Cult TV Blog

This is a blog post which almost never saw the light of day. I suspect that not that many readers of this blog will have come across the mini-series Dead Head from 1986, and yet strangely it is commercially available. It is summarised as a crime drama about a petty criminal who is given a box which turns out to contain a disembodied head and this is part of a conspiracy to frame him for the crimes of a sadistic serial murderer of prostitutes. It is filmed with much of the sensibility of a 1940s film noir. Sounds good, doesn't it? As soon as I read about it I started salivating and then when I found it was comemrcially available looked it out. It is expensive for a four-episode show. For the region two release on two DVDs you're looking at about £30 upwards from most sellers (the cheapest is CEX at £12 but it rarely comes up there), which means each episode is £7.50. As it happens I don't have money to throw around any more but would have been too cheap to pay that anyway. I...

Continuing a series of posts about 1980s Tv series which haven't appeared here before. I was thinking of including The Bagthorpe Saga in my last post about coming-of-age dramas, but it is about the life of the Bagthorpe family rather than the characteristic transition from child to adult, so it deserves a post of its own. It is a six-episode children's show from 1981, and despite not being a coming-of-age drama did have the same effect they have on me when first broadcast: in terms of impact it really really punches well above its weight. I was fascinated by the insane Bagthorpe family, who I considered very sophisticated at the time. The series is based on a series of ten books (published between 1977 and 2001) by Helen Cresswell, also called the Bagthorpe Saga. They are about the eponymous family who are described in their Wikipedia article as 'eccentric, ultra-competitive, friendless, relentlessly self-absorbed and largely disloyal'. I was wondering how I was going t...

Continuing a series of posts about 1980s TV series which haven't appeared here before. This post is about a number of TV shows which could be described as 'coming-of-age dramas': the other thing they have in common is that I didn't feel inclined to make a single blog post out of each one so I'm going to deal with them together, rather than not mention them at all. My inability to blog about each of these shows individually stems from a personal distaste for the coming-of-age genre, a distaste which comes from the fact that we all know the life events which appear in this genre are very difficult. I won't hide my usual motivation of distracting myself from life's difficulties by watching TV so too much trauma doesn't tend to appeal. On the other hand, on reading round the subject I am noticing that people who see these dramas at the right moment in their lives (teens, apparently) all speak about the significant impact they had. They also talk about the wa...

Continuing a series of posts on 1980s TV shows which haven't appeared here before. Surely Kenny Everett needs no introduction? Legendary, legendary, genius comedy star, who tragically died in 1995 of AIDS-related diseases. If you don't know who he is this is yet another occasion when your life will be dramatically improved by closing this blog and going and watching some of his stuff on YouTube - the Heroes of Comedy selection is a good start. His career moved between TV and radio and between mutliple broadcasters, his moves usually prompted by getting sacked. You can tell why I like him so much, can't you? I'm sure he was a total nightmare to manage, but you can't expect a genius to be a good little presenter.  Everett fell out with Thames Television over his previous show The Kenny Everett Video Show (nothing he did was bad, exactly, but the Television Show is the better of the two) and the BBC offered him a contract, having fired him previously over the complete ...

Continuing a series of posts on 1980s TV series which haven't appeared here yet. This is one of those posts which afford me great pleasure - in case anyone reading this hasn't seen this series I am delighted to be introducing you to a show which is such a delight. In fact this is a blog post which will rather write itself. It's also one of those occasions when I will tell you not to bother reading my blog post but to go away and watch the show post haste - of course this is about the 1985 series called Mapp and Lucia. There was also another series of the same name in 2014 which is also excellent, just in different ways. There was also an excellent adaptation into radio plays and additional novels by Tom Holt and other authors. Holt's are excellent and authentic, but I haven't read the others. The show has the advantage of working with quality source material, in the shape of the Mapp and Lucia books by EF Benson. In fact I think you should go away and read them as w...

Continuing a series of posts on 1980s TV shows which haven't appeared here before. I have very mixed feelings indeed about The Chinese Detective and I'm aware that quite a lot of what I want to say about it isn't about the show at all. To get the essential bit out of the way, The Chinese Detective was a BBC detective show broadcast from 1981 for two series, about British-Chinese Detective Sergeant John Ho (played by David Yip), who tends to be rather unconventional and have ongoing confrontations as a result with his superiors. It is also about the reaction he gets from being British-Chinese and is set in London, heavily focusing on the east end or dockland, as far as I can tell. If you haven't seen it the closest I can think of is that it's similar to The Sweeney without the violence and has the confrontation with authority with added racism from everyone else. My mixed feelings begin with the reason you may not have heard of it and this is for what I would call pu...

