Cult TV Blog

Future posts on this blog will not appear on blogspot. They will be at  culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive or culttvblog.substack.com   I am delighted to kick off my season of posts about 1970s TV shows with this show, which was the winner of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for Best Television Drama Series in 1973, an award which was well deserved in my opinion. Perhaps I should stress that it is not to be confused with the film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier, which may be better known in the US. Actually it may also be better known here, because I can't think why all the rubbish 1970s TV series are so dominant when there is quality like this lying about. On the surface The Organization is a programme about the machinations and politicking in a large organisation called Greatrick. That is the introduction you will read all over t'internet and it may even say that on the DVD release, which is probably one of the reasons I'd heard of this show but never fan...

Well, that abortive move from Blogger didn't last very long did it? I don't know what happened but Overblog won't be getting the benefit of the millions of page hits that would result from hosting this blog, and instead I'm going to be absconding to Tumblr (address below). I'm still playing with it and will post here to announce my final switch. This post is the introduction to a projected series of posts on 1970s TV series. I am going to try to write one post per series on a number of series which I really think are rather good, in a similar way to what I previously did about 1980s TV. When I did that I found that the shows I featured were mainly ones that I didn't feel I could do justice to in some way, but nonetheless could do an introductory post to the series and focus on one episode. There are a number of problems with blogging about 1970s TV shows which I didn't find so much with 1980s shows. The first is that whenever I have written about it in the p...

I suspect that our culture has a thing about newness and novelty, which naturally the classic TV blogosphere contradicts directly by not feeling the need always to be watching something new or blogging about the latest thing. When periodically I worry whether I will ever run out of cult TV to watch and blog about here I remind myself that I can of course blog about everything all over again if necessary, since it isn't necessary to have new classic TV continually found in a TV station in Ghana. There is nothing wrong about writing about an established 'canon' of TV shows. There is also nothing wrong with noticing the shows that I don't tend to write about here, and Ripping Yarns is one of them. I'm not sure how it has somehow managed not to appear here, but this is an omission which needs to be corrected instanter. In the unlikely event that any readers of this blog haven't heard of the show, of course it was written by Michael Palin and Terry Jones, and parodie...

Continuing a series of posts about episodes of shows relating in some way to the circus. The circus isn't really a huge part of Terror of the Autons, featuring only in the first couple of episodes and being the place where the Master hides his kidnapped scientist there with the idea of attracting the Doctor there to be killed. In fact I'm finding it difficult only to focus on the circus and not do a lengthy post on the whole show, because I love it. I've even watched the Plastic Fantastic documentary again and found there is nothing about the circus in it. I have, however, been reminded that there is more than a passing resemblance between the Master's murderous plan involving plastic in Terror of the Autons and the evil mastermind's plan to dominate the whole country with one washing powder using plastic flowers in the Adam Adamant Lives episode The Sweet Smell of Disaster. I haven't found a source suggesting that it was an explicit influence, but the use of pl...

Continuing a series of posts about episodes of TV shows related to the circus. In fact, if you were being very strict you probably wouldn't include this one because there isn't an actual circus involved, but where else are you going to find clowns? Birmingham City Council, that's where, but that's a whole other matter. Just to allow myself the luxury of a little description because I love this one: the general at a US army base in the UK gets the Goodies to take a huge amount of 'tomato soup' off his hands, only for them to find the tin contains a virus which makes people turn into clowns. Cue all sorts of clownish things, and of course the commentary on this show naturally tends to focus on the more slapstick elements of this episode. However what really attracts me about it is that there are a number of spoofs of various other genres as we go along. It pits the Americans against the commies and stereotypes the former at great length. In a strangely topical tur...

