Cult TV Blog

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...

I blogged about the first part of this adventure four months ago, although I rather got off the subject onto praising the Loose Cannon reconstructions, and you can see that post  here . Since I'm obviously going to keep returning to it at long spaces of time, I have given Fury from the Deep  its own label  to enable people to find the posts. Now watch me grind to a halt on this one! This Who adventure perfectly demonstrates a major motivation behind my writing this blog from the beginning: to make me delve deeper into what is going on in my favourite TV programmes so as not to watch them passively. This adventure is probably one of the most visually iconic of the early ones - the scene on the beach, the sea forts, the iconic appearance of Mr Oak and Mr Quill, and the famous first appearance of the sonic screwdriver. It made me reflect further on the way the doctor enters different worlds and situations, does his thing and leaves. I'm not going to beat about the bush about...

I am going to have difficulty sticking to the subject of the post. (When don't you? Shouts the entire classic TV blogosphere) I will be upfront and say that while I am watching Fury from the Deep, what I am thinking about is reconstruction of missing Dr Who episodes. The specific one I am watching is the Loose Cannon reconstruction. I know there has also been a BBC animated one - oh the irony of the BBC reconstructing shows after reusing the tapes! I have seen a few BBC animated reconstructions (Power of the Daleks, The Macra Terror and The Faceless Ones) and also a BBC reconstruction using telesnaps. I am going to come right out with it and say that I prefer the telesnaps reconstructions. The animated ones just don't seem to have the right feel. As far as I know they aren't going any more but I also prefer the Loose Cannon ones - you can find them on the internet. You can also find out about Loose Cannon  here . I particularly like Fury from the Deep because it presses all...

High time we had some more Who and this one is a cracker. It will give you some idea of how highly I rate it if I tell you that this Who is comparable to an original Sapphire and Steel, and uses many of the writing techniques used by The Avengers. There are also some Harry Potter resonances. The magical omniscience of The Avengers mean that the doctor and his companions just arrive in the hotel with no explanation. The closed world of a hotel where something distinctly peculiar is going on, is exactly the sort of set up that Sapphire and Steel use - in fact this feels very much like the adventure in the railway station. My absolutely favourite thing about this is the beginning and especially the bit where the doctor decides a character's pathological urge to be conquered means he must be from Tivolia, a planet whose inhabitants have been willingly conquered so often that their anthem includes a blank for the name of the current invading force! The adventure also includes a number o...

 High time we had some more Dr Who - it's been several years since I posted about him.  Unfortunately The Monster of Peladon is not a favourite and I am unlikely to be able to rehabilitate it in any marked way. The usual criticisms are that it is too like the preceding The Curse of Peladon, problems ewit slow pacing and that the doctor and Sarah Jane just don't seem to gel. I personally would add an extra one that the galactic ambassador is very irritating. Once you get over her appearance of a single eyeball, which makes her look like a speaking penis, she is very wearing. I find the social structure within the planet quite interesting. The miners are, as you would expect, working class. I have posted about TV doing this before but you would be able to tell that they are working class because they have bare chests (with or without hairy shoulders). The guards are also working class because of the resilient nature of their uniforms. Otherwise I feel any sexy significance to th...

 As we go into our third lockdown this post is purely to draw attention to this legendary infection control video by the above university.

I have to come clean at this point - I haven't seen any of the other films in this series but I found them for sale at a price I was prepared to pay and chose this one because it features a railway station. In the unlikely event that my televisually literate readers haven't come across this series, here is somebody else's account of what they are about: The first unofficial Doctor Who spinoff video was  Wartime , in 1988.  This was made by Reeltime Pictures, known for their  Myth Makers  interview tapes, and is the only one of its kind that was made while Doctor Who was still on television.  Their second effort was  Downtime , in 1995, which we will be looking at soon, probably the best known unofficial spinoff.  The point of these things mainly was to fill the gap left by Doctor Who when it went off air in 1989, to give the fans something new.  Another company was also doing the same kind of thing in the 90s: BBV, which stands for Bill Baggs Vide...

High time we had some more Who. This one features Jon Pertwee with the Master, of course one of the Doctor's greatest enemies. The premise of this one is relatively simple, but tends to become complicated when it is explained. The Master gains access to Nestene intelligence which allows anything plastic to become dangerous. It's really as simple as that. You can get as sci fi about as you like. But of course that is not how I would approach it - the premise of dangerous plastics allows endless japes, like murderous toys, deadly flowers and chairs which eat people. Oh, and plastic police officers. You can approach this one as horrifying if you want - in fact it was given in Parliament as an example of how children's television had become scary - but watched as an adult, it is a jolly romp. This Who calls in a feature of the TV of the sixties which I bang on about here - the ambivalence about the bright new scientific future which was otherwise all the rage at the time....

I am feeling a little trepidation at the thought of reviewing a Who which is a definite favourite of the fans - I realise that my usual tendency is to pick a show or episode which routinely gets savaged on the Internet, and have a go at rehabilitating it. My thoughts about this one are relatively few. The names of Doctor Who adventures are rather confusing. We have The Mind of Evil, The Faceless Ones, The Face of Evil, and so on. Personally I tend to think of them as 'the one where...'. In the case of this adventure I am not sure that actually helps because I think of it as 'the one where everyone would be better leaving well alone,' and that is also my title for several others! In fact I think it would be better called by one of the titles mooted before the final was settled on, and which unfortunately was rejected on the grounds it was pretentious: The Day God Went Mad. A major thread of the story is commentary on humans' religious instincts and behaviour, sp...

