Cult TV Blog

This post will mark something of a departure from a tradition I have unintentionally started on this blog. The tradition is that when I am writing about 1970s TV, I start by reflecting on the circumstances under which I first watched it, comment on how the humour and attitudes haven't work well with time, and then either decide it is rubbish or express my horror at how many of the cast have been posthumously convicted of child abuse. This pattern developed in a series of posts I did wome time ago on seventies TV. Are You Being Served, however, will buck that trend completely. This post is actually occasioned by my finding the DVDs of Grace and Favour (the 1990s resuscitation of the show set in a country house hotel) and also the DVDs of Are You Being Served Series 1 in very close succession. I actually have almost no recollection of the episodes in series 1 at all, despite the fact that Are You Being Served has rather been repeated to death over the decades. Almost no recollec...

Apologies for the lack of TV-based posts here recently. It has been the weather for getting out and about, and when indoors, the picture which illustrates this post will show where I have been! The pub is actually the Gunmaker's Arms in Birmingham's Gun Quarter, which sells proper beer, much of it made by the local Two Towers Brewery. 

It is my day orff, I have done the little jobs I have to do and it is looking like rain, so instead of me sitting in the park reading Philip Heselton's new biography of Doreen Valiente (weird is my life), you lucky people get a blog post about Survivors. Survivors is a series which I have rather avoided so far, despite having looked at it in shops and on line multiple times, I have always metaphorically put it back and in fact am writing this post on my first viewing of the first series. It is having an interesting effect on me, in that it is making me question why I like the television that I do. In fact considering from watching The War Machines (see my last post) I got a warm comforting feeling that IT failings would almost certainly prevent the takeover of the world by computer-based machines, Survivors gives me the warm, fluffy feeling that the holocaust imminently-expected in the 1970s didn't actually happen. You see if War Machines taps into a major fear of the moder...