Cult TV Blog

This was very nearly a post about Carry on Christmas, but I don't think anyone would read it at this stage. I may post it in August and see what happens. Actually I have been taking notes of some of the searches which bring people to this site, and some are hilarious. Let's just say that entitling the last post Designing Women has caused a significant spike in page views! Instead a general post about this show which arrived the day before yesterday and is so good I have watched almost all of it already. It is somewhat late for me, having been originally broadcast in 1979-80, but surely I don't need to tell any readers of this blog that anything Les Dawson did is wonderful. The whole series is on region 2 dvd by Simply Media but if you need any persuasion to buy (or even get a multi region dvd player if you don't have one) you can see episode 1 gratis  here . What makes this show particularly suitable for the readers of this blog is that you shouldn't be deceived...

Last Christmas I made a post about Fanny Cradock and fortuitously this weekend I have bought the Central Office of Information volume 2: Design for Today and thus discovered this gem which provides an excuse for a post featuring Joyce Grenfell. I realise that I am being inconsistent but some people, like Fanny and Joyce  are so much themselves that I make an exception to my usual rule about familiar faces for them. In my opinion it is worth buying the set for this sweet film alone, but you can also watch it at the Internet Archive  here . It is about a young couple moving into their first home without much idea of how to go about it, and the film is about the contrasting demands of design and art. Grenfell plays Miss Arty and Audrey Fildes plays Miss Design - the booklet describes them as ethereal beings - who just appear in the couple's house. Grenfell plays her artistic part wonderfully, and the arrangements she makes in the house are hilariously impractical. Of course the...

I have been watching some episodes of Armchair Theatre. I am finding it terribly worthy, rather stodgy, and frankly rather prefer the superficial soufflé TV shows I normally watch  and don't want to have to feel like I should be in evening dress to watch TV. It appears I am not the only one and  this page  (which I really do recommend for good background to this show and also Special Branch) indicates that Euston Films were recruited to shake it up. Regan was the second episode of the revised show. To be frank my first impression of this was not at all favourable, for a single reason. At this length of time, when the population and language of London have changed beyond recognition, it would be difficult or impossible to find someone who would think it natural to refer to the Flying Squad as the Sweeney Todd, but you could have done in the early seventies. But I myself went in pubs in the seventies and I find it difficult to believe that a pub would have been full of peo...

There is a youngness and freshness about the humour of the sixties and seventies , before the cynicism of Thatcher's Britain put paid to it. You have to be young to produce certain sorts of humour - age has its own humour - and perhaps in releases of the last few years we see this best in The Goodies and in Do Not Adjust Your Set and Not the 1948 Show, both of which have been released this year by BFI. I recently fell for the complete Goodies and am enjoying the episodes I haven't seen before. I had forgotten that the celebs queued up to guest on this show and the wonderful Molly Sugden features in this one. The best thing is that the character she plays is so close to Mrs Slocombe that it just misses her talking about her pussy. Incidentally I also love that she is a minister being blackmailed for going to the Playgirl Club - a topical reference in the age of the Playboy Club. This episode of course reverses the Playboy Club theme by having topless male staff, and the episo...

Perhaps I had better start by explaining my title. If you want to see this on YouTube the thing to search for is Armchair Cinema. I think it may be on one of the Network box sets of that name but I'm not certain. If you want to read about this show on IMDB, it is under the title of ITV Playhouse  here . Wonderful TV this, proper quality. And you all know how difficult it is to get unalloyed praise from me. Settings, visuals, plot, characterisation, acting, all superb. It may, however, be rather wrongly named, because this is much more of a psychological thriller than a Whodunnit. It gradually and effectively builds up the tension, mostly revolving around Mrs Segal, some of whose actions are rather bizarre and she backs herself effectively into a corner. There is also a feeling of claustrophobia about this because so much of it revolves around a single house and a single village. The house is absolutely gorgeous, but don't please run away with the idea that we are talking abo...

In my last post about this show I neglected to mention the soundtrack of this show, and this episode personifies perfection. It depicts demimondaine - I'm not sure of the word to use to describe them, possibly respectable people at the time would have called them beatniks - denizens of Soho and the sound track is thus jazzy and cool for cats. I have recently also been watching some episodes of Peter Gunn, which has a similarly groovy soundtrack. In point of fact The Nightlifers places us squarely in the most sophisticated worlds of post-War Britain, just before the Beatles met the Maharishi and everyone started meditating. It has all the hallmarks - for a start being set in Soho, Gideon's wife tries to get him to get some Chinese delicacies from a shop in Soho, and there are parties and drugs galore. This episode exactly depicts the world in which The Avengers is set, including depicting a world of privilege. This show is not the simplistic contrast of youthful exuberance w...

