Cult TV Blog

The Power of the Witch - Real or Imaginary? is a 1971 BBC documentary about contemporary witchcraft, which is appearing here for Samhain. The veil is thin and so is my damn patience. Let me say right at the start that this is an excellent documentary, purely because it does a good job of trying to marshall the information on perhaps the most difficult subject there is. The word witch and the idea of witchcraft have been ridiculously slippery over human existence and this documentary, I think, chooses the correct combination of interviewees. We have actual modern witches, a vicar, a member of the Church Army, a psychologist. Obviously I can claim this to be a subject that I know a fair bit about. The interviewees all give their own particular view of the subject, and while that is good in itself I would wonder whether the production team knew enough about the complex subject to provide enough context to what was said. For example you have the Church Army officer talking about the devil

Warning: This blog post is about a documentary about child abuse and may be distressing. I have linked the relevant report of the Scottish Child Abuse inquiry which also contains significantly disturbing accounts of abuse, including in a setting of religious worship. Sins of our Fathers is a BBC Scotland documentary about abuse in Fort Augustus Abbey school, a school run by Benedictine monks in Scotland: both the school and the monastery have been closed since the 1990s. It is available on iPlayer. And it's bloody devastating. It goes straight into its first explicit description of sexual abuse within a matter of minutes and then immediately goes on to how the authorities at the monastery knew, and it isn't even talking about Fort Augustus yet, it starts with all the other monasteries of the English Benedictine Congregation first and then indicates that the Fort Augustus scandal was the last to break. This technique is literally devastating, completely factual, and you will kav

This post is about two documentaries, one of which is TV and the other isn't. I'm doing them both for completeness in case anyone is interested and because they both interest me. So there. Actually the subject has been touched on on the blog before in my post on the Danger Man episode Not So Jolly Roger here . They are about the sea forts called Maunsell forts (after their designer) built in the sea in strategic places off the coast of Britain during the second world war. The wikipedia page ( Here ) is actually very good but the short version is that a man called Guy Maunsell invented several designs of forts which would be phsyically in the sea outside the then limit of British territorial water to stop German forces approaching the land rather than stop them once they got here. They weren't everywhere around the country, they were placed in the Thames estuary to defend London and surrounding areas and outside Liverpool to protect Liverpool. There were two separate design

Keith Allen Will Burn in Hell is a 2007 Channel 4 documentary about the Westboro Baptist Church. I was looking for Louis Theroux's series of documentaries about The Most Hated Family in America, but there aren't pirated versions online so you've got Keith Allen instead. I would also recommend an internet documenary called Brainwashed by the Westboro Baptist Church as a complement to this one, but I'm being good and sticking to the TV one. Aren't I good? The internet reviews for this documentary are universally bad and I honestly can't think why.  This documentary is banging. In fact I think it's the best one on this bizarre church I've seen because it treats WBC as a spectacle to start off with and gradually escalates and this sense of horror creeps over you until you want to throw something at the screen. And it's done in an incredibly low key way, as if it isn't really a very polished documentary. Any old documentary can have the Phelps-Roper f

I have decided to go ahead and do something which I have considered for some time but fought shy of doing, namely a series of posts about documentaries, as opposed to the purely fictional shows I normally write about here. I have fought shy of this project because the last time I had a few odd TV shows to write about I declared I was having an orphaned episodes series, which got out of hand and ended up with puching fifty posts and took four months. I could see documentary season becoming even more unwieldy, but I'm going to set out and see what happens. I will try to stick to documentaries which are TV shows naturally, although you all know that I'm going to break this rule. As always I'm going to select documentaries purely because they interest me so I have a whole like of shows about weird shit lined up: we have religion, pirate radio stations, abuse, and all sorts of odd things. I'm also going to try to stick to documentaries which are available for free on the int

The Mark of Satan is the final episode of Hammer House of Horror and it's a belter, straight out of a classic horror film stable. Graveyards, castles, and mortuaries are classic places to set a horror film and this one goes for the final one. It's a great place to set a horror film because clinical places are uncomfortable and being a mortuary rather than a hospital you get acres of bare flesh so it creates whatever emotions in triggers in the viewer personally. In fact in discomfort and bare male flesh it's a bit like visiting this blog. There is one aspect of this episode which has gained a different significance since it was broadcast in 1980, and that is that Edwyn, the protagonist, thinks he has been infected with an evil virus. It actually came to me as a bit of a shock that that wouldn't have had the strength then that it does now! In fact did you know that it was last week the vaccine was supposed to be activated and nobody who's been vaccinated is supposed