This blog post spoils an essential plot point of this show. Remaining on the other side of the Atlantic (with a distinct absence of tea) for only my first ever post here about Kojak. I can't begin to think what's wrong with me, and I can only say that the fact Theo's never appeared here yet just illustrates that shows which are good haven't all appeared here yet, but shows I think are rubbish never will. One of these days I'm going to do a blog post about rubbish TV and have you all stop reading because you're so offended. Kojak needs no introduction to the readers of this blog. The Chinatown Murders is a two-part adventure over two episodes. That's pushing 100 minutes of television, which broadcast on TV would presumably have had adverts and been even longer. This is a genuinely prodigious adventure for Kojak. My only question would be why it apparently isn't a film. The plot doesn't match any of the Kojak TV movies, and I'm not aware that any o...

Caution: this blog post contains plot spoilers. Who am I kidding, it basically blabs the whole plot, but I couldn't think of a way to blog about this show without doing so. For some reason not entirely clear to myself I have never written about The Protectors here (I mean the ITC series, not the 1964 ABC series) before and that is an omission which should be corrected at once. I see that I have been a little sniffy about it before, and commented that it is a bit of a generic ITC international sophistication-type series. Take out Harry Rule and put in Jason King, and you would have much of the same thing, was really what I meant. I still think that is basically true - but then I think that any show of the ITC formula *without* Jason King is automatically going to be a very different, and much more sensible, proposition. In fact The Protectors does seem to have a real following online, but for the rather extraneous details, such as 1970s fashions, shop fronts, even signage. You can l...

This is a show I've had in the back of my mind to write about here for ages. What has so far stopped me doing so is that the show is barking mad and I really didn't know how to convey it. It is a comedy sketch show written by two actual doctors. It does not have the common problem that shows about doctors or clergymen aren't written by doctors or clergymen: this is the real thing. It's about as subtle as s very bad dose of herpes and you just know it was written by men who've spent years being shown diseased bits. For this reason it may not appeal to everyone's humour. However if you were a staff nurse at the Queen Elizabeth Psychiatric Hospital in the 1990s and passed on the gossip about the nurse who went home drunk, put on the chip pan and started to get undressed before passing out and having to be carried out in his undies by the fire brigade, or about the student nurse who was in the News of the World because she was supplementing her grant on the game and...

This post may either mark the end of my series of posts on 1980s TV or be a break in it. Anyway we go back to the seventies for some truly legendary television, since I was thinking about Penda's Fen and decided I wanted to have a go at writing a post about it. I say have a go: Penda's Fen is a hugely complex, ambitious and layered drama and while nobody has a higher opinion of my abilities than I do myself, I think even I might have dificulty doing it justice. It doesn't help that quite a lot of what is written online about it is written by the literati and is - sod it, I'm going to go there - a load of poncey wank and toss. Sorry, but I'm merely describing the fanciful stuff written about this show. I'm going to come straight out with it here and say that in my opinion this play is barking mad and that's why I love it. Who in their right mind would write this play and then even think of committing it to the jolly old 16mm? This difficulty is perhaps best c...

You know you're in for something wonderful when the show starts with a child berating a picture of Jesus for not listening to him before signing off with his name and address so that Jesus knows who's talking to him.  I honestly thought that Scorpion Tales had appeared here before, but it seems it hasn't. It's another 1970s anthology series of plays built on the earlier succcess of Thriller, in this case with each one having the common feature of a sting in the tale. It's been available commercially on DVD for a while now. The premise is very simple, really: poor Matthew Ward is from a family where the only sensible adults are the staff. His (very superior) bookdealer father is very absent and his mother's emotional and physical neglect reaches positively Edina Monsoon levels of lack of awareness. It's not stated as such, but this is of course the situation of a lot of kids in rich families and this is of course a trauma which carries on through generations,...

Happy new year! I'm starting off the new year with a bang because while I've blogged about some weird shit on this blog over the years, this is the wildest thing you will ever see on here, so hold on to your hats. Caution: this blog post is about a broadcast dramatising railway accidents and may be distressing. In the past I have briefly touched here on the notoriously scary public information films of the 1970s, at least as I remembered them. Perhaps the most famous of this genre are Apaches (also 1977) in which a number of children play in a farnyard and meet their deaths in various ways. and Building Sites Bite (1978) which bizarrely shows the same child repeatedly meeting his death in all the various ways a building site can offer. But these are as nothing to The Finishing Line (1977). Instead of merely shockingly depicting the dangers and the consequences of going near them, The Finishing Line starts by depicting a boy sitting on the edge of a railway bridge and voice over...

