoner and Randall and Hopkirk Deceased). I have got so used to seeing them, that recently it took me aback to see Steed hiding behind his books when pretending to be under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen and chased by a murderous fake nanny who is a diabolical mastermind. Of course the episode could only be Something Nasty in the Nursery.

Doctor Who: The Smugglers Episode One

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Of course this is not the first time I have blogged about TV which no longer exists (my series of posts on series 1 of The Avengers will be continued at some point in the future). This First Doctor adventure still exists as a soundtrack, some bits which survive and telesnaps. I have never got on well with audio issues of programmes which were intended for TV, so what I am writing about here is the wonderful Loose Cannon reconstruction of this adventure, which I won't link directly because it is readily available on their Daily Motion channel. Normally I wouldn't get on very well with this adventure, simply because historical dramas never do it for me. That is even usually the case for Dr Who, but the historical setting doesn't put me off. I was recently in a shop buying a Dr Who when the man behind me started telling me that Who has never been the same since it went into colour. He's wrong, in my opinion. Two things which marked sea changes in the show were the fir

Danger Man! Not So Jolly Roger

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I was sure I had blogged about this, but if I have I can't find it. This is the last black and white Danger Man episode and it's a stunner. For a start the human chameleon John Drake becomes the cool DJ Johnny Drake, or JD. How cool is that? For another the setting is about as groovy as you could want. At the time we didn't have many licensed radio stations in the UK and the inability of the BBC stations to cater to the audience for pop music led to a proliferation of pirate radio stations. Naturally pirate radio continues, but the setting places the episode firmly in the latest trends in 1960s Britain. Many of these stations were based off shore to take advantage of a legal loophole, but this Danger Man sets Radio Jolly Roger on the  Red Sands Sea Forts  in the Thames estuary. They are still there and an internet search demonstrates loads of nostalgia for their time as several pirate radio stations. That's right, the uber-cool Danger Man series recorded an episode

Some Grown Ups' and Some Children's Programmes, and my Christmas Present to Myself

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I have been trying to find a suitable TV Christmas present for myself and as a result have hit the wall I do on and off, when it feels as if the supply of classic TV which I will actually like,has dried up. Of course the key problem here is actually my picky taste in TV shows. So of course I have been watching stuff relevant to this blog, and will use this post to talk about a few things which I won't be writing a whole blog post about. The sixties are the setting for a lot of the TV I watch, and were also the setting for the sexual revolution. Not TV, but a classic film of the time is Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, in which Barry Evans's character tries, and eventually manages, to lose his virginity. Teen sexual angst aside, the film is so redolent of the sixties that it is a classic. Evans also stars as a randy taxi driver in Adventures of a Taxi Driver, available in a boxed set with other Adventures... films, if you like that sort of thing (I do). Personally I didn&

Wilde Alliance: The Private Army of Colonel Stone

This episode is a deceptive one and its strength is in the complexity of the story it tells and the different impressions it gives to the viewer. There is just one weakness, which is that it paints people in rather simplistic, almost stereotyped ways. I think probably the most naive character is Jamie's mother,who can believe no evil of him at all. Colonel Stone is a type very familiar from the years after World War 2 - fake colonels and majors who boasted of their honours and tended to disappear when other members of their regiment were about. The seventies are a bit far removed for that sort of character but of course Stone is old enough to have served in the war. Jamie himself is painted as a saint by his mother. Frankly - how can I say this - he comes across as irritatingly good. The story is that he has made a cottage over to Colonel Stone during the expedition in South Africa in which Jamie died. Much of the point of this episode is the exploration of whether this story is

The Sentimental Agent: Meet my Son, Henry.

I wasn't going to write about this show, because I found it difficult to phrase what I wanted to say, but I think this episode may provide the right medium. Not a favourite in the cult TV world, this one. On the face of it this is hard to understand, but this show manages both to be classic ITC viewing and have what will be for some viewers some major defects. Perhaps I had better say that its main claim to fame is as the first TV appearance of Diana Right. The opening sequence encapsulates this perfectly. The Aston Martin. The cigarette holder. The sophisticated places. So far we're in familiar territory for our sort of TV. But, oh dear, the theme tune. It's not hummable but gets into your head and does not give the lounge lizard impression we want for a cult TV series. This episode starts with a daring robbery of top secret plans from a Space Development Corporation. Thus far the show is easy to interpret: the corporation represents modernity. Their building is modern,