Absolute fan favourite, this one. Not surprising, when it is inspired by many of the classic tropes of horror films.  In the reviews online you will, of course, repeatedly see Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956) mentioned, in which aliens replace people with copies. It's an obviously great horror classic, and this episode presses all the right buttons to make the fans think of it. You will also see that The Stepford Wives (1975), about the titular town of strangely conformist wives, is mentioned as a possible inspiration for the conclusion. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this: humans have been around for a long time and we can't always have completely original ideas! But I would suggest another possible inspiration for this story, which is the urban legend of the vanishing hitchhiker, in which a motorist picks up a hitchhiker who then vanishes and not infrequently leaves some item of clothing behind. This was popularised by Brunvand's 1981 book about ur

Surely nobody who has read this blog will be surprised that I have my own particular perspective on this episode and that it differs completely from the consensus of opinion of pretty well everyone on the face of the earth? There isn't that much online about this one, possibly because it's unpopular and many of the reviews are probably by people feeling they have to review the whole series, but the reviews are overwhelmingly bad. And I honestly don't think this episode deserves the terrible reviews it gets. This is another episode using a lot of actors and crew who had worked on Hammer films previously. I have read repeated comments that it would be more suited as an episode of Tales of the Unexpected and is rather atypical coming out of the Hammer stable. I can see that its murder story is out of the ordinary for the studio, however I think it actually contains many of the tropes of the standard horror film: the happy couple, the invasion motif, attempted sexual violence,

We're in classic Hammer territory here, with what in the seventies would have been called a cult, a magical antique which may have belonged to John Dee, antique dealers, people cheating each other and getting what they deserve and lots of mythology taken from real occultism. I have only just realized that these things have been surprisingly missing from the series up until now. This episode also features lots of actors and crew who had previously worked in Hammer films, which may be another reason it feels so familiar and Hammery. Perhaps for this reason I'm surprised to find I don't really have a great deal to say about this - it is essentially a Hammer film adapted for TV and what's not to love? Even though Hammer hit difficulties in the seventies and stopped production five years after this show was made, I think this one shows that they could still do their thing. It suggests that the problems they had were also more to do with competition than their own ability to

I must apologise in advance if this post contains mammoth errors of fact or is just confusing: in all honesty this episode has always always managed to confuse me, and try as I nught, I can't seem to follow the plot, although I am easily confused these days. Because of this I would recommend the synopsis  here. In my post on The Silent Scream I commented that I had always had the impression that it had a very kinky dynamic, which yet isn't picked up on in most of the reviews online. I am indebted to Caffeinated Joe for letting me know that I am not alone in this impression and I have since come to a conclusion that the kinky dynamic is deliberately never made overt in that episode, possibly to make the viewer feel the dynamic and also the feeling that it was totally wrong to be feeling that. After all, it's not overt, so obviously YOU are the only one feeling it, you filthy deviant. It's actually a very clever way of ramping up the feeling of wrongness.  I also wonder w

I was surprised to find, when reading round to write this post, that there are reviews of this one which are distinctly lukewarm, holding that it is a competent but rather pedestrian episode in the series. I was expecting what the other (in the majority) reviews said, that this could well be the best episode and is pretty bloody scary. The major thing that this episode does for me, although I already knew it, is reinforce beyond any doubt what a versatile straight actress Diana Dors actually was. She plays the creepy part of the maternal Mrs Ardoy to perfection, and her Dorset accent never falters once. Seriously, it's worth watching this just for this performance alone. There isn't a hint of the sexiness for which Dors was largely feted in this role. The other completely straight role I would strongly recommend seeing her in, although she was younger and even I can see that she was stunning, would be her role in the film Miss Tulip Stays the Night (1955). In this show, she is

As you all know I like to read round what other people have to say about a show before I start rambling about it here, and my reading round the reviews on this one has been interesting. Basically every review is a)claustrophobia b)Peter Cushing c) Brian Cox and d) sadism. Which interests me because while nobody else is interpreting this episode in the way I always have, it does confirm that I have hit on the sadism element which everyone else has noticed, andwhat we would now call coercion and control. I have thought long and carefully about whether to post this, mainly in case anyone would think that I was kinky, but I've decided I'm going to. Up until I saw the word 'sadism' in every review I thought it might be the result of watching too much porn, but I do think I#m onto something here. You see what nobody else is saying and which I have always thought, is that this show is incredibly sexual. Not sexy in any way that anyone without a specific, really weird fetish wo