Image credit I have somehow managed to get to this stage without watching more than the odd episode of Gideon's Way, so when I saw it for sale I had to try it. I have spent the past couple of evenings beginning to watch the episodes in order that they come on the DVDs and was thinking of them as standard ITC offerings, until this one really hit me between the eyes. I have no idea whether the episodes are in original broadcast order, but there is the slight drawback that this one about a deranged fire setter follows straight on from one about a man traumatised by being in a concentration camp who also has a plan, just for an explosion, with the same motivation of drawing attention to his issue. You all know how I don't like the same actors appearing in different shows? In this one George Cole is cast as the fire starter. It is an unusual role for him, and he plays it superbly - he really does come across as absolutely deranged and it is even worse that the death of his wif...

I am feeling a little trepidation at the thought of reviewing a Who which is a definite favourite of the fans - I realise that my usual tendency is to pick a show or episode which routinely gets savaged on the Internet, and have a go at rehabilitating it. My thoughts about this one are relatively few. The names of Doctor Who adventures are rather confusing. We have The Mind of Evil, The Faceless Ones, The Face of Evil, and so on. Personally I tend to think of them as 'the one where...'. In the case of this adventure I am not sure that actually helps because I think of it as 'the one where everyone would be better leaving well alone,' and that is also my title for several others! In fact I think it would be better called by one of the titles mooted before the final was settled on, and which unfortunately was rejected on the grounds it was pretentious: The Day God Went Mad. A major thread of the story is commentary on humans' religious instincts and behaviour, sp...

To Gloucester and Cheltenham today, where I bought the BBC boxed set featuring A for Andromeda, which I have never seen. The supply must dry up at some time, but until now, whenevr I have thought that the supply of cult TV has dried up,I have always discovered another new series. Gloucester is also famous to TV aficionados for one of the settings of Petunia Winegum's fall from fame - the other one was here in Birmingham. I was reading an article on the train coming back about how the phrase 'white heat of technology' or something similar was first used in A for Andromeda, before the then Prime Minister used it in a speech in 1963, both of which events brought the preoccupation with science of so much 1960s TV to the fore. I have commented that it is usually an ambivalent preoccupation, because science is the hope for the future but also dangerous. Science fiction , as in Doctor Who, has an opportunity to nbuild on this ambivalence by introducing fictional elements into t...

I am probably going to sound fairly critical of this episode, which isn't my intention at all - regular readers will be aware that my policy is only to post about what I consider to be good television. And it may be intentional, part of the depiction of a pregnant wife's breakdown, but there are a few things which chime wrong notes. The absolutely first thing is that the vet's wife brings the family cat to their new home in a basket, opens the basket in a room which isn't sealed tight  and is then surprised that the cat runs away. This is of course a rookie error, and would be excusable if she'd never seen a cat before, but it is her cat and she claims to have grown up in the country. She is also a vet's wife and I doubt that he would never have brought a sick cat home to keep an eye on it overnight. I see from the excellent Celluloid Wickerman post that this story lends itself to a Freudian interpretation, which is of course completely valid but I hadn...

Once again we find ourselves in the presence of quality television. I have recently dropped the name of Kneale when talking about Quatermass, which I haven't got round to blogging about yet, but I didn't then own this series. For some reason I never fancied it, which may be for the very individual reason that there are a lot of famous names in this series, not only in the production, but in the cast, and as you know that normally doesn't go well with me. This eminence is reflected in the fact the Network boxed set comes with a leaflet about Kneale and the series; the only thing more eminent is to get released by the BFI. The theme of this series is given as bestial horror, which I had some difficulty understanding, but seems to mean the individual episodes are about horror, involving animals, entities we don't understand or which don't exist. I would also note that the episodes involve the extremes of human emotions. Buddyboy is no exception, and despite starrin...

One of the newest shows I've written about here, although I can't believe it's taken this long. Not that there's that much to say about it. The recipe was simple: take a TV presenter and a footballer-turned-medium, put them in somewhere ghostly, turn off the lights and see what happens. Oh, did I say that the presenter should be much given to screaming and the entire crew must be the most suggestible people you can find? I personally approach Most Haunted as entertainment: I do have a dog in this fight, since I claim some psychic gifts myself and have made a few uncanny hits in my time. One thing I am certain of is that whatever entities might surround us do not respond well to the Most Haunted approach and certainly not to the confrontational way Acorah speaks to them! Perhaps what Most Haunted was best known for was the volume of backbiting and bitching it achieved among the cast. The TV show that has spooked millions with its footage of hauntings and polter...

