Cult TV Blog

Yesterday I went to Leamington Spa, which is not far from here but is always an expensive journey because there is someone there with the same taste in TV as me, who keeps selling his or her DVDs to the entertainment exchange, and I keep buying them. Yesterday I bought series 1 of a series I have never heard of before, Rogue's Rock, but which I find I like because it is definitely out of the same stable as Freewheelers, even down to some of the same music. In non-TV I bought the horror film spoof Young Frankenstein, and bought the boxed set of Thriller. I have seen the show before but not for some time and have somehow never blogged about it here. Thriller is one of those series which is described as legendary by some, and since it is an anthology series, you can often find it described as mixed. Lady Killer is the first episode, and it's excellent, despite embodying virtually everything I dislike in television of this era! For a start the three main characters are played by...

I am currently starting a much-needed holiday, which is what turned my mind to this episode, and I realise I have been putting off blogging about The Tomorrow People. The reason is the obvious one - it is a hugely ambitious show, which also manages to be ridiculously confusing and, er, bound permanently to the 1970s, with all that that implies. It is also rather difficult to write intelligent criticism of this show because it has all already been said. My own long-standing criticism is that I find it confusing - even to the extent of not being able to disentangle episodes, adventures, series, who is who, and so on - and this is not helped by a changing cast of Tomorrow People. There is also the matter of this being a children's show, and I have been trying to think myself into how a child would view this episode, and I suspect the emotions would be a mixture of envy for the Tomorrow People and horror at how the enslaved boys are treated. Isn't that the point of much writing...

My posts here have veered rather towards the gritty school of cult TV, and this show is no exception. I am also rather unusually in awe of this show, and regular readers will know that my pantheon of shows which are supreme quality is vanishingly small, but Out entered it as soon as I watched the first episode and simply had to order the whole series. Trevor Preston was given two series of his own to write - this one in 1978 and Fox in 1980 - after writing episodes of The Sweeney, which tells us exactly what stable this show comes from. Out, however, is not a cop show by any manner of means - the story goes that a criminal called Frank Ross got grassed up and ended up in prison. At the start of the series he is released from prison, baying for revenge. It's a sort of inversion of the principle of Man in a Suitcase, because the hero is done badly to by another criminal rather than the Secret Service. Man in a Suitcase is of course a classic, and it will give you some idea of the ...