Another episode of this show which has been extensively chewed over online, so again apologies if I don't have anything original, or even sensible, to say. This one brings that horror staple, the Hollywood idea of 'voodoo' into the modern world. I don't think the V-word (in this house we prefer to spell the word Vodou and understand that it refers to what may be the world's oldest religion which is widely misunderstood and the fear of which is because of the birth many of its forms found among slaves) is explicitly mentioned in the show, but I don't think there's a single review online which doesn't use the word. In this the word draws on the strong colonial and racist tradition in many horror films, by which African equates to primitive and evil. The irony is that the show shows a mixed-race couple. I particularly love that Angela Bruce has a Durham accent so is clearly British and would confuse the steretypes you'd expect in a show about this sort

This may be the most chewed-over episode of this show so apologies if I just happily agree with what everyone else says about it. I am virtually certain that everyone likely to read this blog will have watched this episode or at least have come across discussion about it online. As always with this series it messes with your emotions like nobody's business, right from the start. I honestly find the scene of the hisband poisoning his wife incredibly difficult and graphic.  From here on, the episode cleverly uses all the classic tropes of haunted house horror films to tease us and build up the horror in the viewer, alternated witrh scenes of normality just to really build up the tension. I particularly love the thing-behind-the-wall trope, cleverly juxtapositioned with a scene of the mother being trapped in a bedroom with a leaky gas fire, to create a sensation of breathlessness and claustrophobia in us. Obviously, the reason this episode is so extensively discussed it that it's

I have always loved this Hammer House of Horror, so of course it was no surprise when I checked what other people thought to find that it really isn't a fan favourite and I found several reviews which were really very critical of it.  To get the criticism that I agree with out of the way: the opening scene where William takes poison in his dad's lab and dies is just wrong from beginning to end. His reeling round the garden gives an overly dramatic impression and as far as I can see everyone is agreed that it comes across as funny rather than the horrifying death of a couple's young son. It also doesn't help that (in my humble opinion) the Mortons under react so that the drama is left to the character who dies, while they watch. To be fair this reflects exactly the same level of emotional competence they show in the rest of the show, but it looks wrong if you haven't seen that they are utter duds. And I really can't overstate how utterly odious they are. Horrible

One of my favourite episodes of this show, this, so I'm going to allow myself to go into raptures of praise and dreaming. As is the case with every episode of this show, this one sets us up to expect one thing and then gives us another. In this case it draws heavily on the idea of the scolding wife. Norman Shenley's wife as played by Pat Heywood is like a mix of every stand up comedian's mother in law ever, mised with a bit of Liz Truss, Margaret Thatcher (you may remember the scene in Spitting Image where Thatcher wakes up Dnnis by pouring a pot of tea in his crotch), and every other shrew conceived in history by the sexist male imagination. It sets us up to feel sorry for Shenley. Except it doesn't simply do that. In a very clever way it also mixes in the dream-like nature of the beginning of the episode (which is of course actually a dream) and also the plain fact that Shenley is a philanderer and just generally unpleasant. By doing this the show completely wrong foo

Rather mixed reviews on the internet for this one, mainly good. It seems to be one which you either love or loathe, and there are several poor reviews which say that it seems to go on too long and is boring. I think that that might partly be because this is the only show of the series which isn't about anything supernatural. I commented in my previous post about the first episode of this show, that it had a possible feminist interpretation, and that is even more so in this one. For a start it's about the diet industry, which is of course overwhelmingly aimed at women, and is about Ruth Cairns, a female reporter, who is assigned to the dieting report even though she hates being on the women's page and believes that women are worth more than fashion shows. This is some snappy story telling, using some magical omniscience. Ruth hears that her date has died, puts the phone down, is then at the funeral without wasting time explaining how she found out about it, and then the unde

About nine months ago I mentioned a plan I had to write blog posts on each episode of the TV series Hammer House of Horror, and of course it seems perfect in the run up to Halloween. In truth I'm a bit unsure about it because it is a series which is already extraordinarily well chewed over online (I am especially indebted to  this website) and I wonder whether I will be able to make that much of a post out of each episode. Nonetheless I'll set off and see what happens.  Hammer House of Horror (1980) is an anthology series made in collaboration with ITC of fictional stories featuring anything vaguely strange, such as ghosts and Diana Dors (just kidding). It is one of those seminal TV series and deeply ingrained into our national consciousness, and so another reason to go through the show is that we are actually now living through it. First up we have Witching Time. There are a number of very good synopses of the plot online and of course also a number of reviews so without furt