Cult TV Blog

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here. This post is about the joined together episodes Checkmate and Free for All, released as one video called Checkmate by Precision Video in October 1983. David Fakrikian (see web page and video linked at the bottom of the page), whose work inspired these posts, says that they are joined together by going straight from the scene in Checkmate where the butler places a pawn on the chessboard to the scene in Free for All where the phone rings in Number 6's cottage and he answers it with 'What do you want?' This post has proved surprisingly complex so I'm going to have to split it over two, or even three blog posts. This one is about the theme which links the two episodes. Fakrikian feels the linking theme used to make the two episodes a single film with a unifying theme is that of telling the difference between the black and the white (Checkmate) and between prisoners and warders (Free for All). He identifies as othe...

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here. This post is about the episodes Many Happy Returns (MHR) and A, B and C, released edited together into a film by Precision Video in July 1982 as Many Happy Returns. It is based on an online paper and video by David Fakrikian (link at the bottom of the page) with further padding by me. Fakrikian feels (in the video linked below) that the theme which joins the two episodes together is of returning to dreamland repeatedly, and the question of what is real and what isn't. For example is the village really empty, and is my real house real. Ultimately in this view the Village becomes the only reality and the outside world becomes the dream. He identifies some points of similarity: he compares Number 6 walking around the empty village as if in a dream in MHR and saying 'This is a dreamy party' in A, B and C; he also identifies Mrs Butterworth as a point of connection between the two. However I was delighted to find, when...

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here. This post is about the two Prisoner episodes Arrival and The Schizoid Man, considered together as joined together to make a film, which is as they were released on the first UK video release in the 1980s. I briefly considered the structure of Arrival alone in my previous post, to compare it to Koroshi and Shinda Shima, but I would like you to forget what I said there for the purposes of this post. That is because David Fakrikian's article which prompted this series of posts suggests a slightly different structure for the double episodes of The Prisoner and Dangerman (link below) so they must be considered slightly differently. Instead of the straightforward two related plots of the doubled up Danger Man episodes, of course The Prisoner structure as suggested by Fakrikian, requires a change of Number 2 rather than a change of baddie. Edit: Because my brain is like a sieve I managed to publish this blog post without stating...

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here. As I stated in the introduction the purpose of these posts is to examine several episodes of Danger Man and The Prisoner in pairs to see how they work and particularly to identify any structure. So I have identified the following repeat structure in Koroshi and Shinda Shima, the final episodes of Danger Man, which were also joined together as a film. Koroshi : A Japanese female spy is pursued and killed. B Drake arrives in Tokyo as Edwards. C Potter gives him a record. D The record includes a picture of an emblem. E Drake seeks an explanation of the emblem from an old wise man. Drake meets Rosemary F Rosemary takes Drake to see Nigel Saunders. (Inversion of the going to the wise wo/man motif at E) G Drake is introduced to the death cult through the very heavy hint of a koroshi murder scene. H A man tries to kill Drake. I Drake saves Rosemary from a murder attempt. J The purpose of the death brotherhood is to end rule by t...

I have had it in mind for a long time to do a series of posts about the different suggested viewing orders for the episodes of The Prisoner. That I have not so far done so is purely because I can't work out how to and feel that a single blog post about a single viewing order for the seventeen episodes would be unwieldy, and if they were split up it would become confusing. However there's another issue on the periphery of this subject. Actually, as is always tha case with The Prisoner, there are several. We all have heard that McGoohan had his seven favoured episodes and felt the others were merely padding. You can see quite an extensive discussion of this  here but the usual list given is Arrival, Free for All, Dance of the Dead, Checkmate, The Chimes of Big Ben, Once Upon a Time, The Conclusion. That's one issue: that the show's creator didn't mean it to look like it does. But then it gets more interesting. On  this web page (by David Fakrikian) you will see seve...

You're all going to have to bear with me as I go into my usual raptures when blogging about some of my favourite TV. As is usually the case this is a show with somewhat lukewarm reviews, and I can't for the life of me think why. This show picks up on so much in the X-Files universe, which is ours, and deep seams of richness. We have the obvious aspect of 'remote viewing', and I'm afraid I've got one criticism here. What was Mulder playing at not mentioning the Stargate Project which was in the public domain when this one was made? You've gotta love the US government for spending billions of $ on researching psychics. It's one of those cases where it looked like it was positive unless you looked at the whole evidence, when the results didn't exceed chance, but this was just asking to be dragged in and have Mulder and Scully disagree about the research and the nature of the evidence. This is even the actual subject matter of the show but didn't get...

You know you're in for something wonderful when the show starts with a child berating a picture of Jesus for not listening to him before signing off with his name and address so that Jesus knows who's talking to him.  I honestly thought that Scorpion Tales had appeared here before, but it seems it hasn't. It's another 1970s anthology series of plays built on the earlier succcess of Thriller, in this case with each one having the common feature of a sting in the tale. It's been available commercially on DVD for a while now. The premise is very simple, really: poor Matthew Ward is from a family where the only sensible adults are the staff. His (very superior) bookdealer father is very absent and his mother's emotional and physical neglect reaches positively Edina Monsoon levels of lack of awareness. It's not stated as such, but this is of course the situation of a lot of kids in rich families and this is of course a trauma which carries on through generations,...

Home Cooking is an episode of the 1980s anthology series Unnatural Causes about unusual deaths, or rather manners of death, written by all big names (this one was written by screenwriter Paula Milne) under the guidance of Beryl Bainbridge. I see that when I first wrote about another episode, Lost Property, as an orphaned episode, I thought it peculiar that a series written by such great authors should have vanished off the radar. I'm delighted to say that I have since discovered some other episodes online, and still think this show's disappearance off the cult Tv radar strange. I have recently seen the episodes Hidden Talents (which I'm going to watch again and see what I think because I wasn't impressed but also wasn't concentrating on it) and Home Cooking, both of which are currently on YouTube for the watching. Home Cooking is an absolute BANGER and I knew it was going to appear here as soon as it got into its stride. You will read online that this is about Judit...

Happy new year! I'm starting off the new year with a bang because while I've blogged about some weird shit on this blog over the years, this is the wildest thing you will ever see on here, so hold on to your hats. Caution: this blog post is about a broadcast dramatising railway accidents and may be distressing. In the past I have briefly touched here on the notoriously scary public information films of the 1970s, at least as I remembered them. Perhaps the most famous of this genre are Apaches (also 1977) in which a number of children play in a farnyard and meet their deaths in various ways. and Building Sites Bite (1978) which bizarrely shows the same child repeatedly meeting his death in all the various ways a building site can offer. But these are as nothing to The Finishing Line (1977). Instead of merely shockingly depicting the dangers and the consequences of going near them, The Finishing Line starts by depicting a boy sitting on the edge of a railway bridge and voice over...