I am absolutely delighted to make Ride Ride, another episode of Tales of Unease, one of the few episodes I have written about twice here, not least because I don't think I even came close to doing it justice when I talked about it in my series of posts on orphaned episodes. It was orphaned at the time, but Network's glorious release of this series means it can be viewed all restored and sparkling, and I honestly think it comes across quite differently in its restored version.  I note that reviews about this one are strictly mixed, and I honestly wonder whether this is influenced by the poor versions of this show people have had to see up until now. In my humble opinion it is absolutely excellent and the restoration only brings its quality out. One of the things I didn't say last time, and which I'm now reminded to say by having blogged about  The Two Faces of Evil since then, is that the plot is yet another variant on the vanishing hitchhiker urban legend, only (I hope...

This post is about the Thriller episode Kill Two Birds (1976) which I think might have been released as Cry Terror in some markets. Since my last post I hatched a plan to write alternating posts about Tales of Unease and Thriller, simply because I don't want to rush through the seven episodes of Tales of Unease and thought they might compare and contrast well to another anthology series. I hadn't watched any Thriller for several years, although a few episodes have appeared here before, so it seemed the obvious choice. And this is where my plan hit a snag, which is that I frankly found myself wondering why I had bothered to keep the boxed set of Thriller at all, apart from a few episodes. So in the past week I have actually watched the whole of Thriller and can confirm that my personal preference would be for Tales of Unease anyday. Thriller struggles with a few disadvantages to my mind: the episodes are too long and the available material would be enough for a shorter programme...

This show is appearing here because it is a show about something that actually happened in history and so it can broadly be called a documentary although it develops the subject somewhat. But when have you ever known me to stick to the rules, whether made by myself or anyone else? Battleground was a single series show made in 1978 about historical battles which are then re-enacted by war gamers in the studio. I'm not sure whether the word geeky existed in 1978 but it's definitely the word for it, along with blokey. It's also something else I love enormously, which I have decided is slow television: TV which doesn't require much in the way of scenery or effects and moves at the pace of an elderly arthritic snail. This show also goes to show that there was a time when TV wasn't required to move at the speed of light and did genuinely cater for many different interests. I suppose other examples would be that show that shows people playing pub games on the show, and of ...

The Family (not to be confused with the several other TV shows with the same name) was a 1974 BBC series of twelve episodes about a real extended family in Reading. It was a major turning point in 'reality' TV (in the UK - there was a previous similar series called An American Family broadcast in 1973) because it gave the viewer real access to the Wilkins family, their daily lives and conflicts. The show is online in two versions, a shorter summary of the whole series, and all the epiosdes are currently available online. I would recommend seeing all the episodes for the full effect. At the time it was incredibly powerful, attracting much interest (at one point HUGE crowds which the police couldn't control turned up for the wedding of two of the characters and fought over the bouquet) and criticism (1970s Britain wasn't ready for the rather unvarnished portrait of teenage pregnancy, affairs and children with different fathers it portrayed). It was also rather unusual in ...

This blog post is actually about two separate documentaries about the events in Enfield reported as 'the Enfield poltergeist' in the late 1970s. It really winds up my INFJ/librarian brain that I have been entirely unable to date the first one here , which since it doesn't even have titles on the version on YouTube may not even be a whole programme. At the beginning it has an overlay saying BBC however there is no footage apparently later than the seventies so I am assuming it is a contemporary broadcast from the late seventies and the version on YouTube is a recording of a later broadcast, because UK TV didn't overlay the channel over the show in the 1970s. I know, because I was there and if they had I would have wound up my mother by trying to rub it off the screen. The other one is a Channel 4 documentary from 2007 called Interview with a Poltergeist here .  For simplicity I will refer to them as the BBC documentary and the Channel 4 documentary respectively. Truth to...