Cult TV Blog

I'm hoping that this post (which will be less verbose than most of mine for reasons which will become apparent) will explain both of those things. For some time I have been troubled by exhaustion, as well as stiffness and swelling in my hands, both of which explain reduced posting here. I put it down to a heavy workload and probably a bit of RSI but I have now been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I am off sick from work at the moment and full of steroids, but fortunately I can now see the bones in my right wrist for the first time in ages. I have not ceased to watch cult TV although I have predominantly been watching a lot of old films. I have posted about Old Mother Riley here before, but I'm not sure if I have posted about the Thin Man films, about Will Hay or about Arthur Askey. I feel I was probably born too late. I have a boxed set of James Bond films I intend to watch through at some point. I also like a nice murder and have watched the Agatha Christie films I have -...

What's not to love? A ghost train where people disappear and an escaped convict bursting into Dr Keel's surgery - what could be more Avengers than this episode. The famous rediscovered first series Avengers episode arrived and I've leapt straight onto it. This post will therefore be some rather rushed first impressions and a more leisured analysis of the episode may follow at a later date. Completely first impression is that I am horrified that the ghost train in the show is almost *exactly* like one that I remember going on at Dudley Zoo as a child and which my mother probably rightly criticised as ropey. I suppose it must have been very run down if virtually idential ones were running fifteen years earlier! Second impression: Keel is who we expect him to be - the doctor whose life is continually being turned upside down by incursions from The Underworld. But then I suppose real doctors should be used to dealing with all sorts of strange things happening at all hours o...

I meant to have several posts up this week, about some shows I have never written about here, but I have been ill so it hasn't happened. This post isn't any of them, but it is a post about something which I have already managed to think about - the series posts about series 1 Avengers episodes I started some time ago. Lucky I use labels, isn't it - I so rarely complete an actual series of posts when I conceive them. I am of course at least partly thinking about the forthcoming release of Tunnel of Fear and am prompted to think about others in the series, including The Frighteners, which of course still exists. It was actually the only episode known still to exist until Girl on the Trapeze and the first part of Hot Snow (both of which I have written about here before) were discovered. The Frighteners was always seen a the quality piece of work it is. In fact I have read that the received wisdom was that while The Frighteners was obviously quality, it was the odd one o...