Cult TV Blog

The Drowned Town is an episode of the long-running series about archaeology, Time Team. It's about one of my favourite places, the mystical town of Dunwich, Britain's Atlantis. In mediaeval times it was a port which rivalled London, with several churches, even a cathedral, until two storms in the fourteenth century caused the majority of it to vanish into the sea. Coastal erosion has continued since then and there's a whole history which continues to crumble and collapse. The reality is that the remaining few dozen homes which currently constitute the village of Dunwich will also vanish into the sea within the next century, and this is the setting for this episode of Time Team. They comment, rightly that it's an archaeologist's and historian's nightmare because it won't be there and this is about as at risk as heritage can get. The premise the team set themselves is to prove whether or not Dunwich was also an Anglo-Saxon settlement before the mediaeval perio...

'It's a bit black over Bill's mother's' is a very old Birmingham saying indeed, and it means that storm clouds are forming to the South East of the city, over Stratford-upon-Avon. The 'Bill' in the saying is of course William Shakespeare and I think I am the only TV blogger who can blog about this documentary and add such local colour. Apart from my own bizarre attitude this documentary is a masterpiece of historical documentary making, about what on earth is going on with Shakespeare's tomb in Stratford parish church, because it's nowhere near big enough to contain a body. The investigation is absolutely fascinating as an example of televisual dramatic documentary making. It starts off with the vicar refusing to let them just randomly dig up the grave (because of course he did, they'd need to go back with a court order, and this is largely for dramatic effect), saying that the famous curse on the tomb is indication enough that Shakespeare wouldn...

This is a documentary about the 25 day riot and rooftop protest at Strangeways prison in Manchester in April 1990. It is the 2015 documentary here . As always I'm finding that blogging about TV brings out things about shows which I wasn't expecting. These posts about documentaries are making me think about different documentary techniques and making me criticise the way different documentaries show their subject. This one primarily uses a deceptively powerful technique about this technique of some narration but mainly depending on interviews with the prisoners, officers and even the chaplain in the middle of whose sermon the riot kicked off. Sounds perfectly simple doesn't it, and certainly doesn't sound powerful. But it's the juxtaposition of the different interviews which is what makes it powerful. Seriously this is some powerful documentary making. What I mean by this is the way you see the screws saying there was no abuse of the prisoners going on. You then imme...

Warning: This blog post is about a documentary about child abuse and may be distressing. I have linked the relevant report of the Scottish Child Abuse inquiry which also contains significantly disturbing accounts of abuse, including in a setting of religious worship. Sins of our Fathers is a BBC Scotland documentary about abuse in Fort Augustus Abbey school, a school run by Benedictine monks in Scotland: both the school and the monastery have been closed since the 1990s. It is available on iPlayer. And it's bloody devastating. It goes straight into its first explicit description of sexual abuse within a matter of minutes and then immediately goes on to how the authorities at the monastery knew, and it isn't even talking about Fort Augustus yet, it starts with all the other monasteries of the English Benedictine Congregation first and then indicates that the Fort Augustus scandal was the last to break. This technique is literally devastating, completely factual, and you will kav...

This post is about two documentaries, one of which is TV and the other isn't. I'm doing them both for completeness in case anyone is interested and because they both interest me. So there. Actually the subject has been touched on on the blog before in my post on the Danger Man episode Not So Jolly Roger here . They are about the sea forts called Maunsell forts (after their designer) built in the sea in strategic places off the coast of Britain during the second world war. The wikipedia page ( Here ) is actually very good but the short version is that a man called Guy Maunsell invented several designs of forts which would be phsyically in the sea outside the then limit of British territorial water to stop German forces approaching the land rather than stop them once they got here. They weren't everywhere around the country, they were placed in the Thames estuary to defend London and surrounding areas and outside Liverpool to protect Liverpool. There were two separate design...