Looking on my shortlist of shows for this series of posts about eighties TV series I see that a high proprtion of them are comedies. The 1980s are of course known for the revolution in comedy that took place and the coming of the 'alternative' comedy scene, but having watched a couple of shows based in the changes in the railway shed at Swindon in the 1980s I suspect that comedy may not have been that representative of 1980s TV, but is better than the sheer unrelentingly depression of everything else that was going on at that time. There's Nothing to Worry About (1982) was a pilot series in three episodes, intended to be an ITV competitor to the BBC's Not The Nine O'Clock News (1972 to 1982). There were only ever three episodes made and the cast then went on to make Alfresco (1983 to 1984) which may also appear here in this series. Of the three There's Nothing to Worry About is the only one which hasn't had a commercial release, but the three episodes are av...

Continuing a series of posts on TV shows from the eighties we come to Blackadder, specifically the pilot which was never aired, but is available in varying quality on the internet. I find it absolutely fascinating to see a classic TV series in a pre-production form. It is transferred to what I think is the reign of Henry VII because there is definitely a king on the throne and there is a troupe of Jumping Jesuits (necessitated by the eunuchs cancelling), so obviously this was pre-reformation. You will, however, read that the historical allusions are vague, and I can't really disagree. The initial broadcast series of Blackadder was set earlier than this. It's particularly interesting to see that Baldrick is played by actor Philip Fox, which casting gives the role quite a different feel from the one we all know from the Tony Robinson portrayal.  What does, however, come across loud and clear, is the character of Blackadder, fully formed. He connives, conspires, and manipulates hi...

Hot on the heels of my post on End of Part One, we have another comedy series which draws on the Pythonesque humour of some years before and is placed just before the alternative comedy explosion of the eighties. In fact The Steam Video Company, as you can tell by the title, is distinctly looking backwards. The Steam Video Company is more securely in the eighties, being broadcast in 1984, although there is a connection between the two shows, because writer of this show, David Renwick, also wrote End of Part ONe as well as The Burkiss Way, the radio show which was the inspiration for End of Part One. He is a well-known TV writer, having also written at least in part, One Foot in the Grave, Jonathan Creek, Cosby, Poirot, Alexei Sayle's Stuff, There's a Lot of It About, Whoops Apocalypse, The Dick Emery Show, Not the Nine O'Clock News, The Little and Large Show, The Les Dawson Show, and The Two Ronnies.  We are not only in the presence of truly great writing, but also in the p...

Regular readers will recollect that at the beginning of last year I started a series of posts on programmes which, borrowing a phrase from the world of Doctor Who, I christened orphaned episodes. By that I meant that they were not commercially available and had lost some of their episodes. It was a very interesting experience because I rather found that this took over my life: I had no idea how many random episodes of old shows are knocking about the internet, discovered many shows that I had no idea existed, and even following my rule that I only post about things which take my fancy, it became an engrossing project over a period of months.  A similar thing is happening with this series of posts about 1980s shows. One of the reasons my posts are a bit sparse is that I'm going through an initial shortlist of shows on my hard drive and in my DVD collection, which is taking some time in itself. Take away all the shows that I think are great but either aren't actually from the eig...

This is a continuation of a series of posts on 1980s TV series which haven't appeared here before. This is a general post about this show rather than about an individual episode. In a previous post about a show called The Fear we were in the world of eighties London gangsters, albeit as they intersected with yuppies. Running Scared is a 1986 children's TV show also set in the world of London gangsters. In fact I'm finding that many of the 1980s shows I've got on my shortlist are set in the world of London gangsters. This is of course representative of my personal taste in eighties TV rather than an objective representation of the TV of the time, and honestly there is an awful lot of dross you won't be reading about in this series of posts. This show is about a girl who has come into conflict with a career criminal and has the power to put him away for a good long time because her grandfather happened to have  a clue to the criminal's identity, left behind during...

