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Showing posts from 2020

Carry on Christmas 1972: Carry on Stuffing

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Another year and once again I'm saving blogging about Too Many Christmas Trees for some unspecified time in the future. It will surely come as no surprise that I adore the naughty and slightly childish humour of the Carry On films. I suspect they may be one of those British things which don't travel well, but as always I stand to be corrected in the comments. I have deliberately chosen this one of the four Christmas TV specials on the box set because it is my favourite, and yet strangely it is often considered the weakest, according to the internet. Therefore it seems right to give it a plug here and have a go at rehabilitating it. It consists of a number of sketches joined together with a banquet, and manages to contain all sorts of things we associate with Christmas. These include elements of pantomime stories and spoof other genres of films and fiction. Visually it is splendid, and starts off with a shot of a manor house. We all know that in TV that speaks to established wea

The Stranger: In Memory Alone

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I have to come clean at this point - I haven't seen any of the other films in this series but I found them for sale at a price I was prepared to pay and chose this one because it features a railway station. In the unlikely event that my televisually literate readers haven't come across this series, here is somebody else's account of what they are about: The first unofficial Doctor Who spinoff video was  Wartime , in 1988.  This was made by Reeltime Pictures, known for their  Myth Makers  interview tapes, and is the only one of its kind that was made while Doctor Who was still on television.  Their second effort was  Downtime , in 1995, which we will be looking at soon, probably the best known unofficial spinoff.  The point of these things mainly was to fill the gap left by Doctor Who when it went off air in 1989, to give the fans something new.  Another company was also doing the same kind of thing in the 90s: BBV, which stands for Bill Baggs Video. Reeltime and BBV had ver

Quatermass Again: The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)

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I have rarely had the opportunity to write about 1950s TV here and I'm not really doing so now, since I'm writing about the Hammer film which used the original TV series as its source. This 1953 series is a legend in the world of cult TV: Originally comprising six half-hour episodes, it was the first science fiction production to be written especially for a British adult television audience.[1] Previous written-for-television efforts such as Stranger from Space (1951–52) were aimed at children, whereas adult entries into the genre were adapted from literary sources, such as R.U.R. (1938 and again in 1948) and The Time Machine (1949).[2] The serial was the first of four Quatermass productions to be screened on British television between 1953 and 1979. It was transmitted live from the BBC's original television studios at Alexandra Palace in London, one of the final productions before BBC television drama moved to west London. As well as spawning various remakes and sequels, T

The Avengers on Location 1966

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 How didn't I know this video existed until today?

Police Story: Dangerous Games

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Who loves ya baby? I have been romping through seventies US detective shows. Several seasons of Kojak (you will of course notice the great resemblance), and this show which I have just discovered. Coming from one to the other I notice a tendency in this show for people to address each other as 'baby', and I wonder whether it was a seventies thing. I had assumed it was a Kojak peculiarity. Joseph Wamburgh who wrote this show has been credited with turning police shows in a more realistic direction, and so it is possible that this show is the US 'hinge' between the dreamy TV (which survives that is) and the gritty realism of shows like The Sweeney. Despite this and apparently consistent good reviews on t'internet, there is comparatively little about this show online. I myself literally only discovered it by chance this week. I would like to speculate about why this is but I won't because it would be pure speculation. I know how good you all are at filling in gaps

The Avengers: What the Butler Saw

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 I love this episode, it is like an encapsulation of everything Avengers in one hour! Eccentrics, romance, dastardly plots, and parody of our glorious nation. Actually I was reminded of it when watching Clue (one of my favourite films, along with Murder by Death), when Tim Curry told one of the guests that a butler 'butles'. There is an irony - Steed understands 'service' so well because of having been brought up on the other side of the counter. He fits in by actually being an obvious fraud and therefore a shifty character - I love that the nobles in his forged references are the names of pubs! Normally I don't take to familiar faces but like that John le Mesurier turns out to be the baddie here. I love his quote to the effect that his roles were usually of a decent man at sea in a chaos of his own making - which presumably means this isn't a usual role for him. He did actually see himself as a jobbing actor of the sort I'm usually irritated by and has a hu

Shoestring: Private Ear

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Apologies for the hiatus in posting, but fortunately I am on leave again so time for some quality TV and some blog posts. I have had Shoestring on my list of shows to write about here for ages. Usually when I write about 1970s shows I find myself commenting on how dreary the 70s were. This show managers a genius combination of managing the nightmare scenarios of the 1970s with certain dreamy aspirational qualities, which were later taken into the series Bergerac. For example what is not to love about working as a private ear for a radio station? By contrast Shoestring is doing this because he became mentally unwell after working as a computer technician. I believe the 70s to the 1980s were the last time when being a DJ was an aspirational thing, since I have read that it was in the 90s it became a lot about marketing and record deals, leading to it being an increasingly stressful occupation. In retrospect the hero DJs of the 70s have often been investigated if not convicted for se

