Cult TV Blog

It gives me great pleasure finally to be writing about Target here, and I'll just give my first impressions because the discs only arrived today and I'm rushing into print. Target is one of those legendary series of UK television, legendary because nobody has seen it since it was broadcast. Legend has it it was the BBC's answer to the popularity of ITV shows like The Sweeney and The Professionals. It followed a similar formula and perhaps overdid the violence because after a record number of complaints it was pulled after only two series. Basically if you like the other shows you should like Target. I do. The shows still exist and I have bought series 1 from  here.  If you send the guy an email he invoices you by email and you pay by PayPal. What you get is three printed DVDs in cardboard sleeves. They have menus but otherwise there's nothing fancy and that's fine by me. Picture quality is acceptable in my opinion, but as usual don't expect HD from a show of t...

I have been prompted to watch this episode by a new comment posted on my  original post  on this episode. It has been some time since I have watched many Danger Man episodes and have also not watched through The Prisoner lately so wanted to revisit what I thought before. When I started this blog I had an ongoing fear that I would find I had blogged about all the interesting shows and run out of things to say. This no longer frightens me because I now realise that good TV can be watched repeatedly and bring different things to mind. In my first post I decided to take the view that this episode was a true precursor of The Prisoner. This time round the episode has made me think differently, purely because of the opening scene of the car crash. It is evident that Drake of course works for an organisation. And this has taken my train of thought two ways. The first is that the opening scenes remind me of the Avengers episode, The Hour That Never Was. Visually they are incredibl...

The only series of this show currently commercially available is series 6, which I have written about here before. I see from IMDB that this show was not only very go-ahead at the time, apparently being the first time in the UK that a boat was set up as an Outside Broadcast Unit, but also suffered from the junking common at the time. Apparently the only reason it survives at all was because the material chanced to be kept by the series film editor. The upshot is that apparently what I have is a reproduction of this single copy. You can buy it off the internet as I did myself. The only thing I would say is that I have decided I am not going to name (and thus advertise) the vendor for one reason. I was impressed with the speed at which they rushed the order round here, sending me emails all the way to let me know what was happening. So customer service is great. The discs came to around £15 which I suppose would be a shop price for many box sets, and in this case I don't mind pay...

I'm afraid this post will be rather derivative, since I looked online and found that everyone else has already thought and published the thoughts I had myself! What is all my own thought, though, is a growing distaste at the idea of time travel. I'm actually no great traveller at, although it's the actual travelling I dislike rather than the being in different places. This episode makes very clear how dangerous time travel is and how much you could feel trapped. Nobody will believe the truth about your situation and you will be permanently an alien in the place and time you travel to. A humorous point is perhaps rather overdone about this in the way the other characters consistently mistake Polly for a boy, because of her sixties-era trousers and cap: In a further touch of panto, Polly is mistaken for a lad throughout. The joke’s on her for wearing 1960s slacks and a Bob Dylan cap, but the notion that any lusty seadog wouldn’t immediately clock luscious Anneke Wills in h...

I have rather got out of the habit of posting my sightings of the books from John Steed's flat in Stable Mews. I suppose I have got used to the idea that this set of distinctive leather-bound books would keep appearing all over the place in sixties TV (and it's not only the books, props reappear all over the place in The Avengers, and recently I have read about props being used in both The Prisoner and Randall and Hopkirk Deceased). I have got so used to seeing them, that recently it took me aback to see Steed hiding behind his books when pretending to be under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen and chased by a murderous fake nanny who is a diabolical mastermind. Of course the episode could only be Something Nasty in the Nursery.

Of course this is not the first time I have blogged about TV which no longer exists (my series of posts on series 1 of The Avengers will be continued at some point in the future). This First Doctor adventure still exists as a soundtrack, some bits which survive and telesnaps. I have never got on well with audio issues of programmes which were intended for TV, so what I am writing about here is the wonderful Loose Cannon reconstruction of this adventure, which I won't link directly because it is readily available on their Daily Motion channel. Normally I wouldn't get on very well with this adventure, simply because historical dramas never do it for me. That is even usually the case for Dr Who, but the historical setting doesn't put me off. I was recently in a shop buying a Dr Who when the man behind me started telling me that Who has never been the same since it went into colour. He's wrong, in my opinion. Two things which marked sea changes in the show were the fir...

I was sure I had blogged about this, but if I have I can't find it. This is the last black and white Danger Man episode and it's a stunner. For a start the human chameleon John Drake becomes the cool DJ Johnny Drake, or JD. How cool is that? For another the setting is about as groovy as you could want. At the time we didn't have many licensed radio stations in the UK and the inability of the BBC stations to cater to the audience for pop music led to a proliferation of pirate radio stations. Naturally pirate radio continues, but the setting places the episode firmly in the latest trends in 1960s Britain. Many of these stations were based off shore to take advantage of a legal loophole, but this Danger Man sets Radio Jolly Roger on the  Red Sands Sea Forts  in the Thames estuary. They are still there and an internet search demonstrates loads of nostalgia for their time as several pirate radio stations. That's right, the uber-cool Danger Man series recorded an episode...