Cult TV Blog

There isn't very much about this show on the internet so I hope I will achieve writing about a show  Mitchell Hadley  hasn't heard of again. I have had this box set for some time. The reason I have rather avoided writing about it is that it is a show which repays attentive viewing, and that it also takes some understanding. It is based on a series of books by Tim Heald in which Simon Bognor is a special investigator for the Board of Trade. I'm not going to lie, I find it slightly confusing how the apparent remit of the Board of Trade could require lengthy investigations spilling over into investigating such things as murder! Because the show is adapting whole novels, an adventure lasts several episodes and the two series only adapted the first four novels of the series of books. The show therefore operates in a way which benefits from extended viewing and is not that good for dipping in and out. I suppose that TV series based on series of books, unless based on phenomenally...

 You will see from my existing two posts about The Tomorrow People that while I set out to write about all of the adventures in the original series, a mere two posts in I have made a colossal jump. I have noticed that the series tends to have an effect on me that I just cannot get it in order in my head, plus I got the discs confused. I am also not sure that I can usefully say much about some of the adventures. For example the one where pre-pubescent kids are put in slave outfits while Mike Holoway does an impression of Jimmy Savile - that is literally all I have to say about that one. This 'master' post is therefore predominantly an attempt to get a grasp on the amorphous mass of the series in my own head and keep track of what I have already written about. One of the difficulties that have stopped me writing about this show is that it is basically a different show from beginning to end, and is at best patchy. Additionally as said above some of the things on the show would not...

This part of the Tomorrow People demonstrates perfectly why I fought shy from blogging about it. The show went on for so long with so many story arcs that it can be difficult to keep hold of. I think we can truthfully say that A Man for Emily is the point at which it went off the wall. We have the bizarre space family, we have Peter Davison in swimming trunks, we have them make an Earth mission with the only research done in old westerns and we have the Tomorrow People interfering in this. In plot terms I personally feel this may have been stretching the Tomorrow People slightly further than was a good idea. This is entirely personal because I can well see that the idea of a next evolution in human life would well include interaction with aliens, because this is one of the weird interests of the time. There are also a lot of completely earth-bound concerns dealt with by the show, including racism and ghosts. My own opinion is that this episode gives them too much to do and also raises ...

I love a 1970s sex comedy, me. Obviously this means I'm deeply superficial but the reason this one is appearing here is because I love it so it deserves one of my rare posts about non-TV subjects. Actually it's not completely unrelated, because this film shows what was going on in the cinematic world outside the more-controlled world of TV. I have commented before about the war which went on at this time about the nature of what is shown in media. Mary Whitehouse's Clean Up TV campaign started in 1964, and while this film is very far from being porn (it depicts boobs and bums and frequent casual sex) the material in this film is clearly a step on from anything you can see in the TV of the time. Given that Mrs Whitehouse already wanted to clean up TV she must have already thought that what it was showing was unacceptable. I must confess to being somewhat mystified that she campaigned against broadcasting footage of the liberation of Belsen (footage she described as filth) an...

In some ways we are very lucky to be living in the times we are. The current intense polarisation of society allows a quick identification of how you will get on with people. In the US you have it relatively easy, because you just have to ask people who won the election and their response is likely to give you a good idea of the rest of their opinions. Here we tend to do that by their reaction to the word brexit, although now we have the handy indicator of whether they've had the vaccine and the reasons for their decision either way. I have been spending time sitting in the sun recently (pictured below) and yesterday a man started chatting with me who told me quite seriously that Bill Gates was spying on me through the coronavirus vaccine I have had and that this is part of a new world order. I remembered an urgent appointment elsewhere. Apart from anything else, if this was actually happening, a member of our government would have left it on a memory stick on a train by now. In th...