You wouldn't believe the difficulty I am having finding programmes to blog about which would be suitable as Television for a Time of Strife. So many programmes, when you come to look at them, include references to plagues, government corruption, espionage, poverty, injustice, that they really aren't suitable. For that reason here I am blogging about this wonderful mockumentary about a Cotswolds village with a character heavily based on serial killer Fred West . All I can say is that strange things will start to be entertaining as the level of strife increases, and writing this post is how I found on tvtropes.org that there is a thing called Comedic Sociopathy. Perhaps I should mention that this show has a Uk rating of 15 for Strong Language and Sex References. The show is made by  real life siblings (Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper as Kerry and Kurtan Mucklowe), playing members of their fictional family the Mucklowes, and based on real events in Cirencester, although filmed...

Surely the FBI is on the minds of the whole world this week? It's no use, us setting the collapse of our banana republic government to the chase music from Benny Hill doesn't compare, and obviously we're going to have to have a General Strike (click the link in the menu to join the resistance). So what else was I going to move straight on to but a bit of X-Files. I've chosen this one for a rather idiosyncratic reason which is that I like the particular sequence set in the hotel, and in fact have found that I'm tending to find these Series 10 episodes rather difficult to get my head round. I have identified a couple of reasons for this: they have complex, layered plots, and tend to be very self-referential to the previous history of The X-Files. Which is fine, obviously. What makes it difficult is that this season frequently pokes fun at the growth of conspiracy theories and increase in people believing utter nonsense since the original show aired. Since 2020 this ha...

I see that I wrote about this series in a general post ( here ) in 2016, in which I expatiated at length about its gorgeous setting of the former Birmingham Central Library. Having got that out of the way, I'm intrigued that it has struck me very differently this time. This post might come across a bit apocalyptic, and I'm not sorry in the slightest.  I seem to have missed much of the point of this show when I wrote about it before (silly me). There is a recurring motif that the world of Cold War era espionage depicted in The Game is, indeed, a game and one that is played by the characters. You could of course interpret that idea several ways, including it meaning that you might have to follow rules or use tactics or strategy to win. However I think it is much more clear that The Game is somewhat unreal. You play the game regardless of the impact on the players, and another recurring motif is the different ways people react to things like deaths which carry out in the course of...

The advantage of themed series of posts is they keep my grasshopper mind on the subject and the disadvantage is they don't necessarily represent what I'm watching and detract from the principle that I blog about what I'm actually watching. Hence a sort of round up post of some things I have been watching and some things I've just discovered. Some of these might get a post of their own as well. When I was doing the posts about orphaned episodes it brought home to me that it is important not to give a show or a film the same name as another one. Obviously we know all about this problem with The Avengers, but it turns out there was a TV comedy show between 1983 and 1988 called  Who Dares Wins . Even at the time that name was a mistake because since it is the motto of the SAS it had already been used by  this  film, and has since been used by  this  TV show and then  this  one. What is wrong with you people? You might think you're giving your show a punchy...

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here . I seem to have come to the end of the orphaned episodes I have for now, and this post is to gather together some shows that I think people might like but I don't think I can squeeze a whole post out of each one. I still have one separate post to publish with my reflections on this journey down the junked TV rabbit hole. Mornin' Sarge  (1989) is a single season comedy set in an incompetent police station and made by the team behind  They Came from Somewhere Else . You can read the story behind this team  here . Not to beat about the bush I think this show may be a bit Marmite, and online opinion seems to be divided between raving about it and a few people saying it wasn't much cop (geddit?). The  pilot episod e has got loose on the internet. Mr Majeika is an almost legendary children's TV series about a wizard who has failed his exams seventeen times so is sent to earth to teach in a primary school. He...

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here . So far there have been various reasons these shows have been broken up or become unavailable. I wasn't going to do this show (there are a couple of episodes on YouTube) but have decided I will, simply because of this episode's unusual reason for being orphaned: because it was so controversial at the time of its first broadcast. I am also delighted to say that it is reality TV and is about the residents of James Turner Street in this great city.  But first some background. You didn't think I'd actually get straight onto the subject did you? Winson Green is a loosely defined inner-city area in the west of the city of Birmingham, England. It is part of the ward of Soho.  It is the location of HM Prison Birmingham (known locally as Winson Green Prison or "the Green") and of City Hospital (formerly Dudley Road Hospital) as well as of the former All Saints' Hospital. The area has a very multi-racial p...