Cult TV Blog

I am absolutely delighted to make Ride Ride, another episode of Tales of Unease, one of the few episodes I have written about twice here, not least because I don't think I even came close to doing it justice when I talked about it in my series of posts on orphaned episodes. It was orphaned at the time, but Network's glorious release of this series means it can be viewed all restored and sparkling, and I honestly think it comes across quite differently in its restored version.  I note that reviews about this one are strictly mixed, and I honestly wonder whether this is influenced by the poor versions of this show people have had to see up until now. In my humble opinion it is absolutely excellent and the restoration only brings its quality out. One of the things I didn't say last time, and which I'm now reminded to say by having blogged about  The Two Faces of Evil since then, is that the plot is yet another variant on the vanishing hitchhiker urban legend, only (I hope

This is about an episode of the 1990s TV version of the Famous Five, rather than the 1970s version.  Five Have a Mystery to Solve is the penultimate Famous Five adventure that Blyton wrote and it's a cracker, with a mysterious island full of old treasures, on which of course the kids gets trapped and discover what's going on there, before we all go home for lashings of ginger beer. The island is known as Whispering or Wailing Island and this of course represents exactly the sort of mysterious local folklore which appeals to me. It also seems to be a popular episode judging by the interest online. It had a film version made in 1964 (which is available on DVD from the BFI) although as far as I can see wasn't televised in the 1970s series. I've seen the 1964 version and in my humble opinion this is better. It's short, for a start, and perfectly paced. It's also slightly different from the other episodes of this series in extensive use of very arty camera techniques

This post is about the Thriller episode Kill Two Birds (1976) which I think might have been released as Cry Terror in some markets. Since my last post I hatched a plan to write alternating posts about Tales of Unease and Thriller, simply because I don't want to rush through the seven episodes of Tales of Unease and thought they might compare and contrast well to another anthology series. I hadn't watched any Thriller for several years, although a few episodes have appeared here before, so it seemed the obvious choice. And this is where my plan hit a snag, which is that I frankly found myself wondering why I had bothered to keep the boxed set of Thriller at all, apart from a few episodes. So in the past week I have actually watched the whole of Thriller and can confirm that my personal preference would be for Tales of Unease anyday. Thriller struggles with a few disadvantages to my mind: the episodes are too long and the available material would be enough for a shorter programme

I have promised myself that I will save the rest of Max Headroom to return to at my leisure in the future. You all understand that this isn't at all because my grasshopper mind has already moved on, don't you? In fact where it's moved to is my Christmas present to myself, which is the Network release of the 1970 anthology series Tales of Unease. This is a series I have long wanted to see in its entirety, even though I don't tend to get on very well with the rather changeable nature of anthology series, because I loved the orphaned episodes I have written about here in the past (click on the Tales of Unease label in the menu to see those posts) and also because I have been struck by the unconditional, yet intelligent, adulation I have seen this show receive in the cult TV blogosphere. Well done, Network for releasing it, First up we have The Old Banger, the final episode broadcast in the original run, and which I was particularly keen to see because I have never seen a r

 This is about an episode of the original UK show called The Max Headroom Show, broadcast 1985 to 1987. You can see it at https://youtu.be/2JLpKbMlcSU. Unfortunately for music copyright reasons it's not complete but is nonetheless an excellent monument to eighties culture and cult TV. As I commented, you can tell how cult a TV show is by how much TV archaeology you have to do to find out about it and I've had to dig quite deep to work out more or less where this episode came and have been unable to identify it exactly. It is not a series 1 episode because they're missing, and it isn't a series 3 episode because they had studio audiences so it must be from series 2, broadcast in the UK July to August 1986. I am indebted to maxheadroom.com for the information that the episodes 2.2 (broadcast 29th July 1986), 2.5 (12th August 1986) and 2.6 (19th August 1986) had no guests so this must be one of them. Some kind soul has ripped it from the Betamax tape it was recorded on and

Hi there, televisionists! I vaguely remembered Max doing some adverts for Radio Rentals (the appliance hire firm) in the eighties, and was delighted to find that this is how he greets the viewers on one of them.  Despite my avoiding his advertising in my previous post, it is strangely suitable that I at least touch on it in this post on Blipverts. Blipverts is of course the first episode of the 1987 to 1988 ABC US series simply called Max Headroom. It's coming at this point because I've previously written a post just about Twenty Minutes into the Future, which originally created a back story for Max, and this episode rather covers the same ground so is by way of another introduction to his back story. The titular blipverts are a system of very short adverts that get into people's subconscious discovered and run by Channel 23.  I actually think this episode is in some ways a better introduction to Max's history than Twenty Minutes into the Future, at least in narrative t

