Cult TV Blog

This episode is a deceptive one and its strength is in the complexity of the story it tells and the different impressions it gives to the viewer. There is just one weakness, which is that it paints people in rather simplistic, almost stereotyped ways. I think probably the most naive character is Jamie's mother,who can believe no evil of him at all. Colonel Stone is a type very familiar from the years after World War 2 - fake colonels and majors who boasted of their honours and tended to disappear when other members of their regiment were about. The seventies are a bit far removed for that sort of character but of course Stone is old enough to have served in the war. Jamie himself is painted as a saint by his mother. Frankly - how can I say this - he comes across as irritatingly good. The story is that he has made a cottage over to Colonel Stone during the expedition in South Africa in which Jamie died. Much of the point of this episode is the exploration of whether this story is...

Source Last weekend I had an outing to Gloucester and bought the boxed set of this show in a charity shop. I had previously avoided it, and actively disliked the snippets I had seen on the internet. I obviously hadn't managed to see very much of it because I had completely missed the fact that Patrick Newell (surely everyone reading this will know that he played mother in The Avengers) is a regular character. It is usually described as a detective serious about Rupert and Amy Wilde who have an extravagant lifestyle and also function as amateur Detectives. The series was broadcast in 1978. Continue my usual policy here, of minimising description on this blog, because I want to focus on one particular episode, first a few impressions. My first impressions were awful! Through the first disc in the box the show really could not hold my attention at all, I thought it looked Bland, moved slowly, and the plots were lightweight. This last seems to be a fairly common criticism on the ...