Cult TV Blog

Finally 2020 is over, everyone thought, and a week in 2021 is escalating rapidly. On this side of the Atlantic we're fairly glad the US has the Trump card in the embarrassment stakes but hope Ireland notices when we all starve. In the somewhat apocalyptic times, this X-Files is about what matters both in this world and the notional afterlife. You can see this as being about reincarnation and revenge from beyond the grave, but it is even more about loyalty and doing the right thing in this life. What kind of prison is it where the prisoners routinely get beaten up by the guards? A desperate one where the remedies of the law don't work. Do people who take the law in their own hands ever have justification? Difficult to tell, and I feel that should depend on what they are up against. The even more difficult question is what to do if the system is stacked against yo u. Manley apparently took the supernatural route, and this can clearly be understood like that. What if the process i...

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

Another year and once again I'm saving blogging about Too Many Christmas Trees for some unspecified time in the future. It will surely come as no surprise that I adore the naughty and slightly childish humour of the Carry On films. I suspect they may be one of those British things which don't travel well, but as always I stand to be corrected in the comments. I have deliberately chosen this one of the four Christmas TV specials on the box set because it is my favourite, and yet strangely it is often considered the weakest, according to the internet. Therefore it seems right to give it a plug here and have a go at rehabilitating it. It consists of a number of sketches joined together with a banquet, and manages to contain all sorts of things we associate with Christmas. These include elements of pantomime stories and spoof other genres of films and fiction. Visually it is splendid, and starts off with a shot of a manor house. We all know that in TV that speaks to established wea...

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...

I have rarely had the opportunity to write about 1950s TV here and I'm not really doing so now, since I'm writing about the Hammer film which used the original TV series as its source. This 1953 series is a legend in the world of cult TV: Originally comprising six half-hour episodes, it was the first science fiction production to be written especially for a British adult television audience.[1] Previous written-for-television efforts such as Stranger from Space (1951–52) were aimed at children, whereas adult entries into the genre were adapted from literary sources, such as R.U.R. (1938 and again in 1948) and The Time Machine (1949).[2] The serial was the first of four Quatermass productions to be screened on British television between 1953 and 1979. It was transmitted live from the BBC's original television studios at Alexandra Palace in London, one of the final productions before BBC television drama moved to west London. As well as spawning various remakes and sequels, T...

 How didn't I know this video existed until today?

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 ...