Cult TV Blog

Back to the Tomorrow People, for a trip to Roman times with Sigmund Freud. I was prompted to post on this episode by reading  The Gay Guide to the Tomorrow People  and while I don't usually really go for queer coding I just think it's fairly obvious in this adventure and of course there are many occasions in other part of the show which could be interpreted in a sexual way - very much in line with the dodgy underage sex which is said to have been so common in media at the time. I'm told that there are people who have a thing about slavery, and the gladiatorial setting gives the show an aura of a sword and sandals film with muscle-bound men and lots of physical stuff going on. Ahem. Even in the commentary the cast comment about dreaming about boys in chains! The seventies were just so strange. It is also notable that unless my eyes deceive me there is little or no reference to heterosexual relationships or sexuality. This really is a very gay adventure indeed! I'm not su...

I have had the box set of The Goodies for some time - it replaced the previous Network individual discs - and have been prompted by a comment on Instagram to crack it open. I have chosen this episode because it is totally barmy - there doesn't seem to be that much on the internet about it, so let's loud pedal it. The Goodies were incredibly popular when the show was broadcast in the seventies, and I see they achieved up to 15 million viewers. I like the humour a lot - it is more like, say, Monty Python, than the more cynical alternative comedy of the eighties, which I also like. I like that it feels very much like young intelligent people just coming up with jokes and making a TV show out of them! Of course the Goodies were university friends of the Pythons, and in fact parodied the show a number of times. However if it comes to a competition we would have to go for The Goodies because it has the ultimate Pythonesque accolade of having someone  die laughing while watching it. ...

As you all know I have a policy that shows I think are absolute duds will not appear here, and for most of my first viewing of this show I was thinking that I would have to comment that Black Carrion wouldn't appear here if I wasn't going through the appearances of the famous white Jaguar. In fact I have noticed that opinions about it on the internet tend to be very divided. Don't get me wrong, the majority opinion is very clearly that Black Carrion is utter dross. However there is also a solid phalanx of people who really appreciate it. I think that may be because this show draws on the mythology and folklore of the possibly abandoned or cursed village where people don't go and if they do they don't come back. The village in this case is even believed not to exist, but there are many real life examples of this.  Dode in Kent  would be an example,  Kuldhara in India  would be another. Sometimes these villages, or their inhabitants, vanish completely, such as  th...

Another show I have rather avoided writing about here. I am going to be completely upfront with the reason, which is the rather superficial one that the actor Gene Barry plays the lead character, Gene Bradley. I have even had to check that three times while writing it, and I just find the similarity of those names very confusing. Barry was of course American, in true ITC fashion and Bradley is of course the archetypal ITC hero, millionaire, sophisticated, and all over the continent like a rash. And this episode has a very classic plot around inheritance and control related to marriage, which is very solid and a real contrast with the exotic Jason King. The Jaguar footage is used in a quite low key way to show the demise of an associate of Bradley's, who has already gone to the castle housing the titular icon. If you have the Network DVD box set there is a featurette on disc 4 called Icons Aren't Forever, which of course I had to watch in preparation for this post, in which Barr...

It's been a while since I've watched a Jason King and I'm suffering from some culture shock, so perhaps I'd better start with a disclaimer that it's very unlikely this blog post will be very serious. Because, well, Jason King. When I started this blog I made a conscious decision to minimize pure description of shows, because it gets so wearing reading the same stuff all over the internet. However I am going to make an exception for this episode because how otherwise am I going to reference   Jason King's Groovy Pad ? Original ITC Synopsis (contains spoilers) Jason King falls in love with a gangster's girl friend - and finds that the arrows of love can lead to death. Olivier  (DAVID BUCK)  is a man with a mission. He wants to steal one million franc's worth of emeralds from Paris' Orly Airport. And he needs the help of gang leader Jean le Grand in order to carry out the raid. But le Grand  (KIERON MOORE)  knows that Olivier would very much like to ste...

Department S is one of my all-time favourite shows, simply because the plots are insane and the characters wild. It is as if they looked at every other show, dropped a few LSD and started writing what they saw. I have really noticed the difference coming from other ITC shows for these posts, and have also realised that the comparison of different shows is another thing we miss out on with the tendency to binge watch box sets. On the other hand this one has been so confusing. The moral is, if you have two or more cars written off during the course of a show, don't make two of them white. It makes it terribly confusing to Google five decades later. Even the internet movie car database, which is otherwise scarily precise, seems to have got confused. Anyway as far as I can tell the first white car to crash, which is driven by a dummy, is a first generation Chevrolet Corvair (don't tell me if it isn't!). I went to the trouble of finding out because I was interested by its transa...

I'm afraid I have got out of sync with these posts and this one should chronologically come before the last, so we make a brief return to the sixties. I am delighted to find, on reading round for this post, that  Grant's  son, despite not being old enough to remember this the first time round and probably the only one in his friendship group to watch quality TV like this, has the discernment to recognise that if you get into a white Jaguar you are going to die. This is the sort of memory which becomes very special as you get older. I have no idea whether Mark 1 and Mark 2 Jaguars exist in the US but when you come across one in later life it brings back your childhood viewing with Dad. I see that this is the first time I have written about this TV series here. There is a very simple reason for this: The Saint was one of the series I watched and loved as a child, and while I have several box sets, I have rather avoided blogging about it to leave my fantasies intact. You see I wa...