Cult TV Blog

The series of posts I started recently about The X-Files became dominated by treatments of religion and religious people also that was not my intention to start off with. On the surface this episode is about a man who has a tattoo unfortunately using ink made from rye grass which makes him psychotic. This would make it a rather pedestrian X-Files episode and so surely the main purpose of the episode is the underlying themes of Rebellion, authority because in The X-Files of the outsiders wisdom, a figure represented in this episode by the tattooist himself. The tattooists Wisdom is perhaps a little trite, since it is limited to unfortunately making his own dies from ride grass and telling his customers that people get the tattoo they deserve. In my own opinion, and anyone who has looked at this block at any length will see that I have tattoos myself, deserve is not quite the word. I can see what he means. If you walk into the tattooist and point at a picture on the wall and have tha...

I'm just rewatching this Saint episode to check, because when I first watched it, at one point its dialogue struck me as very similar to dialogue in Escape in Time. To be sure the two plots aren't that different if you allow that The Avengers will naturally also have time-travelling weirdness in spades. I was hoping that the two screenplays would have been written by the same person, so that any similarities in dialogue would be explained by coming out of his own head, but I see Escape Route was written by Michael Winder and Escape in Time by Philip Levene, being broadcast in 1967 and 1968 respectively. The similarities begin around the 20 minute mark (in The Saint) when a man called Harry is introduced who seems to be some sort of fixer for the escape. He speaks with the same sort of stutter as Thyssen in The Avengers, who fulfills the same role. The nuts and bolts of the escape are actually arranged by a woman in both episodes. I realise the connection is very tenuous but...

You thought I'd got distracted from my re-watch of the X-Files, didn't you? Only temporarily because here I'm back with an episode at the heart of the series's mythology. Not only do we see proof of aliens but Scully learns she has been abducted and there is a whole support group. We also learn the international nature of the cover-up. I see that I have already written about the second part of this two-parter here . This episode ironically references a major topic in 1990s therapy: false memory syndrome. 'You're afraid to remember,' says one of the other abductees to Scully. Outside the world of alien abduction there are all sorts of reasons a person wouldn't remember something, a common one being trauma, and of course the controversy in the 1990s was that people were 'remembering' abuse which probably never happened. The X-Files cleverly gives alien abduction a tangible proof - the scar on the back of the neck and the accompanying implant. Th...

I did start a post recently about Return of the Saint. The gist was that I loved watching repeats of the black and white series of The Saint as a child, and didn’t take to Return of the Saint when I saw it at that time. I do not remember watching colour episodes of The Saint as a child but obviously this is the ever-fallible human memory here. As an adult I have watched the black and white series again and for reasons I can’t put my finger on, not enjoyed it at all. I found Templar's attitude to, well, pretty well everyone, to be arrogant and – ridiculous word I know – ungentlemanly. So the post I started was to the effect that my views had changed. When I started it I had obtained Return of the Saint again and found that I liked it, certainly more than I did the black and white series as an adult, and definitely more than I did as a child. This new post is to record that my fickle opinion has changed again. I went to Kidderminster today where there is a stall on the market on S...