Cult TV Blog

Source Last weekend I had an outing to Gloucester and bought the boxed set of this show in a charity shop. I had previously avoided it, and actively disliked the snippets I had seen on the internet. I obviously hadn't managed to see very much of it because I had completely missed the fact that Patrick Newell (surely everyone reading this will know that he played mother in The Avengers) is a regular character. It is usually described as a detective serious about Rupert and Amy Wilde who have an extravagant lifestyle and also function as amateur Detectives. The series was broadcast in 1978. Continue my usual policy here, of minimising description on this blog, because I want to focus on one particular episode, first a few impressions. My first impressions were awful! Through the first disc in the box the show really could not hold my attention at all, I thought it looked Bland, moved slowly, and the plots were lightweight. This last seems to be a fairly common criticism on the ...

More than two years ago  I posted about some sexploitation pulp novels spoofing the 'Man from...' theme of the TV series. Since then I have discovered that I not only managed to miss some of the later and more bizarre titles but I've found another parody series. So here goes: Incidentally, who would have thought there would be Man from UNCLE chewing gum? I see there was a film out in 1970 called The Man from ORGY: Do I even need to say that the plot isn't great literature? Also Slappy White is a great pseudonym! Protagonist Steve Victor ( Robert Walker Jr. ) is a spy and scientific investigator for the group Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth (O.R.G.Y.). Victor is given a mission to determine the location of three prostitutes that are due  US$ 15 million from their deceased female manager. Victor starts off the trail only knowing that the three women each have a tattoo on their buttocks of a gopher grinning. He is stymied in his e...

This weekend I have watched the House on Haunted Hill (1959) for only the second time in my life. I have had it saved on my hard drive for a number of years but haven't watched it again because I remember it as being rather inconclusive and unsatisfying. I have much preferred it the second time, for Reasons which are not entirely clear to me. It has however set me thinking about some possible connections with this Avengers episode. The superlative seven it's another of those Avengers episodes which Tend To Be  written about fairly dismissively in the blogosphere. I have a feeling that this is because it is perceived to be a remake of the Cathy Gail era episode dressed to kill. And of course it is, or rather it is another episode which uses the same basic plot device off a number of people being called together and then being picked off by various methods. Let me get of the way right at the beginning that I agree with the basic criticisms of this episode, and in fact do...

Today a post which I wasn't sure would really fit the description of this blog, and this lady may not be that well known abroad. On reflection I don't see how I could have had any doubt, since the country's first celebrity chef, who cooked in evening dress in The Royal Albert Hall, was a serial bigamist, invented her own past, cooked food dyed blue and green to look like trees and all sorts of strange things, publicly roared at her common law husband and assistants, and entertained the nation with her cookery programmes... Well if that isn't Cult TV I don't know what it is! I will try to stick to the TV I promise, and not get too caught up in her scandalous private life, but I must just say that Fanny Cradock with her husband Johnny was also the real person behind the character called 'Bon Viveur' who has a column in The Telegraph for years and years. I have found some reflections by her successor in the same role: Trawling the Telegraph’s archives, I ...