Cult TV Blog

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...

It's Loch Ness (Monster) Week! The monster is in brackets because I have a show in mind which doesn't mention the monster but is just set near the loch. Look, I don't make the rules. Alright, perhaps I do. I have been watching The Goodies quite a lot but not blogging about it. I think it is one of those shows which are difficult to write about, and certainly I think this is reflected in what the internet has to say about this show. Most of the reviews tend to gravitate very quickly to describing the show, and as you know that's not really what I'm aiming for here. The other thing the internet tends to focus on with The Goodies is the way much of the humour hasn't aged very well, and there's a limit to how often you can say that a show wouldn't be made today, without beginning to wonder why you're writing about, or even watching, it. It's really difficult to write a blog post about a show which stands on its own, doesn't really have too much o...

This is really a post about blogging with reference to two shows, rather than really being about the shows so apologies if it is a bit navel gazing! One of my main motivations for starting this blog was to force myself to think more about the TV I watch, and not just watch passively. this has worked and since I make a point of reading up what the rest of the blogosphere is saying before blogging about a show, I am very aware that often my witterings here are in response to something I've read elsewhere. I try to make this explicit, although usually without attribution to avoid getting into rows or appearing to criticise someone individually. For example I will often say that a lot of the comment on the internet is about one aspect and try to write about another, or often I comment on how my own view differs from the prevailing one. I think some shows just aren't popular but would like to give them a bit of a push because I think they deserve it. So the content of my blogging is...

I have had the box set of The Goodies for some time - it replaced the previous Network individual discs - and have been prompted by a comment on Instagram to crack it open. I have chosen this episode because it is totally barmy - there doesn't seem to be that much on the internet about it, so let's loud pedal it. The Goodies were incredibly popular when the show was broadcast in the seventies, and I see they achieved up to 15 million viewers. I like the humour a lot - it is more like, say, Monty Python, than the more cynical alternative comedy of the eighties, which I also like. I like that it feels very much like young intelligent people just coming up with jokes and making a TV show out of them! Of course the Goodies were university friends of the Pythons, and in fact parodied the show a number of times. However if it comes to a competition we would have to go for The Goodies because it has the ultimate Pythonesque accolade of having someone  die laughing while watching it. ...

There is a youngness and freshness about the humour of the sixties and seventies , before the cynicism of Thatcher's Britain put paid to it. You have to be young to produce certain sorts of humour - age has its own humour - and perhaps in releases of the last few years we see this best in The Goodies and in Do Not Adjust Your Set and Not the 1948 Show, both of which have been released this year by BFI. I recently fell for the complete Goodies and am enjoying the episodes I haven't seen before. I had forgotten that the celebs queued up to guest on this show and the wonderful Molly Sugden features in this one. The best thing is that the character she plays is so close to Mrs Slocombe that it just misses her talking about her pussy. Incidentally I also love that she is a minister being blackmailed for going to the Playgirl Club - a topical reference in the age of the Playboy Club. This episode of course reverses the Playboy Club theme by having topless male staff, and the episo...

Real life TV presenter Raymond Baxter in string underwear Remaining in the 1970s (terribly modern by my standards), we come to another episode of The Goodies. I see that the boxed set of the whole BBC series is out at a huge price, and I might get it when it comes down a bit. I also have several double disc sets as it is, so I'm not sure what to do, especially as I sometimes find having everything can be a bit wearing. After all the best bits are selected for selection boxes. One of the best things about this episode is not to do with string at all. It is the spoofs of UK brand advertising at the time. The brands include Mr Kipling's cakes (notorious for its cosy olde worlde adverts for its mass produced cakes) and Birdseye fish fingers. Not only are fish fingers the world's weirdest food in my humber opinion, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who found Captain Birdseye frankly rather creepy. On one level the advertising part of this episode is as much social ...

Forward in time for today's post, to Cricklewood, 1973, and the Goodies are broke. This leads to them falling into a pantomime world of beanstalks, giants, and geese which lay golden eggs. I think this has to be one of my favourite Goodies episodes, simply because it is so visually effective, and literally everything is turned into a visual pun, even before it gets to the more pantomimic aspects in the latter half. For example the policeman feeding coins into a parking meter, which then works as a fruit machine and he gets a payout. The old ladies at the bus stop who get their own instruments out and start playing in repsonse to Bill busking. The policeman's sneeze literally blows off Tim's gypsy disguise, to the delight of a man in a suit at the bus stop. A lady presents Graeme with a false leg when he stands on one leg with a sign saying 'give generously', and when he throws the gifted leg away she produces a false arm and punches him with it. The policeman m...

 I suppose there was a time when the only source for information on cult TV was books - and friends, of course. Then came the internet and provided a place where fans of old TV could both publish their own opinions and be influenced by other people's. I find these days that whenever I want information about a TV show and google its name, the web pages which give me the information I want will tend to be from blogs, and will also give me the writer's opinion to make me think in a different way. This post is almost entirely due to the influence of Grant Goggans's blog, since he has been watching The Goodies with his son and has prodded me into giving the show another go. Of course I have seen The Goodies before, but I suspect I wasn't in the right mindset at the time, because I remember heartily disliking it. On watching it again I find I like it enormously and in fact have watched the discs I have, several times. But let's get the criticism out of the way first - ...