The Wild Wild West: The Night of the Lord of Limbo

 Sadly Diana Rigg has been added to the list of my TV heroes who have left us. The internet is naturally full of tributes, however I am watching this show at the moment and thought I would post about it. Robert Conrad has also died this year. For anyone who likes the kind of bizarre TV I do, The Wild Wild West is a gift. It is... Well, wild, I suppose. It is described as a western, espionage and science fiction show, which aimed to take the James Bond concept back to the nineteenth century. The kind of conceits we find in the wilder Avengers episodes are therefore common here, for example this episode has both magic and time travel. What's not to love? Topically, the subtext here is that the baddie is a former colonel in the confederate army who wants to use his ability to change time to go back and change the outcome of the civil war. Obviously ImI a foreigner and history isn't my strong point but I understand that to mean that he would like the US to be built on slavery and t

Queenie's Castle: Just Good Friends

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  How do I even start to write about this show? It has so much good stuff in it and so much that interests me. For a start it stars Diana Dors, one of my great favourites. She is unusual among actresses in that you can find her in straight acting and (ahem) apparently she can also be found in sex comedies and risqué modelling. I always feel her role in this show may have been an inspiration for Lily Savage, who often referred to herself as a blonde bombsite. As with most of my favourites you either like her or really don't take to her - rumours abound of sexy parties and her secretly filming guests at her house having sex. In this show she plays the matriarch of a family, but her husband is 'working away'. She shares a flat with her three grown up sons and her brother in law, and they're all dodgy in one way or another. There is another star in this show, although it's never named, externals of the flats are filmed at Quarry Hill Flats in Leeds - despite my bizarre

Life with Cooper

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  I am delighted finally to be writing about this show which has been on my shopping list for ages, and I finally found a reasonably priced copy on eBay. I love that Tommy Cooper started his life ship building, did magic tricks in his spare time and then realised one day that it was funny if he fluffed the tricks. Thus was his profession as a very good magician who mainly got it wrong on purpose, born. I have just realised that the Goes Wrong Show in the last post is a direct historical descendant of the type of humour in Cooper's act. In between we have Les Dawson, who as my father used to say, must have been a very good pianist to play the piano that badly. This show is rather atypical for Cooper's act, because while his usual shows were his act plain and simple, this show has an element of each episode also having a story, within which he is his normal bumbling self. I really like that aspect of the show, and it is used to bring other people in. I particularly like Sheila Ha

Chance in a Million: Man of Iron

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I once went to a wedding where, when the best man produced the little box containing the ring, the ring almost leapt out and went down through one of those heating grilles so common in Victorian buildings. The churchwarden, who had the necessary tools, had to be fetched from his house around the corner and it took a fair time for the ring to be found. Meanwhile the two families were outside the church on opposite sides, both either in tears or announcing how they all knew this marriage was doomed from the start. Surprisingly they did actually get married but I don't know how it lasted, although I do know that there was an atmosphere you could cut with a knife. The reason I go into this is that it is the sort of thing you would expect to happen at a wedding attended by Tom Chance. This show is often called a sitcom, but it isn't. A sitcom is a usually dreary series which goes on too long and attempts to make comedy of the characters' situation. This, however, is a show about

The Goes Wrong Show: The Lodge

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I am just starting a week's leave and have a heap of things to watch and also hopefully the space in my brain to blog about some of them. This show is the most recent one I have ever written about, being broadcast in 2019. Don't fear, it is definitely up to our standards.  The team who star in this show have done a whole string of good things over the past years, beginning with The Play That Goes Wrong. The premise is that we are at a production by the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society... Which always goes wrong. This episode is a horror, produced to make up for their underwhelming productions of The Texas Chain Saw Massager and Nightwear on Elm Street. This is a play in a haunted house isolated by snow - the setting for many a horror.  And how it goes wrong. A recurring wrong is that the pregnant wife's baby is evidently a balloon, which bursts. The set doesn't quite work right. They have had to put in extra adjectives because the play ran short. My favourite is the ba

