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...