I'm not normally one for animated reconstructions of erased TV  but I saw that this had come out and I simply had to have it. I have seen this missing Doctor Who before - apparently there are several animated versions but the reconstruction I have already seen is the Loose Cannon one. While the Loose Cannon website has vanished, rumour has it that copies of their shows are still knocking about on the Internet. Having said I don't go for animated reconstructions, this one is superb, and there were points at which I could forget I wasn't watching the original series. The only thing which looks slightly wrong is the lettering used for the episode titles. The plot is interesting, because it is set in Earth's colonial future. I can't find a reference to how this future happened  but is an interesting device at the end of the sixties when Britain's colonial past was winding up, to envisage a colonial future. Given that the colonists speak English, perhaps Britain ...

There are a confusing number of TV shows called The Protectors, so for clarity this post is about  this one , which is also in my holiday viewing. This episode was written by Trevor Preston, and while the ITC stable may not seem the obvious place for his writing, Preston's characteristic rich characterisation and psychological complexity are perfectly suited to this episode of what can otherwise be a rather formulaic show. Normally The Protectors features the standard settings (sophisticated for the time) of the ITC shows, but this one enters what the contemporary media wouldn't have hesitated to call a cult. The subject is therefore one of interest at the time. The only thing wrong with the cult is that it has a Christian basis, combined with esoteric beliefs, and thus feels much more like the more respectable organisations dating from an earlier period. One of the regrets of my life is that we used to have a Liberal Catholic pro-cathedral in Birmingham and I never went. Th...

You didn't think I would be able to concentrate on the viewing list I set out in my last post, did you? Naturally I've got distracted. Do you like the genre of films where somebody sets off by train (usually) to see a relative who lives in an Old Dark House? I do, and funnily it's a genre which lends itself to humour. I'm thinking of Morecambe and Wise's Night Train to Murder and What a Carve Up! Those films loud pedal the mystery leanings of the train journey into the country genre, but this one of course loud pedals the genre's horror leanings... While also being funny. I suppose this film won't be to everyone's taste by any manner of means. The opening scene shows two runaways from the hospital being beheaded by knives which come out of the side of the doctor's car. No matter how often I see that scene it makes me roar with laughter. I think this is because the scene is so obviously a parody. Nonetheless if that sort of thing doesn't strike...

The observant will notice I haven't been posting here much. The reason is that my OK-job took a nose dive and became a horrendous job, which has been taking up a lot of energy. I actually have a conditional offer of another job but it will take up to eight weeks to get the checks done. Meanwhile HR graced us with a visit today and because the woman could see I wasn't OK asked for a chat. The upshot is we mutually agreed I could leave immediately and so I have some weeks off and can watch the huge heap of DVDs I have. Don't get too jealous, will you? What I have in store (and which I may well blog about) is- I have already started watching  The Day of the Triffids , which I have somehow managed not to see until now. I haven't even seen the film from the sixties. I suspect the reason is that having eye trouble myself it has always been too close to the bone, but since my bones are currently far more likely to fall apart, that is less of a worry. It seems to follow t...

I was convinced I had already blogged about this Avengers episode, since it is one of my favourites, but am unable to find it if I have. The episode came to my mind recently, because once again I am having a spot of bother at work. I solemnly swear I don't go looking for it! But when I explained to my manager the reason that it is a phenomenally bad idea to stop anyone except management reporting incidents, I found myself using the words of Mother in this episode, when he comments that his interlocutor would be foolish not to suspect him . Nobody should be above suspicion, and the best-intentioned of people can, and do, go off the rails. Since then one of my colleagues has quite rightly blown the whistle on their failureto treat a particular event as an incident, and management have wound up looking very silly indeed. Anyway the upshot is that all three of their seniors are looking for other jobs. Incidentally, in this one Mother dictates a memo to Grandma, whom we never see, an...

When I wrote my recent piece speculating whether Bond was an influence on The Avengers, I didn't envision that post becoming a series, but this is probably the second in an unintentional series of posts on The Avengers in its context of Cold War spy literature. Perhaps I should also say that probably none of what I am going to say is academically proveable, so if you're a media student please don't quote me, I am not respectable in any way. Oh, one last disclaimer, Michael Caine normally irritates me witless. In fact Ipcress is the only one of his films I have managed to see all the way through, and I notice a few other people say that they like the film despite its cast. You may also say that his Palmer character is almost diametrically opposed to Steed - definitely working class and not with the grand origins Steed refers to now and again. My theory would be that The Ipcress File may have been initially influenced by The Avengers , since it came out halfway through the ...