Cult TV Blog

The maid has the dinner on, all is quiet outside in the compound and I am thinking of having a sundowner so it's time to think about a blog post. What has prompted me to write a post about Small Game for Big Hunters is that I think it gets an unfair hammering on the internet. It seems to me that the key to understand where this Avengers is coming from is to think ourselves not only into the world of the Avengers, but also into the time that this episode was happening. The world of The Avengers is of course the epitome of Britishness - and I will be the first to acknowledge that it is a Britishness which never really existed. Remember how many of the episodes are about Our Sort of People who have gone bad and bought into some diabolical mastermindery? The point is that The Avengers save Blighty and the empire goes on undisturbed for another day. And that is the point of this episode: it is important to remember that this episode was being filmed at the absolute dying end of the ...

This is probably one of the posts which it has given me most pleasure to post here. In fact I'm absolutely delighted to be writing this post, for the simple reason that I feel as if I have done Big Finish Productions a disservice here and am delighted to have the opportunity to make it up. One of the things I find myself repeatedly musing about here is the likelihood that the cult TV I like so much will one day turn into a static 'canon' because there will be no more shows to be discovered. My own rather dogmatic opinion is that it is possible further Doctor Who serials will be discovered while it is unlikely that missing Avengers shows will be discovered, and I am delighted to find that I have, in a way, been proved wrong. It turns out that a comic strip of Avengers adventures - with stories not based on broadcast TV episodes - was published in Diana Magazine in 1966 and 1967. Getting excited yet? I certainly got very interested when I found out that that was the case...

I'd better start by saying that I wouldn't be writing about this Doctor Who adventure if it didn't come in the Earth Story duo set with The Awakening, which I had to buy as it is the only way to get The Awakening, which I fancied. There's nothing wrong as such with The Gunfighters, but I wouldn't have bought it because I don't tend to get on with period dramas. You may say that that is ridiculous when I'm writing about a TV show based on the ability to go to all sorts of times, and of course it is ridiculous, but I am just declaring a pre-existing bias. This adventure is of course set in a very specific time, in the Wild West around the time of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, which would of course date it to the end of October 1881. I am rather ambivalent about this setting - although I note that it was at this time that Verity Lambert and others of the original team left Doctor Who and it consciously took a rather different direction. For the purpose of m...

I genuinely thought I had already blogged about this already, but am unable to find it. I suspect I may have written a piece about this show and it vanished when I had a netbook die some time ago. Anyway, Whodunnit is a show which I can't resist writing about - as usual for all the wrong reasons! By all means, watch this show the way it was intended to be watched, if that is what floats your boat - as an exercise in deduction, expanded into a full programme by a panel's deductions and audience participation. The formula is very simple, yet surprisingly effective: the show begins with a film showing the actual death. The panel and members of the audience who have also been selected to deduct who did the murder, are introduced. The events surrounding the murder are elaborated in another film. The celebrity panel members get to ask to see parts of the film again - they have to give some notice, because I imagine this would have presented some technical difficulties in the 1970s. T...