As sometimes happens the posts on this blog haven't faithfully been representing what TV I've been watching lately (I get caught in a conflict between that aspiration which would make the blog more accurately reflect the lapfrog nature of my inner world and the opposite aspiration to write constructively and in an orderly manner and try to concentrate on things), and this post is an attempt to remedy this. I actually got distracted by Virtual Murder and what has most been at the forefront of my attention lately has been the various TV incarnations of Max Headroom. This post is purely intended to chat about them a bit and try to disentangle them, and then I'll write some blogs about different episodes of the various TV shows. I loooved the eighties, I think because I was at the exact right age to appreciate the good sides of it without being too deflated by the incredible greed and other terrible things that were going on. For that reason the 1980s shows that have appeared h

This is the episode of Virtual Murder broadcast as the first, although it wasn't intended to be. In my humble opinion this was the right thing to do rather than broadcast the intended first episode, Dreams Imagic, first. The reason I think this is the plot of this one is a beauty, of the paint of famous works of art suddenly melting and running. As a plot this is exactly the right note to kick off on, and it is well worthy of the sixties TV gauntlet that the show runs with. As is the cast of complete eccentrics, once again played by a guest cast of Big Names: Helen Lederer, Bernard Bresslaw, Julia Foster,  When we see the murder victim the presentation is sufficiently eccentric to be right up there was reenacting any campaign you like in the potting shed. This show is absolutely barking and I know regular readers will love it. I think it is more apparent in this one than in the other episodes that Dr Cornelius's sidekick, played by Kim Thomson, was at least partly inspired by E

In a change to my usual practice I am going to start with a list of the guest stars of this episode of Virtual Murder: Ronald Fraser, Jill Gascoine, Alfred Marks, Peggy Mount, and Julian Clary as a most unusual undertaker dressed all in pink. How in hell is this show not well known if not on its own merits but because it managed to obtain a list of guest stars like that in one episode? What is wrong with the TV viewing public? The show is also an absolute delight. It's insane and I love it. Unusually this one is much more focussed on the university in the unnamed city, its daily life and rivalries. Specifically we're in the run up to a play and there has been a sudden spate of attacks by an apparent real world vampire. In this way we are set up to expect a particular ending to the show, because when you've got a university production of Dracula going on and people start reporting a real life vampire, you tend to assume the two are related. Of course we all know that the unn

This episode of Virtual Murder is one which really makes me wonder why this show isn't more known because it stars Jon Pertwee, who is surely known to everyone in the cult blogosphere, as an Italian chef (who is Spanish) and the villain of the piece. He does a brilliant job of portraying a man who is utterly barmy, and this comes across in everything he says because of his odd manner of speech, but nonetheless nobody has stopped to think he's insane. You may think that I'm naughty giving out that he's the baddie right at the start, but so does Virtual Murder, and I think that just underscores that this show is about the atmosphere and the whole story, not just about solving the crime. You've got it, exactly like so many great 1960s TV shows. The details of the investigation are of course entirely psychological and the profile drawn up of Silverado is fascinating. We don't only see this excellent portrayal of human life in the excellent depiction of the barmy Sil

In my first post about Virtual Murder I said that it had picked up the gauntlet laid down by The Avengers. This episode is about a man, Roger Smith, who turns up to a police station on a bicycle and empties a bag of human bones over the desk. If I say that this man is dressed as Father Christmas (and played by Tony Robinson as guest star) you may be inclined to say that the show has blown up the gauntlet and turned it into a whoppie cushion and I'll tell you right now, it's glorious. I particularly like when Smith uses his one phone call to ring Cornelius and dramatically play out that the police have attached electrodes to his tongue. This is the truly bat shit crazy world of English eccentricity (which is of course completely untrue, in no way are we eccentric) and it displays a procession of eccentrics for us. We're beyond eccentricity though because Smith has been a research project because he has pseudologica fantastica, and just lies continually. Psychologically very

After writing some posts about documentaries I was absolutely gagging to scurry away to unreality, and so here we have an episode of the 1992 series, Virtual Murder. Honestly, I'll be surprised if even the readers of this blog have ever heard of this show because nobody ever has. Virtual Murder was intended to be in the mould of earlier eccentric series (The Avengers, Adam Adamant and Department S are often mentioned  - are you interested yet?) and was about two amateur detectives who investigated odd cases in tandem with the constabulary. It's got some names in it: Nicholas Clay plays John Cornelius, Kim Thomas plays Samantha Valentine, and Stephen Yardley plays Inspector Cadogan. It incorporates elements of the occult and virtual reality, and so brought the eccentric sixties TV show up to date for the nineties. All of the episdoes are available on youtube. You may not have heard of it because it's had a critical pummeling and there is vanishingly little about it even in t