The Avengers: The Gravediggers

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I started a blog post on this episode last week but it became incredibly unwieldy so I have scratched the whole lot and will start again. I find that using voice activated software to type makes me even more verbose than usual so perhaps I'm better with bullet points. I do highly admire the way David Stimpson blogs about The Prisoner, though, with more short posts on particular points, although I'm not sure it would work with the way I blog. 1. This Avengers episode is the famous one with Mrs Peel strapped to the railway line. I start with this because I had forgotten it was this one. My main criticism of this episode is that what with the radar thing, the hospital, the undertakers and the railway, it is perhaps somewhat too packed with different images. 2. Apart from that scene the episode contains about every ingredient of an Avengers episode you could ever wish for: English eccentrics, wonderful visuals, deadly enemies... You name it. 3. The episode effectively 'Ave

Wilde Alliance: First Impressions with Specific Reference to A Game for Two Players

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Source Last weekend I had an outing to Gloucester and bought the boxed set of this show in a charity shop. I had previously avoided it, and actively disliked the snippets I had seen on the internet. I obviously hadn't managed to see very much of it because I had completely missed the fact that Patrick Newell (surely everyone reading this will know that he played mother in The Avengers) is a regular character. It is usually described as a detective serious about Rupert and Amy Wilde who have an extravagant lifestyle and also function as amateur Detectives. The series was broadcast in 1978. Continue my usual policy here, of minimising description on this blog, because I want to focus on one particular episode, first a few impressions. My first impressions were awful! Through the first disc in the box the show really could not hold my attention at all, I thought it looked Bland, moved slowly, and the plots were lightweight. This last seems to be a fairly common criticism on the

The Man from UNCLE: More Parodies

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More than two years ago  I posted about some sexploitation pulp novels spoofing the 'Man from...' theme of the TV series. Since then I have discovered that I not only managed to miss some of the later and more bizarre titles but I've found another parody series. So here goes: Incidentally, who would have thought there would be Man from UNCLE chewing gum? I see there was a film out in 1970 called The Man from ORGY: Do I even need to say that the plot isn't great literature? Also Slappy White is a great pseudonym! Protagonist Steve Victor ( Robert Walker Jr. ) is a spy and scientific investigator for the group Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth (O.R.G.Y.). Victor is given a mission to determine the location of three prostitutes that are due  US$ 15 million from their deceased female manager. Victor starts off the trail only knowing that the three women each have a tattoo on their buttocks of a gopher grinning. He is stymied in his e

The Avengers: The Superlative Seven

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This weekend I have watched the House on Haunted Hill (1959) for only the second time in my life. I have had it saved on my hard drive for a number of years but haven't watched it again because I remember it as being rather inconclusive and unsatisfying. I have much preferred it the second time, for Reasons which are not entirely clear to me. It has however set me thinking about some possible connections with this Avengers episode. The superlative seven it's another of those Avengers episodes which Tend To Be  written about fairly dismissively in the blogosphere. I have a feeling that this is because it is perceived to be a remake of the Cathy Gail era episode dressed to kill. And of course it is, or rather it is another episode which uses the same basic plot device off a number of people being called together and then being picked off by various methods. Let me get of the way right at the beginning that I agree with the basic criticisms of this episode, and in fact do

Fanny Cradock

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Today a post which I wasn't sure would really fit the description of this blog, and this lady may not be that well known abroad. On reflection I don't see how I could have had any doubt, since the country's first celebrity chef, who cooked in evening dress in The Royal Albert Hall, was a serial bigamist, invented her own past, cooked food dyed blue and green to look like trees and all sorts of strange things, publicly roared at her common law husband and assistants, and entertained the nation with her cookery programmes... Well if that isn't Cult TV I don't know what it is! I will try to stick to the TV I promise, and not get too caught up in her scandalous private life, but I must just say that Fanny Cradock with her husband Johnny was also the real person behind the character called 'Bon Viveur' who has a column in The Telegraph for years and years. I have found some reflections by her successor in the same role: Trawling the Telegraph’s archives, I

Virgin of the Secret Service: First Impressions

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Source:  here After hesitating for a number of years, a hesitation which was caused by definitely mixed reviews on the internet, I have finally taken the plunge and bought the box set of this series on spec , having never seen a single episode of it. Not a favourite of the cult TV world, is I suppose the verdict on the internet. This verdict seems to be based on the idea for this show cannot decide what it really wants to be. It is either an actual spy series set in the Edwardian era, or it is a light piece of fluffy parody, off the sort which the 1960s did so well. The show has been compared to Adam Adamant, just with the proviso that in this there is the hero has never gone to sleep. It has also been described as an Edwardian Avengers, surely a huge compliment if it can be said to be true. I have been trying to get out of the habit of making general posts about a new series, and instead concentrating on posts about single episodes, but I am watching this series for the first ti