Continuing a series of posts about 1980s TV shows which haven't appeared here before. It's actually giving me some difficulty because I'm finding so many shows are well nigh impossible to write about (what can you say about Alas Smith and Jones, for example?) or not from the eighties at all. Which brings me nicely to the show that was on my original list of possibles but that I didn't think I would actually write about because nobody would believe it. It's Sticky Moments with Julian Clary. Unusually for this blog I'm going to be more descriptive than usual because frankly you don't criticise this show for fear of getting a razor sharp put down, you just have to experience it and be glas you're only in the audience and weren't chosen as a contestant while you were waiting to go in. You can see this show in its entirety on YouTube because, let's face it, nobody is going to give this show a commercial release. However if you have familiy who vote To...

Continuing a series of posts introducing 1980s TV shows which haven't appeared here before. Obviously I think they're worth watching, although I don't think I'm likely to blog again about many of them for various reasons. The Fear might be the exception to that, though, because I like it hugely. You all know the arduous research I put in on a post before losing interest and posting something completely chaotic with whacking speeling mistooks, and of course while reading up this show I immediately hit my current bugbear of giving a show a short, catchy name which will confuse bloggers in 2023. I should stress that this post is about the 1988 show The Fear made by Euston Films for Thames TV, not the 2012 TV show of literally the same name. I am also not talking about the films of the identical name made in 1995 nor 2023. Nor any of the other films and TV shows involving subtle variations on the word fear which come up when you try to find this one. There is vanishingly li...

This is the first in a projected series of posts about 1980s TV shows. I will try to pick ones which haven't appeared here before and at least introduce them, even if I don't think they merit repeated posts. I have been seeing the DVDs of this show in shops and market stalls for literally years and avoiding it because it looks like a show about football. However I have given it a go and as soon as I started the first episode I knew it would have to appear here because it's an absolute joy. Honestly I odon't know what is wrong with advertisers because the impression given that this is a show about football, or even heavily featuring football, is absolutely wrong. The show's Wikipedia page has a better go at representing what it is about by describing it as a television drama with some comedy elements. One thing is certain: if you're football-mad and think this is the usual aspirational tale of a young lad who makes it in football you will be disappointed. I suppo...

Home Cooking is an episode of the 1980s anthology series Unnatural Causes about unusual deaths, or rather manners of death, written by all big names (this one was written by screenwriter Paula Milne) under the guidance of Beryl Bainbridge. I see that when I first wrote about another episode, Lost Property, as an orphaned episode, I thought it peculiar that a series written by such great authors should have vanished off the radar. I'm delighted to say that I have since discovered some other episodes online, and still think this show's disappearance off the cult Tv radar strange. I have recently seen the episodes Hidden Talents (which I'm going to watch again and see what I think because I wasn't impressed but also wasn't concentrating on it) and Home Cooking, both of which are currently on YouTube for the watching. Home Cooking is an absolute BANGER and I knew it was going to appear here as soon as it got into its stride. You will read online that this is about Judit...

 This is about an episode of the original UK show called The Max Headroom Show, broadcast 1985 to 1987. You can see it at https://youtu.be/2JLpKbMlcSU. Unfortunately for music copyright reasons it's not complete but is nonetheless an excellent monument to eighties culture and cult TV. As I commented, you can tell how cult a TV show is by how much TV archaeology you have to do to find out about it and I've had to dig quite deep to work out more or less where this episode came and have been unable to identify it exactly. It is not a series 1 episode because they're missing, and it isn't a series 3 episode because they had studio audiences so it must be from series 2, broadcast in the UK July to August 1986. I am indebted to maxheadroom.com for the information that the episodes 2.2 (broadcast 29th July 1986), 2.5 (12th August 1986) and 2.6 (19th August 1986) had no guests so this must be one of them. Some kind soul has ripped it from the Betamax tape it was recorded on and...

Hi there, televisionists! I vaguely remembered Max doing some adverts for Radio Rentals (the appliance hire firm) in the eighties, and was delighted to find that this is how he greets the viewers on one of them.  Despite my avoiding his advertising in my previous post, it is strangely suitable that I at least touch on it in this post on Blipverts. Blipverts is of course the first episode of the 1987 to 1988 ABC US series simply called Max Headroom. It's coming at this point because I've previously written a post just about Twenty Minutes into the Future, which originally created a back story for Max, and this episode rather covers the same ground so is by way of another introduction to his back story. The titular blipverts are a system of very short adverts that get into people's subconscious discovered and run by Channel 23.  I actually think this episode is in some ways a better introduction to Max's history than Twenty Minutes into the Future, at least in narrative t...