Cult TV Blog

Who loves ya baby? I have been romping through seventies US detective shows. Several seasons of Kojak (you will of course notice the great resemblance), and this show which I have just discovered. Coming from one to the other I notice a tendency in this show for people to address each other as 'baby', and I wonder whether it was a seventies thing. I had assumed it was a Kojak peculiarity. Joseph Wamburgh who wrote this show has been credited with turning police shows in a more realistic direction, and so it is possible that this show is the US 'hinge' between the dreamy TV (which survives that is) and the gritty realism of shows like The Sweeney. Despite this and apparently consistent good reviews on t'internet, there is comparatively little about this show online. I myself literally only discovered it by chance this week. I would like to speculate about why this is but I won't because it would be pure speculation. I know how good you all are at filling in gaps ...

 I love this episode, it is like an encapsulation of everything Avengers in one hour! Eccentrics, romance, dastardly plots, and parody of our glorious nation. Actually I was reminded of it when watching Clue (one of my favourite films, along with Murder by Death), when Tim Curry told one of the guests that a butler 'butles'. There is an irony - Steed understands 'service' so well because of having been brought up on the other side of the counter. He fits in by actually being an obvious fraud and therefore a shifty character - I love that the nobles in his forged references are the names of pubs! Normally I don't take to familiar faces but like that John le Mesurier turns out to be the baddie here. I love his quote to the effect that his roles were usually of a decent man at sea in a chaos of his own making - which presumably means this isn't a usual role for him. He did actually see himself as a jobbing actor of the sort I'm usually irritated by and has a hu...

Apologies for the hiatus in posting, but fortunately I am on leave again so time for some quality TV and some blog posts. I have had Shoestring on my list of shows to write about here for ages. Usually when I write about 1970s shows I find myself commenting on how dreary the 70s were. This show managers a genius combination of managing the nightmare scenarios of the 1970s with certain dreamy aspirational qualities, which were later taken into the series Bergerac. For example what is not to love about working as a private ear for a radio station? By contrast Shoestring is doing this because he became mentally unwell after working as a computer technician. I believe the 70s to the 1980s were the last time when being a DJ was an aspirational thing, since I have read that it was in the 90s it became a lot about marketing and record deals, leading to it being an increasingly stressful occupation. In retrospect the hero DJs of the 70s have often been investigated if not convicted for se...

 Sadly Diana Rigg has been added to the list of my TV heroes who have left us. The internet is naturally full of tributes, however I am watching this show at the moment and thought I would post about it. Robert Conrad has also died this year. For anyone who likes the kind of bizarre TV I do, The Wild Wild West is a gift. It is... Well, wild, I suppose. It is described as a western, espionage and science fiction show, which aimed to take the James Bond concept back to the nineteenth century. The kind of conceits we find in the wilder Avengers episodes are therefore common here, for example this episode has both magic and time travel. What's not to love? Topically, the subtext here is that the baddie is a former colonel in the confederate army who wants to use his ability to change time to go back and change the outcome of the civil war. Obviously ImI a foreigner and history isn't my strong point but I understand that to mean that he would like the US to be built on slavery and t...

  How do I even start to write about this show? It has so much good stuff in it and so much that interests me. For a start it stars Diana Dors, one of my great favourites. She is unusual among actresses in that you can find her in straight acting and (ahem) apparently she can also be found in sex comedies and risqué modelling. I always feel her role in this show may have been an inspiration for Lily Savage, who often referred to herself as a blonde bombsite. As with most of my favourites you either like her or really don't take to her - rumours abound of sexy parties and her secretly filming guests at her house having sex. In this show she plays the matriarch of a family, but her husband is 'working away'. She shares a flat with her three grown up sons and her brother in law, and they're all dodgy in one way or another. There is another star in this show, although it's never named, externals of the flats are filmed at Quarry Hill Flats in Leeds - despite my bizarre ...

  I am delighted finally to be writing about this show which has been on my shopping list for ages, and I finally found a reasonably priced copy on eBay. I love that Tommy Cooper started his life ship building, did magic tricks in his spare time and then realised one day that it was funny if he fluffed the tricks. Thus was his profession as a very good magician who mainly got it wrong on purpose, born. I have just realised that the Goes Wrong Show in the last post is a direct historical descendant of the type of humour in Cooper's act. In between we have Les Dawson, who as my father used to say, must have been a very good pianist to play the piano that badly. This show is rather atypical for Cooper's act, because while his usual shows were his act plain and simple, this show has an element of each episode also having a story, within which he is his normal bumbling self. I really like that aspect of the show, and it is used to bring other people in. I particularly like Sheila Ha...

I once went to a wedding where, when the best man produced the little box containing the ring, the ring almost leapt out and went down through one of those heating grilles so common in Victorian buildings. The churchwarden, who had the necessary tools, had to be fetched from his house around the corner and it took a fair time for the ring to be found. Meanwhile the two families were outside the church on opposite sides, both either in tears or announcing how they all knew this marriage was doomed from the start. Surprisingly they did actually get married but I don't know how it lasted, although I do know that there was an atmosphere you could cut with a knife. The reason I go into this is that it is the sort of thing you would expect to happen at a wedding attended by Tom Chance. This show is often called a sitcom, but it isn't. A sitcom is a usually dreary series which goes on too long and attempts to make comedy of the characters' situation. This, however, is a show about...