The Children's Film Foundation: One Hour to Zero

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Goodness, our world has become a strange place very quickly. You will be pleased to know that you can read this post without fear of infection, because it turns out I have coronavirus antibodies. I wasn't aware I had had it, but I've got the antibodies. This programme is rather topical in another way, because it is set in Wales, another place the English took over and forced everyone to learn English. It was just as topical in 1976, because it features a nuclear power plant, and of course people imminently expected a nuclear winter: my own mother actually had an evacuation plan that began (I was tiny) 'put John in a wheelbarrow'! My own view is that nuclear power is completely safe, if you can sit with the potential if it goes wrong and you can face the need to contain the waste for thousands of years. The trouble was that the reactors of the time were not safe, because they allowed people to do stupid things like see what happens if you remove the power rods, which is

Jonathan Creek: The Curious Tale of Mr Spearfish

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Another of my beloved series which I have never written about here, although the reason is simply that you have to let yourself forget mysteries before you watch them again.  I don't personally watch mysteries really for the detection but for the comfortable setting and the atmosphere. This goes for Agatha Christie, whom I have written about here before - although her books are now old enough to have faded into a mythical past - for example I would love to sympathise about the servant problem, but I have never had that problem myself. I feel Jonathan Creek also has an air of unreality and regular readers will know I love TV shows to be unreal. It has only just struck me how unreal this is. As I remember it is revealed at some point that Jonathan inherited the mill (although I stand to be corrected) but Maddie's flat in a mansion block would be ridiculously expensive. Out here in reality journalists can't be sure of stability and people who make a living by consulting on

The Avengers: Death's Door

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I have had a stressful few weeks... However thankfully I am starting a holiday at home which will hopefully mean getting some sun. I was thinking which recent purchases I ought to blog about but then decided that I will watch and blog about what I want to! One of the reasons I have picked this Avengers is it is an all-time favourite of mine, seems to be popular with the fans and yet strangely gets hammered on the Internet. Let's get the criticism out of the way, so that I can proceed with pure adulation. Props, locations, shots are all taken from other Avengers, but of course we must remember these shows were intended to be viewed once and not to hold up to the sort of analysis we give them now. You will also read that this one is inferior to Too Many Christmas Trees - it is if you buy the premise of real psychic powers, but I think the fake psychic power here puts it more firmly in the spy stable. I have commented many times on the sparse props used by this series to give a wh

Bergerac: Burnt

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Another series I can't believe it's taken me this long to write about. I must begin by being frank about the fact that Bergerac was a favourite show of mine in my teens - I even fantasised about living on Jersey 'when I grow up'. The irony is that now I am grown up I actually could live there, because I belong to a profession which is granted residence without the usual requirement that you pay at £125,000 sterling in tax every year, and wouldn't want to because I loathe the sort of people who pay that sort of tax. This episode is largely about a financial fiddle - it isn't enough being fabulously wealthy, but the fabulously wealthy like finding ways of contributing as little as possible and so like to have their assets hidden away. In this case on Sark, another of the Channel Islands and with notably eccentric laws: I see that feudalism was only abolished in 2008 in the island's first election! Perhaps I have given a rather negative impression, and woul

Not TV: Honor Blackman in Serena (1962)

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We have lost a couple of actors already this year, who will be well known to the readers of this blog. Tim Brooke-Taylor succumbed to Covid-19, and I feel that is the reason his death has had a higher profile. I have recently featured him in drag  here  and you can read a tribute to him by Grant Goggins  here . Instead I have chosen to post about Honor Blackman and feature a film of hers contemporary with The Avengers. Serena has what is a rather simple plot under the surface  and cunningly hidden by layers of deceit and confusion. This film really does take a few viewings to sort out what is happening. I am going to say as little as possible about the plot, but I do have a few films I think are out of a similar mould to The Avengers but have not so far got round to doing a post about them. This one has very much the same atmosphere as the early Avengers. It is set in a rather Bohemian setting, based around an artist whose wife will not divorce him because she's a devout RC. I

The Avengers: Man-Eater of Surrey Green

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In theory I am working from home but surprisingly can't get on to remote working and have done nothing for two days. I have additionally been offered another job, and since my manager couldn't be bothered to acknowledge my notice or speak to me, I am not minded to be helpful! The perfect opportunity to write a blog post. I don't know why I have never noticed that this Avengers is one of those which spoof a whole genre of film, in this case the dangerous plants theme which is a sub set of 1950s creature features. It is suitable for the Avengers  which so frequently refers to the 1960s love and fear of science, which at the same time was mirrored by a love and fear of nature. One of the things I find interesting about this is that in theory the action leaves Avengersland completely, going as far as Denbigh, which is in Wales. There are also other distances involved, by means of rockets and what have you. There is therefore a sense in which this show is an exception to the

Avengersland: The Wrestling Parson

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I am accustomed to saying that the world depicted in The Avengers is not real. Until now. British Pathé did a series of films on eccentric vicars and this one (from 1963) is straight out of The Avengers. Many a clergyman must have been involved in wrestling or boxing, but working in Canada  buying a horse from 'the gypsies' and giving the horse beer to drink take it to the next level. And that wrestling match in the open surely wasn't set up for the camera was it?