To Gloucester and Cheltenham today, where I bought the BBC boxed set featuring A for Andromeda, which I have never seen. The supply must dry up at some time, but until now, whenevr I have thought that the supply of cult TV has dried up,I have always discovered another new series. Gloucester is also famous to TV aficionados for one of the settings of Petunia Winegum's fall from fame - the other one was here in Birmingham. I was reading an article on the train coming back about how the phrase 'white heat of technology' or something similar was first used in A for Andromeda, before the then Prime Minister used it in a speech in 1963, both of which events brought the preoccupation with science of so much 1960s TV to the fore. I have commented that it is usually an ambivalent preoccupation, because science is the hope for the future but also dangerous. Science fiction , as in Doctor Who, has an opportunity to nbuild on this ambivalence by introducing fictional elements into t...

I'm not normally one for animated reconstructions of erased TV  but I saw that this had come out and I simply had to have it. I have seen this missing Doctor Who before - apparently there are several animated versions but the reconstruction I have already seen is the Loose Cannon one. While the Loose Cannon website has vanished, rumour has it that copies of their shows are still knocking about on the Internet. Having said I don't go for animated reconstructions, this one is superb, and there were points at which I could forget I wasn't watching the original series. The only thing which looks slightly wrong is the lettering used for the episode titles. The plot is interesting, because it is set in Earth's colonial future. I can't find a reference to how this future happened  but is an interesting device at the end of the sixties when Britain's colonial past was winding up, to envisage a colonial future. Given that the colonists speak English, perhaps Britain ...

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 thei...

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...

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...

I actually wasn't going to post about this Doctor Who adventure at all. I got out the Myths and Legends box set because I had only watched one out of the three adventures and felt like some Who. It's a funny thing about this set - it reminds me of how Dr Who started off life as an improving educational show in the more worthy BBC mould than the more entertaining ITV mould of much of the TV I write about here. All three of the adventures in the bexed set draw on ancient mythologies - The Horns of Nimon draws on the mythology of Theseus and the Minotaur, Underworld references Jason and the Golden Fleece, and Time Monster is all about Atlantis. I knew that there was a great fad for all things Atlantean around this time, but didn't know until I looked it up for the purposes of this post how ancient the myth of Atlantis is. It is found in Plato's works Timaeus and Critias, where it is the antithesis of Athens, Platos' perfect state, and ultimately sinks into the sea ...

I'd better start by saying that I wouldn't be writing about this Doctor Who adventure if it didn't come in the Earth Story duo set with The Awakening, which I had to buy as it is the only way to get The Awakening, which I fancied. There's nothing wrong as such with The Gunfighters, but I wouldn't have bought it because I don't tend to get on with period dramas. You may say that that is ridiculous when I'm writing about a TV show based on the ability to go to all sorts of times, and of course it is ridiculous, but I am just declaring a pre-existing bias. This adventure is of course set in a very specific time, in the Wild West around the time of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, which would of course date it to the end of October 1881. I am rather ambivalent about this setting - although I note that it was at this time that Verity Lambert and others of the original team left Doctor Who and it consciously took a rather different direction. For the purpose of m...

The parodies are coming thick and fast at the moment. I didn't really need to ask myself the significance of cult TV when I realise the impact it can have on popular culture. This post is about comedian  Lily Savage  and her parodies both of The Avengers and Doctor Who. Well, I say 'about' - it more showcases them, so click play, sit back and enjoy.

One of the all-time great Dr Who adventures, this one, or rather one of the legendary ones because it was intended to be the first ever, before being demoted to first adventure of the second series. I'm trying to make a connection betweem the original educational intent of Dr Who and the major concern of the time which is the real subject of this adventure. This concern is of course the contemporary ambivalent attitude to technology, where it is both the white hot hope for the future, and also a source of danger if not managed properly. Rachel Carson's book about the supposed dangers of DDT was published the year before Dr Who started, and since her findings - that DDT has effects further down the food chain - while not being completely unchallenged at the time, would have been very much the latest science at the time. Ironically, since I believe Carson's research is now believed not to have been controlled enough, of course this Who's educational intent missed the p...

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 ...

Since the majority of hits to this blog are from places other than the UK perhaps I had better begin this post by apologising for my compatriots. It is #notinmyname that we are leaving Europe, in fact it's nothing but an embarrassment. Which is almost true of my last post on this First Doctor adventure ( here ), which I'm slightly ashamed of on re-reading it. I suddenly found a new, sealed, DVD of this show amongst my library (can't think where it came from, obviously by rogue computer technology) and decided to give it another go. Much of what I wrote about it the first time still stands, in terms of the dead sixties fear of encroaching technology. Ironically of course, it is only the connection of computers all over the world which means you are reading this, which would have seemed like an impossible dream of the future at the time. On rewatching this show I am finding the mixture of technology and non-science quite interesting. I love it that the feared take over ...