I have decided to make this the last post in my current Documentary Season, purely to try to keep it in some sort of control. There are of course loads of other documentaries sitting on my hard drive that I want to write about - in fact I might do a Home of Your Own series of posts which they would fit in - but I don't want it to take over the blog for now. Hence I will attach some conclusions to this series of posts in this post. Apart from anything else I've had a bit much of reality for the present and am gagging for the unreality I usually see on TV. This documentary is about the Ashwood Day Centre, a day centre for people with mental health needs, in Leeds, and was made by the University of Leeds in 1982. This documentary has one serious defect, which isn't a reason not to watch it because seeing the day centre and the interviews with the service users is fascinating, which is that it doesn't include a formal statement of who runs the day centre and what it specifi

The Drowned Town is an episode of the long-running series about archaeology, Time Team. It's about one of my favourite places, the mystical town of Dunwich, Britain's Atlantis. In mediaeval times it was a port which rivalled London, with several churches, even a cathedral, until two storms in the fourteenth century caused the majority of it to vanish into the sea. Coastal erosion has continued since then and there's a whole history which continues to crumble and collapse. The reality is that the remaining few dozen homes which currently constitute the village of Dunwich will also vanish into the sea within the next century, and this is the setting for this episode of Time Team. They comment, rightly that it's an archaeologist's and historian's nightmare because it won't be there and this is about as at risk as heritage can get. The premise the team set themselves is to prove whether or not Dunwich was also an Anglo-Saxon settlement before the mediaeval perio

'It's a bit black over Bill's mother's' is a very old Birmingham saying indeed, and it means that storm clouds are forming to the South East of the city, over Stratford-upon-Avon. The 'Bill' in the saying is of course William Shakespeare and I think I am the only TV blogger who can blog about this documentary and add such local colour. Apart from my own bizarre attitude this documentary is a masterpiece of historical documentary making, about what on earth is going on with Shakespeare's tomb in Stratford parish church, because it's nowhere near big enough to contain a body. The investigation is absolutely fascinating as an example of televisual dramatic documentary making. It starts off with the vicar refusing to let them just randomly dig up the grave (because of course he did, they'd need to go back with a court order, and this is largely for dramatic effect), saying that the famous curse on the tomb is indication enough that Shakespeare wouldn

This show is appearing here because it is a show about something that actually happened in history and so it can broadly be called a documentary although it develops the subject somewhat. But when have you ever known me to stick to the rules, whether made by myself or anyone else? Battleground was a single series show made in 1978 about historical battles which are then re-enacted by war gamers in the studio. I'm not sure whether the word geeky existed in 1978 but it's definitely the word for it, along with blokey. It's also something else I love enormously, which I have decided is slow television: TV which doesn't require much in the way of scenery or effects and moves at the pace of an elderly arthritic snail. This show also goes to show that there was a time when TV wasn't required to move at the speed of light and did genuinely cater for many different interests. I suppose other examples would be that show that shows people playing pub games on the show, and of

The Family (not to be confused with the several other TV shows with the same name) was a 1974 BBC series of twelve episodes about a real extended family in Reading. It was a major turning point in 'reality' TV (in the UK - there was a previous similar series called An American Family broadcast in 1973) because it gave the viewer real access to the Wilkins family, their daily lives and conflicts. The show is online in two versions, a shorter summary of the whole series, and all the epiosdes are currently available online. I would recommend seeing all the episodes for the full effect. At the time it was incredibly powerful, attracting much interest (at one point HUGE crowds which the police couldn't control turned up for the wedding of two of the characters and fought over the bouquet) and criticism (1970s Britain wasn't ready for the rather unvarnished portrait of teenage pregnancy, affairs and children with different fathers it portrayed). It was also rather unusual in

This is a documentary about the 25 day riot and rooftop protest at Strangeways prison in Manchester in April 1990. It is the 2015 documentary here . As always I'm finding that blogging about TV brings out things about shows which I wasn't expecting. These posts about documentaries are making me think about different documentary techniques and making me criticise the way different documentaries show their subject. This one primarily uses a deceptively powerful technique about this technique of some narration but mainly depending on interviews with the prisoners, officers and even the chaplain in the middle of whose sermon the riot kicked off. Sounds perfectly simple doesn't it, and certainly doesn't sound powerful. But it's the juxtaposition of the different interviews which is what makes it powerful. Seriously this is some powerful documentary making. What I mean by this is the way you see the screws saying there was no abuse of the prisoners going on. You then imme