Minder: Gunfight at the OK Laundrette

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How have I managed not to pass comment on Minder up to now? Despite being a series which IMHO went on too long, I love the gritty depiction of 1970s London in the early episodes. This is the same world shown in The Professionals and The Sweeney, just seen from the underside. This episode is based on real events  of the Spaghetti House Siege in 1975, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the Minder script. Three black men attempted to steal the week's takings from an Italian restaurant in Knightsbridge, but wound up taking the staff hostage. Surveillance techniques were used by the police, the hostage takers made rather confused attempts to pass the robbery off as a political act, the press nobly agreed to help the police manipulate what was happening by their headlines, and one of the hostages developed what later became known as Stockholm Syndrome.  The episode also deals with another issue of the time, namely immigration, by cleverly juxtaposing the concerns of It

Randall and Hopkirk Deceased (2000 Version): A Man of Substance

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I never thought I would ever be blogging about this show here. The original series is one of my favourites and I thought this one had everything I dislike: I loathe remakes and thought this was one. But then I read a blog post by Grant Goggins about a different episode  (here ) in which he says, I’m afraid the previous three episodes were really uneven, but  Randall & Hopkirk  went out on a high note written by Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson as a very cute tribute to  The Avengers . It’s  “Death at Bargain Prices”  crossed with  “The House That Jack Built”  as Jeff and Jeannie are trapped in an escape-proof department store full of lethal traps. And just to add to the tips of the bowler, they brought along some mannequins that evoke the Autons from  Doctor Who  and dressed one of them like Steed. ... And of course I was smitten. This series manages to play tribute to just about every classic TV series and film ever made, including often focusing on the unreal Britain of The Aven

Monty Python: The War Against Pornography

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For some strange reason I have managed to blog about TV for this long and not once blogged about Monty Python and this is an omission which requires immediate correction. I have commented recently on the energy and youthfulness of TV comedy before everyone became very cynical in Thatcher's Britain, and of course Monty Python is no exception. The Pythons seemingly took whatever came to mind and made it hilarious. Their humour was not without relevance to the events of the day and the war against pornography referenced here was of course a real war being waged at the time: regular readers will have noticed how often Mary Whitehouse is referenced on this blog. If you want the other side of that story I would recommend the film about Mary Millington which I have recently watched with much enjoyment. The other thing the Pythons bring home is how the world has changed in the intervening decades. Part of this episode mentions Britain and trade with other nations, and of course the sev

Dr Who: Terror of the Autons

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High time we had some more Who. This one features Jon Pertwee with the Master, of course one of the Doctor's greatest enemies. The premise of this one is relatively simple, but tends to become complicated when it is explained. The Master gains access to Nestene intelligence which allows anything plastic to become dangerous. It's really as simple as that. You can get as sci fi about as you like. But of course that is not how I would approach it - the premise of dangerous plastics allows endless japes, like murderous toys, deadly flowers and chairs which eat people. Oh, and plastic police officers. You can approach this one as horrifying if you want - in fact it was given in Parliament as an example of how children's television had become scary - but watched as an adult, it is a jolly romp. This Who calls in a feature of the TV of the sixties which I bang on about here - the ambivalence about the bright new scientific future which was otherwise all the rage at the time.

Billy Liar

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This was very nearly a post about Tales From Fat Tulip's Garden, which is a delight and which I remember the first time round, although I was probably older than its intended audience. Tony Robinson (Baldrick), dissatisfied with the quality of story telling around at the time for his own young children, tells stories in a gorgeous listed house and garden. You can read about this show at the Curious British Telly blog  here  and here  and about the sad story of the house  here . I would recommend the show to children of any age. Also in my current viewing heap is the TV series Billy Liar, which I have seen before and for some reason didn't take to. On revisiting it I have come to the conclusion that this show is also a delight. The Billy Liar meme lasted for a good couple of decades after the initial novel, about a terminally dreamy young man came out and encompassed film, play, sequel and this TV series. The idea is very simple, Billy Fisher leads a humdrum life still living